Sidetracked by minor illness
When I arrived in Phnom Penh I was all fired up and ready to explore Cambodia and Laos, but shortly after arriving I caught some kind of bug that sapped all my energy and took away my momentum. But I’m over it now.
My first night in Phnom Penh I found my cheapest accommodation yet: $1/night for a bed in a dorm at Okay Guesthouse. It actually wasn’t as bad as you might think it would be at that price — each set of bunkbeds even had a curtain around it, which is more privacy than you get in most dorms. The security situation seemed a bit iffy — the beds were in kind of a weird spot, off to the side of a wide hallway on the way to the bathroom, so there wasn’t even a door between my stuff and the rest of the place. But I usually carry anything important with me anyway.
My bed had a mosquito net which I think was either meant to be purely decorative or to provide the mosquitoes with a convenient place to rest in between bites, because it had holes in it the size of grapefruit. There isn’t supposed to be any risk of malaria in Phnom Penh, but mosquitos at night are never any fun, so even after coating myself in repellent I had a hard time getting to sleep, partly due to noise from people coming and going at all hours of the night. But… $1/night, how could I turn that down!?
There was a sign on the wall informing guests that if you should happen to bring an escort back to your room, please walk them to the gate afterwards so the guard knows you haven’t been drugged and robbed. Classy!
Hmm… this all makes the Okay Guesthouse sound pretty bad, but it was actually a great place to stay — I ended up staying there almost two weeks. I probably wouldn’t recommend the dorms (though paying only $30/month for rent is nice), because they have private rooms that are also quite cheap: a couple days later I upgraded myself to a $4 room with fan and private bathroom (in the basement, no window), and they had other rooms with windows and a/c for around $8-10 I think. (but who has that kind of money!?)
They had a couple nice lounge/restaurant areas with TVs and DVD players, and each night they’d put on a few movies from a huge DVD library. They had a cool system for keeping track of expenses during your stay: next to the water/beer fridge was a shelf with little booklets with room numbers on them, and they would trust guests to write down any expenses they had while they were there — meals, water, beer, laundry, any excursions they booked for you. Then at the end of your stay they just tally up your book, add your room nights and you pay for everything at once.
I actually wondered if the $1 beds and honor system booklets weren’t simply meant to encourage people to stay there and spend lots of money in their restaurant and bar — they make everything so comfortable and convenient that you have no reason to go elsewhere. A guy I met in Vietnam told me about a place he stayed in Sihanoukville which is a beach town a few hours away, where you pay something like $2 for the first night, then stay as long as you want for free — they just count on you to spend money in their restaurant and bar.
My first day in Phnom Penh I locked my suitcase to the bed, loaded up my day pack with anything valuable (laptop, big camera and lenses, little camera, tons of other junk — about 25 lbs of stuff I think) and lugged it around in the hot sun for hours, looking for decent net access and a SIM card for my phone.
The next day I did a bit of the same, and started to feel a bit run down — sore throat, headache, no energy. I wasn’t too worried about it because the sore throat (reflux) is one of the known side effects of the malaria medication I started taking a few days ago, Doxycycline, and I figured I was tired from lack of sleep in the noisy dorm.
I realized I hadn’t been taking very good care of myself (not eating well or enough), so I had a couple yogurts to settle my stomach and a big meal that night. Reading about reflux on wikipedia the next day I discovered I had done a bunch of things known to make it worse: big meals, eating before bedtime, drinking coffee and milk products. Oops.
Then the next night I had a fever, which kind of freaked me out because I had been reading a lot about doxycycline and malaria, and the CDC site says:
Malaria is always a serious disease and may be a deadly illness. If you become ill with a fever or flu-like illness either while traveling in a malaria-risk area or after you return home (for up to 1 year), you should seek immediate medical attention and should tell the physician your travel history.
I didn’t think I had been anywhere with risk of malaria yet; I had started taking the meds because of risk at Angkor Wat, where I planned to be the following week. But I started to wonder about some of the places I had been in Malaysia: CDC says “No risk in urban and coastal areas” — how urban is “urban”, and how coastal is “coastal”?
I think the combination of paranoia from reading malaria horror stories online and inability to think clearly from the fever got to me, because in my fever-induced haze I typed a bunch of notes into my laptop with info on where I had been, what drugs I had taken, and what symptoms I had noticed and when, thinking that would be useful information for whoever found my unconscious body the next day. I even left the door to my room unlocked just in case (I propped my guitar against it so if anyone opened the door it would fall to the ground and make a loud noise to alert me.)
I didn’t rush myself to the hospital because I was pretty sure I hadn’t been anywhere at risk yet, but I wasn’t 100% sure so the next day I went to a clinic and asked for a malaria test; they seemed to think it was pretty pointless since by that point my fever had passed and I was feeling pretty good, but they did a blood test anyway to humor me (only $12), which came back negative.
I also thought I might be having a bad reaction to the doxycycline; some of the info out there makes it easy to be paranoid about this stuff. MedLine’s page about doxycycline has a section that says “Some side effects can be serious. If you experience any of these symptoms, call your doctor immediately”, and I had at least five of the symptoms listed. If anyone takes that advice literally, they’d be calling their doctor every few days!
Over the next week or so my symptoms turned into something more like a normal cold/flu, and I spent about 16 hours a day in my windowless basement cell, sleeping and watching TV and movies on my laptop. I watched almost all of seasons 1 of Heroes and Veronica Mars, and seasons 1 and 2 of Arrested Development (starting what must be my eighth time through that series — best show ever!) I left only to eat, and work a bit here and there. It was actually kind of nice to be so lazy for a while — I didn’t have enough energy to do anything else, so I didn’t feel guilty about not doing it.
Once I started to feel better I went out and explored Phnom Penh a bit, and it’s a really cool city. I’ll write more about it next time.