Hell – distance irrelevant
Strictly speaking, the events which follow span the entries for 8th & 9th August, since they began after laying down to sleep and went on through the night. They’re pretty gruesome though, so rather than skew either of those day’s entries, I’ll cover them as part of a separate account. If you are of a squeemish nature – here is the summary:
My stomach exploded from both ends all night and I slept for at most an hour.
Feel free to skip to the next episode if you’d rather avoid the graphic details.
Let me start by setting the scene. The events that unfolded over the next few hours were only in part about what happened, the other part being about where they happened. On most other nights of the tour I would have had a hotel bathroom close to my bed that I could reach easily, or even just sleep in. But this was not the case here. The bathroom block was 200m or so away from my cabin – which meant every trip had to be planned with military precision to avoid detonating either of my explosive ends before arriving. And it was freezing cold during the night. But I was feverish and sweating. So much so that I couldn’t wear anything beyond the minimum of clothes – which I soon realised, should not involve my riding shorts as the chamois would be impossible to get clean. So instead, I just went commando in my waterproof over shorts which were easy to hose down if needed. That meant in the 15 or so minutes leading up to a planned assault on the toilet block I had to decide whether to put on more clothes – but with the risk of not getting them all off in time on reaching the loo. Or alternatively just dash there, freezing and near naked apart from my shiny plastic shorts. In the end, for most trips, I threw on an outer jersey only – which was quick to take off, and I had a spare if the mission failed.
So there you have the logistical scenario – before going on to describe the nightime internal ballistics, I’ll mention a handful of things which rescued me that night, and possibly saved the rest of the ride. The first of these was the remaining coke, from the last stop of the day. OK, the caffeine probably kept me awake – but it’s not like I could afford to sleep anyway, And the sugar provided some small amount of energy to keep me going through the long night. The next was something I could almost imagine reading complaints about in a booking.com review. The waste paper bin was in fact one of those large plastic builders buckets that usually hold plaster, or paint or something. Any ordinary guest would probably have seen this as beyond rustic – even “cheap”. But it’s tatty vastness was perfect for me. There was nothing to spoil, and it was large enough to fit my whole head in with zero risk of vomit splatter escaping to the room around me. Next up was a realisation: I may have remembered the purification tablets too late to avert the crisis initially, but lying in there in my own personal hell it came to me that anything other than clean water was going to prolong the episode. Not being sure whether the issue was the refill from the kitchen here or earlier in the day, I dosed both bidons just in case. I was surprised how little after taste the tablets actually added – just a feint hint of chorine, but overall it tasted clean, pleasant, and a part of the journey back from this awful place. The final aid was an obvious one: Immodium. That stuff takes a while to kick in, but it works. Damn but I was glad I pack for all eventualities!
I lay there making use of two of three of these at intervals. But I knew the bucket was too much of a risk in the room – it might constrain the ejection from one end, but the violence that it erupted with would make it impossible to restrain an equal and opposite reaction from the other end. So it travelled with me to the bathroom on each visit (of which there were many) and got rinsed out before the journey back once the carpet bombing of the facilities had finished. My management of each trip improved with each visit. After the first one, I realised there was no point wearing any clothes into the stall itself – that just meant the risk of more to clean after. So I stripped start naked in the changing room outside, and went in naked to shed what seemed like an endless supply of stomach contents. Honestly, sat there in the loo dripping in sweat as both torrents flowed from both ends I was fairly sure this was what the end of the world felt like. It was horrific. On maybe the second or third trip, I realised the showers were the best thing after the evacuation – so I carried a towel with me too. I cannot say how many times I repeated this scene through the night – at least five or six.
Eventually, of course, there was practically nothing left to eject. It just became a sitting, sweating, and retching exercise. And even that stopped, at maybe 3am in the morning – it had of course been light the whole time. Finally, I felt secure enough for maybe an hour of sleep without risking anything foul escaping into the still thankfully spotless cabin. I have no idea how I survived that night – but somehow, my brain managed to keep functioning, and the few things I could think of to do seemed to stem the tide of vomit and shit. Sometime around maybe 4 or 5am I realised I just had to get up, try and eat something, and see if I could actually ride a bike again. I was not confident of any of those at the time.