Floored in Bangkok

Messy desk, messed up mind.

This messy desk in our hotel room could be a visual metaphor for the inside of my brain at the moment. We are in Bangkok, a city we love, where we are researching and photographing a travel book, something we said we’d had enough of. Our fascination with Bangkok drew us back here for this project, but as much as we love the place, having to work at the pace we do for these jobs is wearing us down – which is exactly why we don’t really do them anymore.

Complicating matters is our state of health. The constant changes in temperature (you’re in and out of air conditioning all day here) and the crowded skytrain have left Lara with a bad chest infection that doesn’t want to take its leave. One course of antibiotics has not killed it off and Lara’s uncle (Dr George) has said if ‘she makes it back’ to Australia she should get x-rays done. He’s only half-kidding, I think. Lara just keeps working, regardless.

I managed to stay healthy through the past couple of weeks – somewhat of a miracle considering the crowded skytrains and the fact we’ve been eating enough street food to make Anthony Bourdain shudder. But this all changed the other night.

A highly regarded restaurant’s food made me so ill that I thought there was I chance that it would go down as my last meal – and not a very good one. It’s ironic that I’ve been ignoring everything I’ve ever read and been taught about food hygiene to sample the endlessly captivating street food here, but it’s at a ‘serious’ restaurant that something dodgy passes my lips and turns my abdomen inside out.

Of course I’ll spare readers the details, but I now know have a first-hand experience of what the term ‘writhing in pain’ means. I’ve had food poisoning before, but this was something special. I basically lost a day and a half – a day and a half I didn’t have to lose and now we’re really under the gun to get this research wrapped up. We’ll average 5hrs sleep a night until we leave in a few days. The only bright star in the sky is the fact that we upgraded to business-class for the trip back to Dubai and later to Melbourne. As much as I love Bangkok, sipping a glass of champagne as I scroll through photographs on my laptop in the pointy end of the plane can’t come soon enough. The most important thing as a writer and photographer is not to let these things colour your opinion of a place. I still love Bangkok.

But I can’t help the feeling that I’ve disappointed a lover by wanting to leave.