No happy ending to this shitty desert banquet

The desert is inevitable in Dubai and it is difficult to resist a safari. While we will feast in the dessert there will be no booze or belly dancing tonight because of Ramadam.
I don’t mind.
We traverse the dunes in Top Gear fashion while I weakly exclaim “Oh my god!”. I don’t really mean it as the track up the peaks and down the dips aren’t that scary.
While everybody else looks towards the sunset and the passing camel train, I turn my back to the sun to enjoy the light and shadow casting relief over contrasting textures of the sand.
The banquet is a typical tourist trap with hookah pipes, henna tattoos and a dreaded buffet. I should probably mention the cats wandering the tables with improbably large balls.
Despite sand in my shoes and sticking between my fingers and teabag tea (make an effort at least), the food seems okay.
Or so I thought.

The incubation period for bad food is some 12 to 24 hours. About 2pm the next day my stomach starts cramping but I ignore it. and have a peppermint tea in the spa.

I opt for a 15 minute steam and the massage room which seems a bit cool.
Now you can never be sure what you’re getting in a massage abroad. Is it legit or is it going to provide one of those messy but happy endings so beloved by my fellow countryman.
I’m given the choice between some disposable shorts and nudity but when I see my masseuse is a muscled filipino chap rather than a young Thai lady I decide on the shorts.
I do start to worry as his hand slips up the inside of my thigh uncomfortably close to my wrinkled scrotum. Soon I’m urging him harder and after 90 minutes of brutality it culminates in him rocking on my back ion his knees. I’m same after all.

I emerge battered and throughly worked out.

But I feel bloody awful. My whole body shakes and my teacup clatters on the saucer as my hand shakes uncontrollably. I can’t warm up in a warm shower and still outside in the 38C air I shake. My eyes are blurry and have spots in front on them and my mind feels it has been set in a large jelly and is isolated from the rest of the world.

I’m sick, very sick. Immediately I think I may have heatstroke but I’ve been wearing a Cambodian scarf over my head (prompting an Indian chap on a water taxi to ask if I’m Muslim) and keeping up my fluids apart from a two hour trip to the spice market.

It’s time to buy water. By 4 O’clock I’m back in my room falling into delirium.
The sluices open unleashing a rush of brown liquid to the toilet bowl, dripping down my leg and onto the floor as I rise. This is a pattern that repeats over the next two days.
My temperature is out of control and now I’m wearing a jumper. Later I strip off and later again the jumper is on again.
“Oh my god!” I should exclaim. But I’m too weak.
At 8pm I’m due for a special feast at Indego, the restaurant of Michelin starred Indian chef Vineet Bhatia at the swanky Grosvenor Hotel. It’s part of the whole point of this journey and the book I’m writing.
On a more serious note I’m also planning to buy the Martini Monster a snow-dome to add to her collection at the ski slope. Will she ever hand feed me ketamine ever again?
Faster than I can drink water I lose it. Stumbling to the courtyard I beg some salt and sugar from the kitchen and make myself a rehydrating mixture – 8 teasponns sugar and one salt to a litre of water. I am in such a state that I can hardly work out the simple calculations for 1.5 litres.
But it is no good. Brown sludgy water still comes out quicker than I can take dehydrating fluid in.
I cancel my dinner and stumble to the chemist for some proper mixed dehydration formula. All along I’ve taken the junior diarrhea tablets that I brought along (I should have got the serious shit kit from the Travelers Medicine Centre).
During the night I’m too hot and I wake to a soiled bed. I can’t stop it and dread my flight to England – some 2 hours in the airport, nearly 8 in the air and another 2 hour bus trip to my final destination.
Fortunately I have managed to stabalize myself and I’m taking on more water than I’m losing now. In the airport the only food aside from cakes I can find is fruit salad and I take a gamble that this is better than nothing at all.
I think I survive thanks to my “mind over bowel” technique that I invoke. It requires mental discipline developed over years of meditation (I also have a mind over vomit technique and am sure it would apply to pain if I wasn’t such a wimp).

For sale: one soiled iPhone

It works but not without my body letting go of its functions in the bathroom at my mother’s in Saffron Walden. Later I soil the heirloom linen sheets (from my granny, one of the original Traffords as in the football ground rather than the ones preceded by a de) on my bed that night and fear that we will have to cancel the Michelin starred meal we have planned for my Mother’s birthday on the fateful 9/11, the poor woman.
It turns out some plain silverbeet and chicken have helped further stabilize me and I think I’m up for the trip.

My working title for my travelogue was jokingly “Curry wallah: one man’s search for the perfect curry with only one spare pair of underpants (and a packet of moist wipes).

Sod that. I need several spare pairs of trousers and a nappy. Perhaps some elastics bands to stop everything dripping into my shoe. And wipes are useless in the circumstances.
Although I should also add this incident has nothing to do with curry but the poor handling and serving of food at a tourist gimmick. Beware.

Footnote: it actually takes me about 5 days to recover fully from this bout and I have to cut back my agenda and plan another trip to the UK next year.