Does travel yield suffering?

Whenever I travel, I feel that I suffer. It could be the places I travel to such as Cambodia, Cuba, Ethiopia. I’ve never had a proper trip to an easy country, although Albania and Malta were somewhat easy, except for the language barrier. Around noon yesterday, I began to feel queasy, in addition to being majorly constipated. Thus, I began to suffer through the day and night, skipping lunch and dinner and drinking a lot of water.


Suffering leads to a longing for home. In the moment, I feel lost and weak. I tell myself that I will never travel abroad again, but then it happens. So, I lay down in our room and slept through the afternoon and night, my head aching, my insides feeling stuck together. And then came the diarrhea, along with the fullness in my stomach. Lucy was fine and had dinner with her new friend Mattias as I slept, rising only to tackle the toilet.


I craved water, and Lucy notified the front desk. Within seconds, a young woman appeared but without water bottles. She spoke no English (I spoke no Khmer), and I finally understood that she wanted to refill two glass bottles with bottled water. I just let her do that, but she was reluctant to take a tip. I worried that the room smelled of shit and was embarrassed. 


Things really got rolling during the night, and at some point while asleep, I sharted myself. It was disgusting. I had already bled on the sheets, and now there was some brown to contrast with the red. Did I mention that it was my birthday? So, yes, I took a shower and went back to bed as minutes and hours crawled by.


The episode reminded me of my first time in Ethiopia, where I contracted a case of fulminating amoebiasis. The first sign was belching a rotten-egg smell and then nausea and then diarrhea, which lasted for days. At the peak of my misery, I found myself crawling through mud and rain to the outhouse with a hole in the floor. I was cold, soaked, and wracked with anal urgency. It was one of the lowest points of my life.


It’s ten a.m. and Lucy and I are on a small bus headed back to Phnom Penh. I feel some better but still could not eat breakfast and just had a cup of coffee. So, I suffer in silence, looking forward to going home tomorrow. Lucy will stay another six weeks, and I hope that she is spared any suffering.

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