(Daniel) My new travelling partner, Yerko and his Surf Adventure Expedition had commitments in Coban, a small city to the West of Agua Caliente, and therefore had to leave today. He had been going on about a stray dog that kept hanging about the camp, this mangy animal had been so badly neglected that it was little more than skin and bones.  I found myself looking at the poor creature this morning, and had noticed that it had a flock of huge ticks gorging themselves in its left ear.  I noticed the dog hanging about as usual as I got up this morning and made a meager attempt at sorting out the mess in the back of the Wolf, this basically consisted of removing everything and laying it out on the floor of the trailer tent. 

Yerko and I ate breakfast in the lakeside restaurant, where I told him that I would never finish packing today, and that I would try to meet him tomorrow at the Super Lavados Y Mas operation that his friends owned in Coban.  This co-incidentally was the area’s Cooper Tire dealer, fortunate for me, as I wanted to swap one of my slightly worn tires for a new one to balance the treads ready for the next mud plugging session.  We agreed on this loose plan as he finished his breakfast, I couldn’t finish mine however, this he took away in a tissue to feed to the dog then he set to packing away his stuff to leave.  Meanwhile I turned my attentions to the stray animal which was still hanging around at the edge of the lake.  I took my thin nose pliers and Kevlar gloves, then approached the skeletal creature.  Just for reference, this is a very stupid idea, to inflict pain on a stray animal in a country where rabies and all manner of other disease is rife!  But armed with a sense of misguided charity and my Kevlar slashproof police gloves I soldiered on in the face of idiocy. 

The ticks looked like a strange kind of pearl earring all nestling in the crease of the ear close to the animals head.  I stroked the dog until it became calm and relaxed, then gripped one of the animals with the pliers and pulled.  The whole tick came away, but the animal let out a yelp retiring to the shade of a tree.  Yerko seeing what I was doing came over to help.  Together we began a pattern of gaining the animals trust then  betraying it by painfully pulling the horrid insects, all about 2cms in length, from it’s ear.  There were six ticks in all, the last one being a surprise bonus having found a secret spot deep inside the ear hole.

Once this grisly operation was finished, my gloves were off limits for some time, the dog hated both of us, but had avoided or not had the strength to bite us and the insects had all been fed to fish in the lake to teach them a lesson that they would never learn.  I suddenly felt a wave of illness come over me.  Just a flicker, but I mentioned it to Yerko as it happened, he asked if it was the fever type or the stomach type.  I opted for the latter, but little did I know that I was in for a bout of both and possibly some new undefined action as yet unsuffered by me on this trip.

I read something once about the human psyche, which I found to be true from my own experiences.  That is that we don’t have the capacity to remember physical or emotional pain.  A kind of safety buffer, time cures all, that kind of thing.  This ability, or rather lack of ability has it’s benefits, but the one major drawback, is that sickness, if bad enough, always seems to feel like the worst yet.  As Yerko left in his Toyota to brave the rough tracks leading to Coban, I turned my attention once again to packing the truck.

I managed to get the tool drawer in order, and collected a lot of rubbish from around the camp, my laundry I handed over to the staff of the restaurant whi had a decent washing setup infront of their house.  They asked for 55 Quetzals, around $7, but I insisted on 100Q knowing where my clothes had been.  After these few jobs, and with a mountain of stuff still to find homes for I began to flag.  I sat in the camp chair and fell asleep, a few hours later I awoke, freezing cold but with the afternoon sun blazing on me.  Not a good sign, but foolishly I thought that this was not so bad, at least I could wrap up against this.  Just how ill I was growing to feel this cold in tropical temperatures I did not bother to calculate.  I decided that rest was the best answer, and with a bottle of water in hand retired to bed in the trailer tent as the sun began to set over the lake outside.

What couldn’t have been a couple of hours later I awoke in the darkness.  My head span, I mean really span, I felt sick, and desperate to go top the toilet.  Outside the noise of insects was immense.  I pulled the sleeping bag off my sweat soaked body and lay back for a second exhausted from the effort, mosquitoes instantly attacked, biting my ankles and arms.  Helpless in the dark, and without a working light, I attempted to negotiate the ladder to get out of the tent.  The heat was searing, making the dizziness feel like a blanket around me that just kept unwinding.  I fell to the floor, aware that I was all alone here, Yerko had gone, the staff would have gone home too.  I managed to unzip the tent door enough to get into the main living area.  I felt I the dark and found the toilet paper.  Outside the door I had no time to do anything but squat down and crap on the floor.  If this helped I didn’t notice.  With my last drop of energy, I unlocked the back door of the Wolf and climbed in to the back, thankfully clear from my cleaning efforts earlier.  I reached forward and switched on the 12v rotating fan, in the same move I grabbed the first aid kit and a bottle of water.

As I sat back in the cool draft, I felt the searing heat let up and looked for a painkiller to stop the stomach cramps.  The ones that came immediately to hand were lemon flavoured dissolvable ones that you didn’t take with water, instead they dissolved in your mouth, I took two, but the sensation of the foam and sweet flavor made me retch and throw up violently out of the back door.  I kept having weird fly on the wall visions of my actions from far away in the darkness, with my head lolling from the back door and propped up in the wind flow by a blanket which I had brought to cover myself, I fell asleep in the seat.

An hour later I awoke, cooler and feeling slightly better, managing to return to the tent.  It was a temporary reprieve, as I spent the rest of the night climbing in and out of the tent, unable to make it further than the door before my body evacuated everything it could find in an attempt to clean itself of whatever had infected me.  I thought of the candidates as the time passed by at what seemed like a torturously slow pace.  There was the Pizza in El Estor the day before, that had tasted unnaturally sweet, then the breakfast which I had not been able to finish, my body telling me not to eat more, then there was that bloody dog.  Whatever it was I cursed a thousand times as I moaned and yelped in pain through the whole night, Having gone to bed at sunset around 6pm, it was an incredibly long night, thankfully even now I have begun to forget the pain, but wrote this diary entry now two days later so as to try to capture some of the pain and helplessness that tortured me.       

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