What's the worst sickness you've ever experienced while traveling?
For me it was while traveling in Mexico last year. On the day I arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas I ate some veggies that were possibly washed in tap water, which left me feeling very feverish in the evening. Lucklily enough a good night of sleep left me feeling better the next day, but I had a dish with cheese, sausage and a lot of oil for dinner which caused all hell to break loose. At night I ended up pooping the bed, violently vomiting out my dinner, and then my lunch while shitting out a strange green substance at the same time. I then had to shit out the same green substance approximately 20 times the rest of the night until I was finally able to get some sleep. The next night I ended up sleeping 14 hours in a row to make up for it.
>central Sri Lanka
>purchased food from a street vendor
>the street vendor was actually closing up but I interrupted him
>bring the food to my room
>the samosas aren't vegetarian like the usual kind, there's fish in them
>the food was most likely old & stood out in the sun all day
>street food vendors don't have the best hygiene practices
>my stupid ass ate the nearly day-old fish that's been rotting under the sun
>next morning
>feel the need to burp
>it was very loud, long, and I could smell it
>never did that before
>stomach started gurgling
>run to the toilet and unleash hot diarrhea
>the diarrhea is also very thick & pasty, like refried beans
>I've had diarrhea many times before, I never had one that thick
>had to make repeat trips within the span of 30 minutes
>eventually run out of solids to shit out
>there is only liquid
>have to keep shitting more
>the liquid is losing more color with every trip to the toilet I make
>it's practically water by the end
What happened at the end?
I don't mind continuing, but we already got to the weirdest part.
>this happened on my last day of staying at a hotel, right before checkout
>shit as much as possible before checkout time
>eventually becomes easier to hold it in
>check out of hotel
>have a long ride to catch to my next destination
>arrive ~2 hours later while still holding in water-shit
>check in to the guest house
>run for the toilet as soon as I get my keys
>shit some more
>even puke a little (it was very, very little)
>be tired from shitting, holding in liquid shit, and enduring a long ride all day
>fall asleep in bed
>next morning
>guesthouse owner asks me if anything was wrong
>I had missed dinner that night, so she was worried about my health & made me a huge breakfast
>feel completely normal from that day on; no aftereffects
I didn't see a doctor or anything, I just shat all day.
Actual good food healed you, amazing.
Smelly burps could be giardia
worst I’ve had was a case of campylobacter. 48h of shitting and puking. Then I got reactive arthritis as my immune system went into overdrive. Couldn’t walk for two weeks and took six months to get back to normal. All from a kebab
>Smelly burps could be giardia
Damn, that just might confirm it. I posted this exact story on SighSee a few years ago, and another anon said the same thing. But good god, man, that shit smelled foul, and it was big & loud.
ate a fish bun at the baltic coast in germany and had green diarrhea like crazy f
flatulences
i got some kind of vicious stomach virus in Hawaii that spread around the resort buffet. 48 hours of puking and shitting every 30-45 minutes. Lost 9 pounds in 2 days.
I don't eat unknown food so I never got sick. I did get a weird kind of spasm in my arm where it hurt to lift up my arm for a solid 2 hours while I was in my hotel room. I freaked the frick out but didn't wanna spend money on the hospital so I just drank beers until it went away and it did.
Was in Puerto Rico. Last day there woke up with typhoid fever. Could hardly walk. Felt as though I was freezing even in the 80 degree plus temperature. Wore two jackets in the airport. Took Tylenol and other drugs to help me make it through. Never going back there.
Truly 3rd world
I was in Costa Rica a few years ago with the gf and we went out for pizza one night and I had a bunch of gay fruity drinks with dinner.
Fast forward to later that night, I get woken up at like 3 in the morning with a shooting pain in my gut. I sprint to the bathroom and start spraying orange foam out of my ass. I try to get back to sleep afterwards, but it starts up again like 30 minutes later.
It kept coming in waves all night long, and I end up shitting like 12 times in a 6 hour span.
I'm guessing it was from chewing on the ice cubes in the drinks. God damn filthy monkey people.
Another time I was in OKC for work and got totally fricked up one night and forgot I had a big presentation the next day. I don't know how I didn't get fired, I kept having to leave the room to throw up in the trash can in the hallway and I almost fainted at one point during the meeting.
>I had a big presentation the next day. I don't know how I didn't get fired, I kept having to leave the room to throw up in the trash can in the hallway and I almost fainted at one point during the meeting.
kek
I'm a young lad and have a pretty strong stomach and a good appetite. One day while I was traveling in the US, I saw some Greek restaurant and decided to get the menu since it was closing at the time, I returned next day and ordered 2 gyros and ate both before going to bed. I don't know what the frick was but I woke up with a terrible stomachache and had to rush to the bathroom, I ended up puking everything and felt like absolute crap worst part is I had a trip to Washington DC the very next day were I walked the entire day.
Greek restaurants in the US are known for being filthy. The Greeks even top the chinks when it comes to small town rumors of disgusting practices in the food industry.
It was indeed a Greek restaurant in a small town. I didn't know they had such an infamy, but yeah, the worst experience I've had. It took me a week to fully recover, but the disgust of thinking about trying Greek food again never fully went away.
I got food poisoning several times while in China.
Worst part is when you don’t have a normal toilet, and the Airbnb apartment you’re renting only has those primitive monkey squat toilets because you didn’t do your due diligence. I got it bad in chengdu after eating uncooked hot pot one day. I was shooting watery diarrhea like a hose and literally shot it all over the bathroom since it was a shitty squat one. The chinky Airbnb landlady was pretty pissed off after I left lmao
>uncooked hot pot
Isn't the point of hot pot that you cook it yourself on the spot?
Are you saying you were just eating the raw ingredients like a chimpanzee?
The worst sicknesses IME are not the violent purges which pass quickly, usually caused by poisoned food properly cooked, but the long-term bacterial, viral, or protozoal infections caused by good food improperly stored, prepared and served. A case I got in Chihuahua City (Mexico) from a street vendor's leftover burrito of gritty "meat" for the street pickers left me shitting liquid sharts and unable to fart when not sitting on a toilet for two weeks. One case of poisoning I got in Salento (Colombia) from a stale empanada was only cured one week later by Krodex, a powerful kill-all drug that fricks up gut health and digestion for a long time. Strangely, I could eat well during both of these infections, and gut cramps were a rare occurrence beyond the first couple days, when all the solid gets pushed out of the gut and the liquid sharts begin occurring.
lmao. the liquid sharter.
the stories here make me want to avoid mexico and LatAm in general
Ive only been food poisoned by american bbq restaurants. Shit tier sanitation in corporate chains. Only eat 5star or cook yourself on trips.
There is a weird sort of irony to all this.
>be major multinational chain with first-world owners
>hate lawsuits
>invest in idiot-proof kitchen equipment that makes it difficult to frick up food
>train staff on food safety
>post constant reminders on walls to wash hands
>customers still get sick
>be local street vendor or small business owner in a third-world country
>"food safety? health inspection? what are these things you speak of?"
>"here, let me make you something delicious with ingredients I pulled out of my cart"
>nobody gets sick
>long lines that stretch out into the street
It's the wagies they hire in countries like Peru and Egypt vs the street vendor who has been making the food for generations.
>Beijing Airport at 22:00
>Everything is closed except a KFC
>decide to get chicken sandwich
>flying back to Munich feel something isn’t right
>run to WC and puke
>keep puking for most of the flight home
>then have diarrhoea for the follow two days
That will happen no matter where you order KFC from anon.
For me it was an Italian restaurant in Havana. Was bedridden for 3 days and painted the bathroom wall brown.
Mandatory food safety training doesn't magically make turd worlders respect concepts like basic hygiene. Maybe if the franchisee and manager were watching like hawks and cracking the whip to drill it into their wagies, but why would they? They're turd worlders too.
I got food poisoning from a fricking Pizza Hut in Ica, Peru
ate delicious local food all week long and the one corporate food i ate got me sick as frick
You never know where danger strikes. Two weeks in Egypt eating every street shawarma and felafel I could find and the only time I got sick was from the pizza at the only 5-star hotel I stayed at the whole trip.
>long lines for streetfood
This usually means that your food will be quite fresh, no matter the hygiene standards.
In some more upscale places you might get served food that has been prepared a while ago while more or less following the corporate standards.
e coli is endemic in the San Cri water supply. The only place outside of India I've ever gotten sick.
>long time third world traveler and haven't gotten sick in nearly 10 years (last time was India, 2013)
>no fear of any food
>head to the locals market in San Cri to try to hunt down obscure, rare mole preparations
>go to a stall where they only speak local Maya dialect and broken Spanish
>try their Pechuga con Mole Roja
>incapacitated for 3 days straight, saved only by pharmacy grade mexican pepto bismol
Be warned about San Cristobal, it can take out even veterans of dodgy street food with seasoned microbiomes
Bento box and soup in Indonesia - explosive diarrhoea and vomit within 10 mins
>fully cooked (hell, overcooked) meat
>brown rice
>hard-boiled eggs
How could anything even go wrong with these kinds of foods? I'm guessing it was the soup that did you in.
I can see at least 6 reasons why just on the photo you posted.
>In Indonesia, soup comes in bags
>In Canada, milk comes in bags
>In China, beer comes in bags
>In America, juice comes in bags
>In Thailand, soda comes in bags
>In Liberia, water comes in bags
>In Singapore, coffee comes in bags
>In Mexico, wienertails come in bags
by consuming all of these, how fast will i ruin my body with microplastics
This is actually fairly standard even in first world nations like Japan, Taiwan and Korea
That bag of frog piss prob was it but id never trust beef or pork, you cant always tell if its bad like with chicken.
>Egypt
>Stay at family run hotel in front of the Pyramids
>Eat the local food that they eat and the water that they drink
>Perfectly fine for days
>Take the cruise down the Nile intended specifically for tourists
>Buffet meals
>Immediately get severe diarrhea
>Spend days shitting my guts out to the point I got sick
>butthole so sore it feels like Anubis himself fricked me raw
Now I dont go anywhere without diarrhea meds and antibiotics
Covid while in Spain wasn't that bad at first then got progressively worse and the heat at night made it almost impossible to sleep
Not sure what the cause was but I do believe I know how I got it. In Mexico, somewhere north of Puerto Vallarta, Monday the week of thanksgiving in the US, last day of the trip, I ate carne asada I bought and a baked potato I made on a plastic plate that I had used and didn't wash but just wiped off (old friend and I were doing some beach camping). We planned to leave tuesday morning and be back in time to have thanksgiving dinner at my parents house in California. I believe flies had gotten onto the plate and spread fecal material. A few hours later I was sicker than I've ever been before or since. Vomiting and shitting green mucous, I had a fever so high I was hallucinating. Spent a miserable night puking my brains out then we attempted to drive straight back to the US early the next morning, stopping like every 30 minutes so I could shit my brains out again in the dirt by the side of the road. I could not manage to drive and I could not even keep water down, it was absolutely miserable. We stopped at some roadside hotel in some small town in Sinaloa near the Sonora border after driving 13 or 14 hours. By then I was feeling a little better but still couldn't hold food down and the owner lady who noticed I was sick made me a fried chicken sandwich with mayonnaise and a tea of boiled basil leaves from her garden, insisting this would help. I think the tea did a little. I think I threw it all up later. The hotel also had no power after 9 pm (which I didn't know) when they turned off the backup generator they were using and it was pitch dark in the room and cold. The next day I felt good enough to eat some plain flour tortillas and we made the border after another long day of driving. By thanksgiving I had started to recover but I couldn't eat much food at all. This was also like 20 years ago when I was 19 I think, now a lot of these places have serious travel warnings.
Working a festival in Malaysia, just north of Singapore, look across the grounds and see a guy I see at events stretched out on ground like he is dead. Start over towards him, by the time I get there I'm staggering, horrible intestinal cramps. About half of us went down with whatever it was, spraying semi-fluid ejecta from both ends and just wishing to die. Two wound up in the local hospital, THAT was not a fun place. Apparantly something in the breakfast. Did not go back to that event in future years.
My first couple weeks in Morocco, I started feeling nauseous one night and started my vision started to be like what happens when you close your eyes too tight. It went away after a couple hours but for the next two days, I had the worst case of the Hershey Squirts. Never had a problem after that in Morocco or any other country. It was my first trip overseas.
Your fault by going to dirty shitty San Cristobal De Las Casas in Chiapas.
Travel noob here. Is it true that you should only eat at street stalls where the locals get their food?
Decent rule of the thumb. I've been to Uzbekistan and all the street food I was getting was at the places that are nearly packed by the lunchtime. The only time I got something suspicious was at a nice-looking restaurant, but I got lucky and had no shits.
Had some kind of infection right after I arrived though, probably picked it up back home. Carried through on ungodly doses of advil for almost a week before finally saying "frick it" and calling the insurance, got prescribed antibiotics and got over it in less than 2 days.
you only eat at places that have a lot of turn over/customers that aren't tourists.
There were few instances
>got terrible stomach flu in brazil while i chilled out in 4,5 star hotel after crusing the coast for a week (it was hotel food, im sure of it). I woke up in the middle of night and got the shits, vomit, shit, vomit ect. for like 3 hours. The shit was exiting me so fast that I get hemmoroid because of the constant shiting strain. Felt terrible but i remember laughting about shiting and vomiting at the same time while my family thought I must be in very bad spot if I laught given my situation.
It got better at morning so it wasnt as bad as some stomach flues Ive had in past or since then.
> geting some food bacteria twice in Liban. Ive heard the country have different bacteria flora like India, but ive been to many countries and didnt had any stomach flora problem beforehand. Liban was another story, I had cramps and felt nausious like 1/5 of the trip, runny shit was just a bonus. After I thought im good it caugth me again on the night of return, I ate 4 coal tablets just to stop my bowels.
>Caught some influenza like stuff 4 days before a korea trip and went there on antibiotics, probably worst long time journey in my life, felt like shit all the way. I got the proposition to give up my fligt spot in turkey and get 500e and hotel room to fly the next plane (next day) because of the overbooking. I would take in any other circumstances, but i felt so bad that I just wanted to be done with this flight. We arrived aound 22 and our hotel was around 100m up the hill while it was raining and was pretty cold for this period of year. I sweated like a madman because I hauled 2 large bags and bagpack (i was there with my gf and she sometimes get vertigo from the long flights) which resulted in me being sick for the next week. We didnt changed out plans beside first 2 days which were the worst and continue with sightseeing but I remember that I felt like ive just finished some marathon after returning from 8km walk.
*100m as in not vicinity but the elevation difference.
>in Malapascua, Philippines
>there’s a disco going on in a basketball court
>decide to buy a bottle of rum
>chug it down like I usually do
>full party mood dancing around like a fricking moron
>some Spainards bring in a bottle of Red Horse
>we share it
>drunk as frick
>eventually decide to follow a friend back to his hotel
>it’s a Korean who can’t speak much English and is equally shitfaced
>the alcohol truly kicks in
>after leaving him, going back to my place, all I can remember is me stumbling around, falling over in front of a local, asking for the way back in broken Bisaya and eventually asking a Filipino tourist to help me up the stairs to my place
>wake up 4am in my own puke in the shower, freezing
>turn on the shower with hot water going back to sleep, unironically one of the best feelings I’ve ever experienced
>turns out my gf had trouble making me puke in the toilet so she left me there for the night as I was filthy
>severe hangover the following morning
>worst part is we need to hop to Bantayan, a different island which is 6 hours of boat, van and ferry transfers
>this is the worst part by far, threw up repeatedly throughout this ordeal
I’ve never felt worse in my entire life to be honest. I am usually fine drinking a bottle of rum but the beer might have made things way worse.
Also that Filipino reacted to one story of me on my IG a few days later, asking “remember me?”
>no?
>”I’m that guy who helped you up the stairs! You kept on asking for my IG as I helped you”
kek, cringe of me but also kinda based
Peru, it was a hotel near Ollyataytanbo or whatever. Breakfast was pretty good but I'm 99% sure the cheese I had wasn't pasteurized or processed correctly so I spent like 2 days just shitting my guts out. I've been traveling with Imodium (anti-diarrheal) ever since.
A tip with Imodium: If you eat bad food, you want to blow it all out before you take any anti-diarrheal medicine. Otherwise, you prolong the irritation and increase damage to your gut.
I had a panic attack on a full bus to home flight, had to fight against passing out.
Why were you afraid to go home?
>go around virtually all of SEA for a year
>eaten streetfood, had drinks with ice in it, consumed washed vegetables
>only had slightly upset stomach and diarrhea that is cured after the first shart
>travel to Taiwan
>a country with supposedly great food hygiene
>get some really bad stomach ache that lasts for days, coupled with constant sharting forcing me to stay mostly at the hotel
Yup, I’m believing in the theory of differing microbiomes
I traveled to Uganda completely by myself because volunteer organizations are for women and homosexuals. I found a place to live and taught guitar for 3 months. after the 2nd month, I got so sick with something (they didnt know what it was, and I didnt want to go to the chimp hospital because its africa and everyone is retared) and I even picked out and piad for a burial spot. Thought I was ghoing to die. I had a muscle spasm that seems to slowely travel around my body, and when i tgot to my spine, it was the wrost pain of my life. Then I meracualously got better. even went back 3 more times.
how did you arrive at that particular misspelling of "miraculously"? honestly i'm impressed
nerve damage
I love this thread.
My story is also Mexico. Twice.
First was Cancun, massive diarrhea, worst of my life. Fairly thick. Kind of looked like the refried beans they serve everywhere. But it only lasted for about a day. Likely seafood at the resort.
Second was also Cancun. Vomited so much that my wife nearly took me to a Mexican hospital, which I vetoed. Gatorade sips and as long as I could urinate I figured my kidneys would be okay. Got better within about a day. Not sure exactly what did it, but I suspect some fairly rare cooked Brazilian style beef.
Might go back to Cancun this December.
Applebee's and similar chain restaurants in the US make me sicker than anything. Must be the Sneed oils.
LoL, i think mexico is a awful country filled with trash "people". People who choose to go to that shithole when there are far better places in the world is beyond me. I mean there is a reason those beaners are fleeing that failed civilization in record numbers. They are brought their corruption with them to the American Southwest. Lowering the IQ of the entire country LOL.
I lived in mexico for a year, mexicans and latinos in general fricking suck. You cant even order a beer without some beaner trying to steal your change, you cant trust anyone. All the prices will go up 30% at any market. The cops will rob you. You cant go hiking or go on road trips.
Frick mexico. And frick mexicans.
Mini aren't that bad, but I wanna share!!
I was getting a fever in China, and my friend's parents gave me some chinese medicine. They were red pills and they did nothing. A few hours later, when the boomers weren't around, we got some western medicine and I felt better in 2 hours.
Also, in Bangkok, I got some nasty tasting Campbells tomato soup tasting omurice at the mall, and some Coco milk tea for dessert. In the middle of the night, I woke up and puked my guts out, then felt better. Such a gross taste.
>red pills
>did nothing
What else is new?
illimitable men helped me stay focused on self improvement. I'm better off having read his old articles!