I suppose every trekker's journal has a section something like this: the first onslaught of illness. Two nights, so far, Brad has woken up with emergency attacks of diarrhea. Today was more or less continuous for both of us. I only went three or four times, Brad was much worse. He felt really weak, was still sore from yesterday, and made about 10 "pit stops." This evening he is really hammered,basically lying in bed without moving. So we whipped out the handy-dandy drug kit. We'll see how it works. This hotel, fortunately, has an emergency back door for hasty exits (very unusual for the second floor of a hotel).

I suppose this is a good time to talk about the sanitation conditions here. Basically there is no sanitation whatsoever. People throw all waste out the windows, and go to the bathroom wherever it'sconvenient. In earlier days all waste products were biodegradable, sothe mess might have been somewhat contained, but now there are cigarette wrappers, and other scraps of paper littering the ground everywhere. People and animals just go to the bathroom on the trails, if you're feeling somewhat sick, this can be pretty disgusting (nauseating is the real word for it).

Since the Nepali people don't use toilet paper, the obvious placeto relieve yourself while on the trail is right by a creek, so you can wash yourself. The water supply gets polluted pretty fast this way.

The conditions in Kathmandu really aren't any better. The hotel we stayed in did have a toilet, but I can't imagine that most of the run-down buildings do. As we were going to catch the bus out ofKathmandu we saw a number of people throwing out their garbage...right out the window (of a 4 story building). I guess the garbage tractors that we saw drive around and pick it up or the piles would have been higher.

I guess the monsoon season in Nepal provides the entire country with one huge flushing, badly needed.

Postscript: I got sicker, but the drugs worked. All undesirable activities temporarily halted.