My trip to back home to Australia was fantastic. It was odd though – the moment I arrived home, it felt like nothing had changed and I had never left, which I wasn’t too keen on. At first, I thought it would be easy to leave again…though, for one or two reasons, it didn’t turn out that way. I was pretty much flat out the whole time, catching up with everybody (it was so awesome to see everyone again) and spending as much time as I could with my two new nephews. Time passed quickly and before I knew it, I was on a plane (make that 4 planes) again to go back to Cambodia.
It was a rough trip – I had an almost 6 hour wait in Melbourne before flying to Darwin….Darwin was a rush because the plane was late and there was a massive line to go through immigration – my flight was due to leave in 30mins and I was still yonks away from the front of the line, so I asked someone about it and they rushed me to the front of the line and I made it to the gate with a few minutes to spare. I wasn’t well though, was feeling really sick, and to cut a long story short….ended up on tears on the plane and they then moved me to an aisle seat so I could get up quickly if I needed to. I arrived in Singapore around 9:30pm and left for Phnom Penh at 6:30am. I wasn’t feeling too bad by that stage, and thought I was well enough to catch the 9 hour bus to Stung Treng. Bad idea. 3 hours in I threw up........it was awful and the man next to me moved to another seat quick smart! I took a sleeping tablet and tried to doze off for the rest of the trip.
I got back to Stung Treng on the Wednesday night, but I still wasn’t feeling that well so I stayed home from school for the rest of the week, though I did pop up there a couple of times and it was great to see all the kids again. By the weekend I was feeling fine, but things went downhill fast on Sunday night, when I started throwing up at 11:30pm, and every 25 minutes right through until 6am. We went to a clinic the next morning and they promptly put in an IV for rehydration – I had lost so much fluid and it’s really dangerous here with people not rehydrating, especially with the heat, so it’s quite common to see lots of people in the hospital or in clinics with IVs, or occasionally someone riding on the back of a motorbike holding one up! We spent 5 hours in the clinic and then went home. Tuesday night I was sick once again, and off to the clinic we went on Wednesday, where I had another IV. Josef took good care of me, making sure I drank as much as I could manage, and trying – though not very successfully – to make me eat.
I was sick once on Wednesday night but managed to make the trip down to Phnom Penh on Thursday, as there was a 3 day public holiday and we wanted to take the opportunity to pick up some shopping. It was also our idea that if I was still sick, we would see another doctor there. But I finally started to feel a bit better, and after 5 days, I was able to eat more than a bite or two of bread. I had been starting to think I would never be able to eat again!!!
We came back from Phnom Penh on Sunday afternoon, and we were both glad to be back to our quiet little Stung Treng after the absolute craziness of all the people and traffic in Phnom Penh. Had a really good week of teaching, and looking forward to seeing the kids progress even more this week.
So in short, it was an awful trip back to Cambodia, and then a bit of a scary time being so sick…..but things are back to normal now and we have even moved house (or more accurately, moved rooms) and now have our own bathroom with……a running shower! Yippee!!
