A post on 💩

Friends, especially my vegetarian friends, we need to discuss poop.  If you are squeamish about poop, maybe just stop reading now.

Silk Road cuisine tends to be pretty vegetable-forward.  Lots of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, lots of grains, lots of fruits throughout the region.  But outside of the big cities, it’s hard to find a lot of these foods cooked.  It’s very easy to get a plate of beautiful vegetables and herbs to eat with gorgeous fresh-baked flatbreads pretty much everywhere you go.  But a soup or stew or plov (the region’s staple rice dish) without meat?  Nope.  

This is, generally speaking, fine with me.  I love me a giant plate of vegetables with bread.  The problem, my friends, is the water.  Because even if a traveler is super careful about drinking only bottled or purified water, you can’t control how your raw vegetables have been treated before they hit your table.

And oh my goodness did I get hit with something unfriendly and microscopic.  At first, beginning back in Turkmenistan, I just had pretty consistent, garden-variety traveler’s diarrhea, or TD as they call it in the poop-problem biz.  But then I arrived in rural Tajikistan.  As I was traveling in the mountains, I was kindly offered peaches and grapes, and before I ate them my gracious host was careful to wash them…in the river.  And when I followed the river along to its lake source, I passed a number of small villages, for which the river was obviously the sole plumbing.  Uh-oh, I thought, that’s not going to be good.

I will not trouble you with my body’s response in detail, but rather offer a single word: grenade.

Fortunately, I brought a couple of courses of antibiotics with me.  I wondered if I’d know when to bring the Z-pack into service.  Let me assure you that I knew. 

So the deal is this:  travelers from the US are gonna get sick here.  Vegetarian travelers may be in a more delicate position, especially when outside of cities, and especially when the kindness of people who do not have much to share presents a gift that cannot be declined.  It is no joke.  I nearly retreated to Europe to recover.  I had to withdraw from a long road trip through the Pamir range because I was just too ill, which sucks because I really wanted to be all up in those mountains.  But I console myself that there will be other mountains, even in my near future.