Enferma.

Good gods, but I've been sick! It started the day I traveled to Nicaragua. Up at 5AM, two buses, a ferry, a third bus, two border crossings and a gypsy cab and I finally arrived in San Juan del Sur exhausted, racked with fever and at the end of my endurance. The first hostel I went to was all booked up. I then came to the Hospedaje Elizabeth, where a friendly, bustling woman told me to go on upstairs and pick a room. I left my stuff in the one that had a real mattress instead of just a thin pad and went back down to pay. The woman had quoted me C$150 Córdobas, or about $7.50. But she wasn't there when I got back down, and I was left with two young women who I think were her daughters. They told me no, it was C$220. I tried to argue, but to no avail. I was so tired and sick I would have paid anything just to be able to go to sleep.

I had already been sore from surfing, but now it felt as though someone had taken a baseball bat to my body. I paid and headed back up. I started to cry as I walked up the stairs. I got to my room, sat down on the bed with the stained sheets. I tried to turn on the fan, but found out there was no electricity and cried some more. Presently the landlady knocked. She said that yes, I had been overcharged, she was so sorry, and gave me correct change. She was obviously puzzled about why I was so upset, but I didn't have then energy to try and explain.

This is pretty much all I've seen of Nicaragua so far.

After she left, I fell facedown on the bed and passed out. All that afternoon and night I had strange, hallucinatory half-waking dreams. It's quite windy here and there was what sounded like a major wind storm going on outside. At first I thought I was at the bottom of the ocean and there were huge waves breaking above me. I eventually, and with some effort, figured out that I was in fact on land, and I was hearing wind, not waves. The roof is simply sheets of corrugated metal nailed onto wood frames, and the hospedaje is actually three or four smaller buildings lashed together with this roofing and a mishmash of homemade stairs and flooring into one(ish) larger structure. When the wind blows, everything shifts and creaks and groans, and the trees rub and thump. It sounded like large creatures roughhousing and tumbling about, trying to pry up the sheets of metal to find a way in.

I don't remember much of the next 24 hours, except lying in bed, sweating and moaning and drooling. My throat was (is) so painful I couldn't swallow. It had swollen up as though I had swallowed a bee's nest and is still now covered in spots of white goo (I know you wanted to know that). While I shook like a leaf from the chills all the first night, I found myself slumped under the trickle of cold water that passes for a shower at 3AM the next night, heat coming in waves off my skin.

I still feel pretty shitty, but I'm lucid now at least. My fever broke on the third day and the pharmacy gave me a grab bag of pills which I take by the handful: some ibuprofen, some antibiotics, some Guatemalan version of NyQuil. One thing to say about the Nicaraguan pharmacists: they aren't afraid to throw drugs at a problem! I got the feeling they would give just about anything I asked for.

I wonder if this illness would have felt so traumatic if I had gotten sick at home (wherever that may be) with a bowl of soup and a blanket and some Netflix. Probably not. But hey, everything is more exciting in a strange town in a strange country in a place with barely functioning running water and electricity! And damn, if I'm going to sick like that while traveling, it better goddamned well be malaria.

I'm staying about three blocks from the ocean. Maybe soon I'll actually get to see it.