For the first time on this trip, I have experienced catastrophic, explosive diarrhea. This was inevitable. My eating habits have been reckless and I often purchase sachet water that tastes like dirt.

Travelers diarrhea has various incarnations. Before today’s update my loose stool count had been tabulating the more benign variety: unpleasant, but manageable. My most recent bowel movements have been completely debilitating.

This brand of diarrhea wakes you up in the middle of night and offers you a few seconds to find a toilet (or hopefully something toilet-like). If you make it to the toilet, you can find solace in that fact alone, because what happens while you are sitting on it is absolutely horrific. There is no relief, only terror, when you are shitting out pure fluid. When you stand up, vertigo takes hold and you have a splitting headache. You realize that along with your life-force in general, you’ve also just pooped out your cranial fluid. You stagger back to bed – anything else is impossible.

After a few miserable days my humanity is restored. Big thanks to bananas, plain rice, and rehydration salts.

Malta Guinness. Tastes like carbonated raisin bran. If I can help it, I will never drink this again.

Future Plans?

I am thinking another week and a half or so in Accra. After that I will head west along the coast and spend some time at Green Turtle Lodge (that’s actually where the header image on this site was taken from – five years ago) eating barracudas and laying in a hammock. From there I will head to Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire. My itinerary after that is a bit of a question mark. I want to go to Mali. The route there is TBD.