Tray Tables and Time Zones

Misery at 40,000 Feet: a Toilet Tale

September 03, 2024 • Josh Bogle • Episode 1

Share episode

Ever faced the unpredictable twists and turns of international travel?  Join me as I take you through a rollercoaster of emotions all in one adventure in this episode of Tray Tables and Time Zones.  Returning home from trekking in the mountains of Nepal, I ended up facing the most challenging ordeal of my travel life: severe food poisoning while onboard multiple flights and a during a layover.  I describe how quickly a nice, easy trip home turned into a cold sweat hell, with panic induced sprints to the bathroom, leg-numbing lavatory sessions and dehydration delirium.  Trust me, its one hell of a story!     

Intro:

This is your captain speaking. If you love travel and we know you do buckle your seatbelts and keep your tray tables in the upright position. You should be seeing the illuminated fun signs throughout the aircraft because we're about to take off on a chat of epic proportions. Welcome to Tray Tables and Time Zones, the podcast where travel isn't just about taking vacations, it's about enriching your life. We'll dive into the highs, the lows and the downright absurd moments that come with exploring the world. Whether it's food poisoning on a long haul flight, trekking to Mount Everest base camp or traveling to Disney parks worldwide, we cover it all Serious at moments, but mostly we're here to laugh and share some brutally honest travel stories. So let's do it one time zone at a time. This is Trey Tables and Time Zones, and this is your host, osh Bogle.

Josh:

Hey everyone, thanks for checking out the podcast and I hope you enjoy this episode of Trey Tables and Time Zones. So if you travel for any period of time, internationally especially, you've heard the stories and, hell, maybe you've even experienced the nightmare that is either food poisoning or traveler's diarrhea. I mean, they kind of go hand in hand. The same thing's happening. I'm not a doctor, so I'm sure there's some differences between the two. But let's just lump them all into one and say you know, food poisoning, traveler's diarrhea, I don't care, they're known by. You know really colorful descriptive phrases. You know, you'll hear Delhi Belly, you'll hear Montezuma's Revenge, I've heard the Middle East Mudslide they're all pretty dead on. Basically, it's something that occurs when you fly too close to the sun and you take some risks with some food or some water, especially when you're traveling internationally. It'll get you. You know.

Josh:

And look, I am a person who loves to eat wild food. I mean, I'm an adventurous eater. One of my favorite things in the world is the Southeast Asia point and pray. You walk up to a case, you're basically looking at a bunch of things that look pretty good. You know, you point at one of them because, hell, you really don't know what kind of meat that is, and you probably don't want to know, but it looks damn good. You're hungry and so what the heck you know, and so you try it, hoping that it will be tasty. And that it won't you know, put you in the toilet later. So, having traveled the better part of eight to 10 years internationally on a pretty consistent basis, I have been extremely lucky that I have not run into this affliction. I don't know how I've been to some somewhat dodgy places and eaten some pretty dodgy food. At times I try to be real careful with the water and ice and drinks and things like that, but on the food side, probably not as careful as I should be, but for some reason I've been able to avoid it until earlier this year. And this, my friends, is the story about how I experienced quite possibly no, not quite possibly, it absolutely, it absolutely is the worst two days of travel in my entire life. I mean living hell.

Josh:

So the story starts in Nepal. I was in Nepal because I had made an attempt on summiting Mera Peak. If you don't know Mera Peak, it's a 22,000 foot peak in the Himalaya, very near Mount Everest, and if you've done, you know the Mount Everest base camp trek, which I've been lucky enough to do. You fly into the same place, but it's a different route. Right, you have to go to a different side. The next morning flew up to Lukla. They're all in Nepal and had been trekking through the mountains.

Josh:

You know sleeping at tea houses, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in tea houses, and you know tea houses, while remote, are generally pretty decent, the food is pretty good they have. You know you still get bottles of water and fresh water or you can use the water on the mountain and then you know purify it and run it through filters and such and you can drink it. So if I ever did that, I would purify it and I had tablets to purify it and never had any issues. I mean, you get upset, stomach and such on the mountain, but that's because you know the food's a little different. You're stressed, you're at high altitude, there's a lot of things going on.

Josh:

So anyway, trekking up the mountain toward Mera Peak and everything was great, we got up to the mountain, got up pretty high and was looking at going to base camp to make an attempt on summoning the peak and ended up getting three days of continuous snow, I mean white out snow. So because of limitations on time and time off and things like that, I couldn't just sit up there and wait for the weather to clear Because, frankly, I had to get back. I had, you know, I have a job, and so there was. There was no way to extend beyond what I had already planned for, so made our way back down, ended up being stranded because of just unrelenting rain and fog and, since Lukla is a visual only approach airport if it's foggy, the weather's bad, the planes aren't coming in and they didn't come in, and so I had to sit in a tea house for a couple of extra days in Lukla waiting for a flight out, and ended up watching a bunch of old WWE wrestling. It wasn't recent stuff and I don't know what satellite they were pulling it off of, but sure as shit.

Josh:

In the middle of the Himalaya in Nepal, myself, two Brits and a tea house full of other foreigners and guides and porters and everything else are sitting there in the middle of the day, all trying to get back to Kathmandu and have nothing to do but watch wrestling reruns. I mean, hey, you do what you got to do to wait the timeout. So anyway, it was actually a pretty cool experience. I was really disappointed not summiting Mera Peak, but we'll talk about that more on another show At that point. Still perfectly fine, no problems, feeling good. Disappointed, but you know, physically felt fine. So I ended up flying from Lukla to a remote airport, not in Kathmandu, because they were limiting flights flying into Kathmandu. The flights out of Lukla were backed up and so I ended up having to fly to a very small airport out in the middle of nowhere, basically.

Josh:

And then a group of us kind of joined together and arranged for a van to drive us from that airport back to Kathmandu. That in and of itself was a wild experience. Not only were we packed into this van with all of our gear and a bunch of guys that had been, you know, hiking and trekking and mountain climbing for the last you know couple of weeks and hadn't really had a bunch of guys that had been, you know, hiking and trekking and mountain climbing for the last you know couple of weeks and hadn't really had a bunch of showers and, you know, certainly needed them. It was an interesting ride, to say the least. Plus, we're going over mountain passes, one lane roads. I mean it's like National Geographic taking place right there in front of your eyes, these buses and trucks on the side of these little mountain roads, and it was wild. And to top it all off, the day that we were driving back into Kathmandu was also holy for the Hindu religion. So there was people everywhere and there was all these little towns and, of course, everybody's covered in color, these colored powders and stuff Again, very cool to see. Loved getting the opportunity to see that, because it was. I mean, it was really cool.

Josh:

But I was so ready to get out of that damn van and off of that road that at that point I didn't really appreciate just how cool it was. So got dropped off in the middle of Kathmandu. The company that was handling the God service for me came and got me, took me back to the hotel and the plan was to fly out the next day. So I got to the hotel, fine, kind of repacked my bags to get ready to go home, drug out my clean clothes that I had stored at the hotel, you know, took a shower, put on some new clothes and figured out that I wanted to go get something to eat. I hadn't had any meat in like two weeks because you don't eat the meat on the mountain because it's been carried up there on somebody's back and not refrigerated and certainly my American stomach would not have done well with the meat. So I was hungry for some type of protein and I really didn't care what kind it was. So I started looking around on Google and turns out very close to my hotel is a Japanese restaurant. Got really good reviews. I'm like, hey, you know I love Japanese food, let's do this. So I Go to the Japanese restaurant, have some karaage, some yakitori, a couple of Asahi Super Drys, anyway, ate a lot of chicken. Enjoyed it, had a good meal, went back to the hotel, took another shower and got ready to leave the next morning had a really early flight, got up the next morning, had a ride waiting for me to take me to the hotel or hotel to the airport.

Josh:

I was flying Qatar Airways on a 787 from Kathmandu to Doha and then I was flying Qatar again from Doha to London. And the thought there was is there was some. I had some points that I could use on United and so why not fly up to London and then fly home in business class on United. So flipped to London. The plan was to take a day in London do some shopping for my wife. There's a fabric company that's headquartered in London that she loves because she quilts, and so I was going to swing by there, pick up some fabric that she can't get in the US and haul it home with me, and you know that way have a little bit of a break on the flight home. Great plan, really excited. Love London. It's going to be great to get back. Plus, I have another layover in Doha. So great, get on the plane.

Josh:

Everything's going fine, sitting in economy class on the on the aisle, so I've got room to stretch out and everything. They bring around some breakfast. So I eat and I settle in to watch a movie to pass the rest of the time on the flight. So I eat and I settle in to watch a movie to pass the rest of the time on the flight. I think the flight was about five hours.

Josh:

So I'm sitting there and I'm watching I don't know what movie, some movie, and all of a sudden my stomach started hurting really bad. It started cramping up and I was like, ah, I might have to go to the bathroom. Yeah, no problem, I've been on enough flights. You know my, my reserve of of going to the restroom and having to handle business has long since disappeared. And I don't care at this point. I'll you know if I got to go, I got to go, so whatever.

Josh:

So I get up, go to the bathroom you know, sitting there, feel a little off, but not horrible, and use the restroom, kind of feel better. So get back up, head back to my seat, sit back down Drinking some water, just hanging out and like a ton of fucking bricks, something just washes over me, just like, hits me, cold sweats, stomach and knots, and I'm just like, oh shit, I jump up out of my seat and I am in a fucking dead sprint to the bathroom. Now, I haven't looked up to see if there's any poor souls in the bathroom, but if there was, I was going to beat the hell out of the door until they got out. Luckily for me I mean think you're lucky stars on this one One of the bathrooms was vacant, so I tear open the door, jump in there, lock it, sit down and it's just. I mean, it's a nightmare, it's just the worst of the worst.

Josh:

I am in the middle of some very bad number two action and I start getting nauseated and it's, you know, coming off the top and the bottom at this point. And here I am in a God forsaken airplane bathroom and I can't go anywhere and I can't stop what's happening and I am just panicked. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do. Well, I try to go back to my seat eventually, but quickly the same exact thing happens. I mean, I get sat down for two seconds, I'm back in the bathroom. So basically, I figure out I'm riding this flight out in the bathroom. It's probably the best place for me because, you know, if I have to get up and try to make it back to the bathroom and there's somebody in there with how I was feeling, it was going to be bad for everyone. I mean everyone. I was going to take people down with me, so better for me to just lock myself in the bathroom and hope that it'll pass. Well, it didn't pass, and hope that it'll pass. Well, it didn't pass.

Josh:

When we finally arrived in Doha, I had dragged my ass out of the bathroom, back to my seat and the poor people sitting next to me I mean my God, they must have looked at me and thought I was a ghost, because I know I had to be. You know, just pale eyes or bloodshot. I mean I had to look, you know, just pale eyes or bloodshot. I mean I I had to look like utter shit, like I had just been through hell, because I had anyway, I had basically evacuated any type of liquids or anything else in my body at that point, and so I didn't have a whole lot to give. So I sucked it up and got in my seat for the landing, got landed, got out of the plane into Doha airport and walked 50 feet and had to dead sprint to the bathroom again, and this was my life for the next four hours.

Josh:

I was in just utter misery, to the point to where I was seriously wondering if I was even going to be able to get on the next flight, because the flight from Doha to London was seven hours and I'm just like what am I going to do? You're dehydrated, you feel like hell, you've been in the bathroom for hours on end and at that point anything sounds good Hell. You would take anything to make it stop Right. And you're also irrational in that. You know I couldn't come up with a logical thing to do. I think I even had some nausea medicine with me, completely forgot about it, didn't know it existed. I mean, I was so tunnel visioned that I couldn't do anything but either sit in a chair or sit on the toilet.

Josh:

Anyway, fought through you know the back and forth in Doha, get on the plane to London. I just said, screw it, I want to get somewhere. Because I knew that if I could just get to London I could get to a hotel. I had hotel reservations for two nights and it was at Heathrow, so I wouldn't have to go very far. And I was like, if I can just get there, I'll be okay, because I figured if nothing else, I could hole up in that room and ride out the misery, right. So I get on the plane to London and look, I'll tell you right now Qatar Airways. I already had pretty high thoughts on them. I thought they were pretty damn good. I mean, I know most people do. They're always ranked really high.

Josh:

And let me just say the cabin crew on that flight, especially one flight attendant, she was an angel. I mean I wish I could remember her name. But hell, I don't remember much about that trip, except you know, the inside of a bathroom. But I wish I could remember her name because I would have emailed Qatar Airways and been like this woman is a saint. I mean, as soon as I walked on the plane, she must have spotted my pale ghost nature and been like there's something wrong with this jackass. And she probably came up to talk to me to make sure that I wasn't like a whack job or something. And anyway, she came over and asked me, you know if I was okay and you know what was going on. And I told her because at that point I just didn't give a shit. Honestly, I didn't care if she knew, great, if she didn't, whatever, just get me to London, I don't give a damn what happens. And so that's what I did. I, you know, I told her the whole situation and I mean she was an angel.

Josh:

She brought me bottles of water, made sure I had, you know, a cold towel. You know she was trying to see if there was anything that they had on the plane that I might be able to keep down. You know she brought me some fruit and whatever other bland things she could find. You know I ended up not eating a damn bit of it because the thought of of putting anything in my mouth at that point was so disgusting and so horrifying that I just couldn't do it. It was all I could do to drink water just to keep my mouth somewhat, you know, wet and from turning into like sand and dust because I was so dehydrated at that point.

Josh:

Anyway, that flight went pretty much as you can imagine. I spent most of it in the bathroom in a very bad way, and when I didn't, I spent the rest of the time kind of leaning up against the wall of the plane because at least it was kind of cool and it felt good on my head. That's all I could really manage. Didn't eat anything, only drank some water. That was it. Got to London. It was Terminal 4 at Heathrow, or Terminal 5. It had been Terminal 5.

Josh:

Anyway, whatever terminal Qatar comes in, it's not a great terminal. At Heathrow I mean, I've flown in and out of the Queens Terminal it's great Terminal 2. This terminal, it was a warehouse right. The luggage was in the very bottom of it. I had to go all the way downstairs to get these two giant duffel bags I had with me, because it's all my climbing gear, all my cold weather gear, and so they weigh a ton, and I'm just, I don't have the strength to do anything. I dragged these damn bags upstairs somehow to the taxi line because my hotel is attached to the Queens Terminal, so it's attached to Terminal 2.

Josh:

And there was no way I was getting on the train at that point. I mean I couldn't, I barely could tell you my name. So gotten the black cab very nice cabbie which, by the way, real quick side note here you know most people will tell you oh, don't take black cabs, are too expensive and they are pricey. Don't get me wrong, but I have never run into a bad black cab driver. They have always been extremely nice and wanted to chat and it's been an enjoyable ride every time. And this was late at night this time and this guy was still chatty and friendly. So yeah, it may be a couple extra dollars, but it's fucking worth it in London, I mean frankly, it really is, it's just great.

Josh:

Anyway, back to my story. Make it to the hotel, get checked in. Don't really have to talk to anybody, thank God, cause they would have probably thought I was bringing in the plague to the hotel. Made it into the room, passed out, woke up sometime the next day, finally, having somewhat regained some semblance of dignity in my life, I was feeling a little bit better, ended up making it into the city for a little while to get my wife's fabric, which was nice. It got me out, it got me to do a few things, came back to the hotel, slept, got up later, went to the actually to the hotel restaurant, had a little bit of chicken which what a ballsy move on my part, because I'm pretty sure the chicken I had in Kathmandu was what did me in but anyway, I figured it was bland enough. I had some chicken and then went back to sleep. Got up the next morning, figured it was bland enough, I had some chicken and then went back to sleep.

Josh:

Got up the next morning, flew home. Felt like absolute shit the whole time flying home, but it had subsided at that point to where I wasn't in the bathroom the entire time and thank God I was in Polaris on United, so at least I had a lie, flat bed, was able to get some sleep and relax. Didn't really eat. But I'm just telling you right now, man, if there's ever something that you want to avoid while traveling, it's food poisoning.

Josh:

But if you're going to get it, if you're going to do something stupid, eat something risky, drink something risky, whatever you make damn sure that when you do that, you are somewhere where you're going to be for a couple of days, because I can tell you what, my friends, you do not ever and I mean ever want to experience the Nepal nightmare like I did Stuck inside a speeding tube at 500 miles an hour, 40,000 feet in the air and you've got nowhere to go. It is an absolute nightmare. Trust me, I've lived it. I know this has been kind of an interesting episode, but hey, this is what we do on this podcast, right, we talk about real travel. It's not always rainbows and sunshine. Sometimes it all happens in the toilet.

Intro:

This has been Trade Tables and Time Zones. Worldwide travel is one of the funnest things you can do in life and it's our passion to talk about the good, the bad, the funny and the ugly. Nothing is off limits. We hope you've enjoyed the show. If you did, make sure to like, rate and review. We'll be back soon, but in the meantime, find us on Instagram at Trade Tables and Time Zones, and for questions or comments, send your email to tradesandtimes at gmailcom. Take care and see you next time on Trade Tables and Time Zones.