A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holiday.
"Just be careful you don't talk about poohs and wees too much, I feel that's generally what you write about." These were the words of warning from a mate of mine not long after the Travel Bugs column first began in the Herald early last year. A fellow writer, he was concerned I was developing a reputation.
"I hardly ever write about poohs and wees!" was my response, though a quick look back over the initial two months of columns did reveal yarns about being poohed on by pigeons in London, an enthusiastic train farter in India, and the most spectacular bout of food poisoning known to mankind in Myanmar. There may also have been a tale about a toddler who had a catastrophic whoopsie in the pool at the now-closed Club Med in Australia's Whitsundays (the whoopsie wasn't a major player in the resort's ultimate demise, so my sources tell me).
So yes, I write about bowel issues from time to time in Travel Bugs, but if the purpose of this column is to celebrate "the joys of moaning about your holiday", ignoring said issues would deprive me of a lot of material. So with all of that in mind, here's an attempt at a slightly more mature take on what some may regard as juvenile subject matter. The specific topic? What to do if you get diarrhoea on holiday.
Two words: activated charcoal. First off, if you're heading anywhere overseas — even the most plush resort in the richest country on the planet — I recommend having a medical kit just in case something goes wrong. As to what should be in that kit, I don't set foot in a departure lounge without having packed a medicine like Loperamide. This is what you swallow if you're in the kind of territory of needing to board a train or a bus in India and you've just had your sixth increasingly flamboyant trip to the bathroom in the past 90 minutes. I'm no doctor, but personal experience tells me that one pill is enough to get you on the straight and narrow again. Two and you run the risk of constipation.
