26 June Sick as parrots

Both David and I have fallen foul of a local virus. First David keeled with flu like symptoms and three days later I too fell ill, too fatigued to get out of bed, coughing and sneezing we stayed on board in the quarantine anchorage to avoid spreading our germs to fellow cruisers. And we felt too sick to get off the boat.

One of our fellow cruisers is a doctor and he advised we abandon over the counter cold and flu remedies and each begin a course of antibiotics – medicines which we were able to buy without prescription in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Maldives.

It is rare that we have colds because we live in a mostly clean environment but travelling on public transport and being in crowds exposes us to germs we have lost our resistance to. 

We weren't the only ones to get ill - one cruiser had the same before we arrived and others had similar after us.  There must have been something evil in the air.

Happily we recovered, but it took more than two weeks to regain our usual energy.