ON VACATION!?!

Finally, after a year in Indonesia, we got around to taking our first vacation... much-deserved, and much-needed... and... much-screwed UP!

One word and the whole plan got turned on its head. MALARIA. We had set off from Bali on a tour from Lombok to Flores (via Komodo to visit the dragons), when, the first evening Martin started feeling 'off'. By the next day he was a mess -- fever and sweating, headache and chills -- ok, maybe just a flu. But, when the next day he hallucinated that his hands had grown as big as his head and were weighting him down and causing the boat to begin to sink, I got really worried. We were on a boat, a three-day tour in a very remote area with no real options, so we just kept Martin comfy, and hoped for the best. As soon as we got to Labuan Bajo (a town with few medical services, but high incidence of malaria), we got him checked out by a local doctor - malaria was the diagnosis. No big surprise considering we had just come back from being eaten alive by mosquitos in the field in Papua and hadn't taken our prophylaxis. There were no decent hotels to be had in Labuan Bajo, let alone flights out to get him back to Bali where the proper tests could be run to see what KIND of malaria he had! So, we got a room that I can't imagine being ill in, and Martin slept off and on while I tried to figure out how to get him to proper treatment. (As a side note, in other circumstances we probably would have thought that same room was a steal - 60,000 Rupiah for the two of us, including breakie). We got lucky the next day: after booking the absolute soonest available ticket (4 days hence), we packed everything up and went to the airport to try to get on the flight as standby, and as luck would have it, there were two no-shows, so we were on our way back to Denpasar and a medical clinic with international standards.

That was yesterday. Since then we have been back and forth from the clinic to our hotel countless times, and Martin has given them enough blood that they could open a donor clinic. The insurance company is suggesting a medical evacuation to Singapore or Australia because of the potentially serious nature of MALARIA. YIKES. More to come!