Bali Blues

We have been terribly sick for the past week since our return from Pemuteran.  Miserable!  Racking coughs, feverish, weak, and completely unable to do anything.  Stuck in our room for days.  Now we had this romantic ideal of the “old” Bali style rooms.  Lots of gardens, fountains, high pitched ceilings, outdoor sitting rooms and outdoor bathrooms.  More of a natural connection with our surroundings.  Well, all that is totally unsuitable when you are as sick as we are.  It’s painful to have to go from your air conditioned room to your extremely hot bathroom outside a zillion times.  It is totally a bummer when you have a noisy freezing AC unit that doesn’t respond to the controller because it’s old and antiquated.  Somehow romantic becomes funky when the WiFi won’t work, and the bed is hard and the pillows dense and huge.  After five nights, in three different rooms mind you, we finally woke up yesterday and looked at each other with puffy sleepless eyes and said “We can’t take this any longer”.  We got up, got a taxi, went to town, and found a nice new modern hotel.  Clean bright rooms with beautiful indoor bathrooms.  Bargained alittle for a slightly reduced price, but really we were willing to pay almost anything.  Rode back, got our bags, paid our bill, and returned to our new digs.  That took every ounce of strength we had.  Took a really long shower, put on our fluffy white terry cloth robes, got into bed and didn’t come out of our room until this morning.  Started taking Z- Pak yesterday as well.  Tried herbal remedies, cough meds... nothing helped.  We were getting sicker and sicker.  So now we have surrendered to modern medicine, and hopefully will be strong enough and well enough to catch our flight on Tuesday.  Not how I imagined spending my last week in Bali.