Fair enough, I thought. The usual precautions that you get when visiting a third world country. Nothing, however, could have prepared us for the state of the water and plumbing system in Margarita. The water from the taps had an awful smell that permeated the entire hotel. When you took a shower, you had to be careful not to swallow any. When you came out of the shower, you felt as if you shouldn't have bothered, because the water made you smell so bad.
Soon our two bathrooms at home in Scotland became a recurring fantasy, an elusive Utopian image that taunted and jeered at us at every possible opportunity. Even my uncle, an experienced traveler who served in the British Navy before emigrating to the USA, began to complain about the facilities. Within the first three or four days of the holiday, we were all suffering from what is fondly named in guidebooks as "traveler's diarrhea."
At home, I have a very regular routine for getting rid of the brown water serpent. As soon as I get up, I release one; later, after breakfast, the encore is performed. Then I'm okay until the next morning. Here, the awful water and upset routines flung this once-happy fairy tale into the huge roaring bonfire of reality in a third world country. The worst thing about these new shits was that, towards the end of a meal, they would rapidly announce their presence in the form of severe stomach pangs. From the initial onset of stomach pangs I had about three-and-a-half minutes to find a toilet. Great, I thought. I've come on holiday and been reduced to a creature with a 210-second buffer time.
On the fourth or fifth day, we decided to take a trip to Angel Falls on mainland Venezuela. We had to wake at 5:30 in order to get to the airport in time for our 7:30 flight. The previous night, I worked out a plan to beat these new shits, or to at least outsmart them: I thought -- and it seemed reasonable at the time -- that the new shits were triggered only by eating. Therefore, to avoid the need for shitting at an inconvenient time, I would skip breakfast the next morning.
So far, so good. We got to the airport on schedule and I hadn't felt the need to visit a toilet. We met the guide and our fellow passengers who were taking the same trip. Brilliant -- I fly thousands of miles around the world and what do I get...? A bunch of overfed German and French tourists. Aside from us, there were no other British or Americans on the trip.
We were warned that the flight would take approximately two hours, and there were no toilet facilities on board. OK, a challenge. At this point, I realize in retrospect, an alarm bell should have sounded in my mind. Retrospect is a wonderful thing. As the flight drew into the second hour, I felt a slight queasiness and that dreaded feeling of being hot and cold. I shrugged it off and tried to think of the green fields and sparkling porcelain of the homeland. About fifteen minutes before we arrived at Angel Falls, the queasiness returned, but this time it brought its own army. Afterwards, I realized how fifteen minutes can seem like an eternity of torture.
I began to get the all-too-familiar feeling of an imminent shit. A cold sweat broke out across my forehead, my bowels turned rapidly to ice, I began to shiver slightly, and the hot and cold feeling returned.
Now, being British and in an airplane full of fat Germans and French, there was nothing I could do to alert someone of my plight. I had to keep up the British end of things, and sit out the torture in silence. The last thing I wanted to do was admit defeat in front of the Germans.
Normally I am not a religious person, but every rule has its exception. I started to whisper prayers to whoever was listening, be it God, Allah, or various Hindu deities whose names I remembered from school only vaguely. My sister asked me if I was okay, a little too loudly for my liking. I whispered quickly that something was seriously wrong, and she passed me some tissues.
Meanwhile, the pain was intensifying. My gut felt like it was about to explode, my head felt pretty much the same way, and I was contemplating suicide with a piece of string I had found in my pocket if we did not land soon. I gently released some pressure with a silent fart, a risky maneuver; but under the circumstances, I had little choice. Then the finale came. The pressure in my system increased its load, and I began to sweat huge beads; every muscle I moved caused me agony, and yet if I didn't move at all, it was unbearable.
At this moment, looking back, I realize I slipped into hallucination. Suddenly I was no longer on an airplane surrounded by closet Nazis and garlic-breathed French women -- suddenly, I was wandering freely in the forests of Scotland, with the pleasant sound of running water from a nearby stream and a sparkling, gleaming white bathroom just ahead to make the scene complete.
And then, miraculously, it seemed the urge for an emergency evacuation passed. Only a dull throbbing in my head and a slight pressure in the bowels remained. Success, I thought, right? Wrong. I had literally forty-five seconds of respite.
I was hit by a wave of nausea and threw up in the back of my throat. I quickly searched for the sick bag that every person knows is located in the seat pocket in front of you. No such luck. There wasn't a sick bag on the whole airplane. The tissues my sister had given me were immediately saturated in vomit and I threw up down my shirt. Because I hadn't eaten anything that day, the vomit was clear -- basically just stomach acid.
As my mental faculties returned, I thought the worst had happened -- every British person's nightmare, namely making a scene in front of the Germans. I expected to see row after row of Teutonic faces silently mocking me for throwing up on this crappy little airplane in some god-forsaken third world country. But it appears my prayer had been answered, well, one of them at least. Nobody else except my sister knew I had thrown up. As we landed and got off the aircraft, I waited until all the Germans were off before stealthily creeping down the aircraft steps. Outside, the heat sufficed to dry my shirt as I ran to one of those filthy Venezuelan shacks with nothing but a hole in the ground in which to drop my load.
Looking back on that eventful day, I realized that there probably is some kind of God, and He isn't too keen on Germans, either.
-- Aelfred