When food turns bad while you're travelling

Magnified botulism bacteria that causes serious food poisoning in humans.

You don't have to travel to get food poisoning, but I think it helps. 

After a great night out celebrating International Women's Day I go home feeling empowered and inspired to work harder for equality. But, two hours later I am crippled, that feeling of empowerment escaping me. Literally.

I am weak, pathetic and writhing in pain. It's like a little hammer is in my stomach smashing its way out. From the upper left, down to the lower right. The middle of my stomach feels more like a sledgehammer knocking on my organs.

Food poisoning can lead travellers into some awkward situations.

Up and down to the bathroom, multiple times. I text a colleague who I went to the event with;"I'm dying, think it's food poisoning" .He's also struggling and blames it on a local hibiscus tea we had, called sobolo. Sweet and spicy, and a pretty, dark pink colour. I'm burning up and even water won't stay down, I curse that innocent looking drink.

This is the worst I've ever had food poisoning despite traveling all over the world and to a number of developing countries. Last time I was in West Africa, I lived off street food and was fine.After 24 hours the thudding and thumping stops and I regain control of myself. I vow to take better care when eating out.

I also check with other expats here on how they get on. Sit around with expats in a developing country, bring up the topic of food poisoning and you can guarantee everyone will have a story, and any sense of decency in talking about such personal things will go down the toilet.

One Kiwi here tells me a juice at one of the expensive restaurants in Accra left her with everything escaping "out both ends and my nose all at the same time." Another one calls these kind of incidents WAWA – West African Wins Again.

I feel like I am truly in the pack now, with my own terrible food poisoning experience, though lucky I was at home through it, unlike my favourite food poisoning story I collected from a Kiwi friend who visited India.

She'd been suffering 'Delhi Belly' and thought she was fine. "One moment I was walking down the Varanasian road, the next moment I hear a sound like a bass drop in a dubstep track, a real banger, and realise that it's my stomach – dropping out of my body," she tells me.

"Sweating and panicked, I started searching for a building that might house a toilet. I figure that my best bet is a cafe/yoga studio aimed at Western tourists. Running in, sure I was about to start trailing a line behind me, I throw 100 rupee at a man behind a counter for 'um, a bottle of soda water! Do you have a toilet?'

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He points upstairs. I take these two at a time and come upon a scene of serenity: 30 or so yogis reclining in corpse pose, meditating after a long yoga session. Not for long."

My friend sees a toilet on the opposite side of the room and runs, "jumping over previously blissed-out tourists, to find a squatter toilet, barely hidden behind saloon-type doors. "

"They are the swinging kind of doors that start about a foot off the ground, little more than a physical marker of where the toilet area begins and the yoga studio ends. Definitely not anything that anyone would consider noise-blocking or modesty-protecting."

She doesn't care: "I think my insides might have turned into some kind of boiling soup, the temperature is definitely rising and my outsides are all clammy and sweaty. Before the saloon door can click shut behind me, my pants are off and I'm squatting over that toilet like an Olympic weightlifter, ready to, as they say, leave everything out on the floor."

And, I'll leave you with this, which a friend messaged me while I was in a conference the other day. I had to do everything in my power not to burst out laughing.

My friend's friend was in Ethiopia, had just hiked up a mountain, and was staying in a camp with no electricity that was quite close to the edge of a cliff.

"So she wakes up in the middle of the night and can't see anything and is wandering around in the dark for a while trying to find the toilet and not fall off the cliff. But she can't hold on any more and as she pulls her pants down to poop wherever she is, this big male bleeding heart monkey is suddenly behind her screeching at her and baring his teeth.

"And she just craps all over him and he runs off covered in poop." 

 - Stuff

Source: When food turns bad while you're travelling