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uncomfortable bus ride
Tuesday, July 1 2025
location: room 3023, Galle Face Hotel, Colombo, Sri Lanka
When I awoke this morning, I was definitely not feeling very good. There was something going on in my gut that wasn't comfortable and I had body aches. Gretchen, though, was fully recovered from whatever had troubled her yesterday. She went down to the Long Room for one last breakfast at the Galle Face Hotel (our group would be heading north today), and I told her to bring me back some tea and maybe a little bread. (The thought of Sri Lankan food — even rice — was nauseating.)
Eventually it was time for all of us to get on the bus. I made my way down to the Galle Face lobby feeling very weak, and when I got there, I looked over at Danielle (part of the nice Australian couple living in Cambodia) and asked how she was, knowing she'd been missing meals. She gave me a big thumbs down. And there were others in our group who weren't doing well; indeed, at least half of us had been or were sick by this point.
While waiting for the bus to arrive, I realized I should probably empty my bowels of the accumulated diarrhea in them. So I went looking for a bathroom. But the Galle Face Hotel is weird in that there are seemingly no public bathrooms, and we'd already checked out of our hotel room. So I went down to the pool, where I knew there were restrooms, and made sweet sweet diarrhea in the men's room there.
After we boarded the bus, I took up a whole pair of seats near the back (since there was room to spread out) and tried my best to get comfortable. But my body was so tormented by whatever was wrong with it that this was impossible. So I sat there as best I could, not able to sleep, but not able to do much else. For some reason I found reminiscing about sexual incidents from my past was helpful; I wonder if that will be my only comfort when I am on my deathbed. Occasionally I mustered the energy to snap a few pictures out of the window.
Our bus stopped several times on the drive up to Anuradhapura so we could have bathroom breaks. I took advantage of a couple of those to purge the liquid that had accumulated in my bowels, though I always forgot to bring toilet paper with me (which is rarely provided in south Asian public bathrooms). But this was no problem because I am experienced in the ways of the ass blaster, which is always available. (Our friends from Australia via Cambodia refer to it as the "bum gun".)
Knowing a lot of us were having gut troubles, Jiva had handed out plastic bags to barf into should any of us suffer from motion sickness. At some point one of these was utilized by Pat, the older of the mother-daughter pair from Ann Arbor, and it was this whole thing, though I never actually heard her retching. Her daughter Nicole's turn came as we were pulling into our destination, the Thissa Wewa Rest House. But this time the puking and gurgling were very audible. Oh, the humiliation, and in such a public form!
By this point I'd taken an ibuprofen and an anti-diarrhea medication Gretchen's father had been carrying, so I was feeling much better. I'd even managed to lie down somehow in my seat with my head cushioned by a bag full of something soft and got in a half hour or so of sleep. I had no interest in the lunch that was about to happen, but I could eat some bread rolls Gretchen brought up to the room.
I decided not to go on the afternoon activity, which was to a huge and consequential Buddhist temple, electing to sleep instead.
I awoke feeling bad again, and I had too little energy to even get up to turn off the lights. Eventually Gretchen returned, and I took another ibuprofen, which made me reasonably comfortable for the night. Gretchen didn't have much to say about the temples, but she had seen some monkeys (grey langurs, it turned out), which had her very excited.
A photo of one of the landforms on the way to Anuradhapura. Click to enlarge.
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