Daily Archives: March 20, 2006

There’s nothing worse on a long road trip than getting sick. I’m talking about the ailments that overcome you with such enthusiasm that you are incapacitated with misery. None of these ailments are fatal, but they’re damned inconvenient, often in the most uncomfortable of ways.

My intense desire to avoid food poisoning and other gastrointestinal ailments when in out-of-the-way places begins on a sorry night in 2000, in Morocco’s Atlas mountains, near the village of Zaouia Ahanasel. As is frequently the case in such situations, the cause of my illness was unexceptional. Only in looking back during my long bouts of reverie in the outhouse do I figure out where I made the fatal mistake.

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