The Best Laid Schemes of Mice and Men
Hospital room with a view. (Yes those are snow capped Andes in the distance)
Should a journey necessarily have an ending? Must there really be a full stop at the end of the road? It seems inevitable sometimes. Usually we can plan for this. In fact our tour provider https://compassexpeditions.com/ are the masters of managing every detail of the journey from a beginning full of hope and expectation to a perfectly orchestrated conclusion. Yet occasionally, well, shit happens!
As we head out of Cusco to catch our flight to Lima and our awaiting bikes, things start to unravel for Sally. She had been a little unwell for a couple of days and we had put it down to the high altitude again but as we go to board the plane an angel in a flight attendant’s uniform notices Sally looking distressed and whisks her off to the first aid station. The duty medico at the airport immediately declares her unfit to fly. For good measure he gives me a quick once over as well and decides that perhaps I should seek some medical treatment too. I have been feeling a bit queasy since eating a slightly suspect guinea pig (the national dish of Peru) at a nice restaurant in the main square. JC immediately contacts his good friend and local guide Rueben who meets us in the airport a few minutes later and takes us under his wing. Rueben’s wife is a doctor at the public hospital in Cusco so he is well aware of just how overstressed the system is, so he takes us to a private hospital nearby where she is diagnosed with…deep breath…. Acute Mountain Sickness, Salmonella Poisoning, Dehydration, Bronchitis and early-stage renal failure. She was lucky to be alive!
Lucky to be alive!
Meanwhile, unknown to Sally at the time, I am also admitted to the hospital also with salmonella poisoning. Apparently, it is very common in Peru and the local population has developed a natural resistance to it. Two days of IV antibiotics and a decent sleep later I am free to go but as Sally is still in ICU, they put me up in their best room with a stunning view of the city. Three days later Sally is moved from ICU to my private room with a view and four days after that, despite still being very fragile she is given clearance to fly to Chiclayo where we will join the rest of the group and continue to Ecuador. Through all this Rueben has been a godsend calling on us twice a day ensuring that we have everything we need. He takes me downtown to a travel agent to book new flights and to buy gifts for the hospital staff who have been fabulous. Two flights and $777 later we are in Chiclayo where JC immediately calls for a doctor to look Sally over again as she is clearly still very unwell. There is a clinic across the road from our hotel, so a doctor comes without delay. He examines her previous notes from Cusco and points to a number on one blood test that says minus 13. It should be zero. This we are told is an indicator of liver function.(Footnote.. we discovered many months later and quite by accident that it was very likely that Sally only had hours to live at this point had her liver completely shut down) He immediately takes more blood and sets up IV lines right there in the hotel room. Eight days later we are climbing the walls and it is becoming increasingly frustrating trying to get medical assistance when the hotel manager, aware of our situation offers to take us to the finest private clinic in town where finally we are cleared to go home. The rest of the group are well on their way to Colombia by now so JC, with his never ending network of contacts arranges for his friend Christian to ride our bike north through Ecuador and Colombia to Cartagena on the Caribbean Coast where it will be loaded on a ship bound for Melbourne sometime in August. The paperwork is a nightmare, ridiculously costly and ultimately useless as I eventually find that I need to organise a Notarized and Apostle’d document from DFAT in Hobart in order for my bike to be moved across international borders without me. The last time I see the Tiger it disappears around a street corner being ridden by a stranger in a T shirt, shorts and crocks.
The last time I saw the Tiger in SA.
But I am past caring. I just want to get Sally home safely to her familiar surroundings. Five flights and 40 hours later we are greeted by my slightly teary daughter at the local airport.
We are home and Sally is recovering but life will never be normal again. While the physical body has recovered to a state of mostly normal function the mind is in hyper drive. Decades of the firmly held belief that the accumulation of stuff is important has been completely reassessed and the illusion of our immortality is now most certainly just that. An illusion. What does this mean for us? Well for one thing our planned trip to Mongolia has been put on indefinite hold and we will certainly be divesting ourselves of many of our physical possessions, the superficial fluff that clutters our lives and start filling that space with memories. Is this journey at its ending? Hell no! It’s just begun. Watch this space.
Post Script: The Tiger eventually arrived back in Tassie unharmed but well used. Interestingly the tyres we started with, Motoz GPS had covered almost 25,00km and still had plenty of mileage in them. But Triumph was offering big incentives to trade up to the new 1200 Rally Explorer so it’s “The Tiger is Dead. Long Live the (new) Tiger”
