A Poorly Day

Wednesday 31 January

When we woke up this morning, Colin was still feeling very poorly – in fact his symptoms had worsened overnight. He was now having bouts of feverishness alternating with the shivers, his head was pounding and he felt extremely nauseous. His limbs ached and he felt very tired. All very similar to the altitude sickness symptoms I had had a couple of weeks ago – and not the hangover I had expected.

The sun was shining and it was very warm as I went to sit round the pool and blog for a time, leaving Colin to rest some more. There were not many other people around the hotel, until mid morning when the “Kids Club” descended into the pool for some musical aerobics. Loud South American melodies blasted from the hi-fi system in the pool bar, and about fifteen little children between the ages of about 4 and 10 were all jumping about in the water for half an hour – this must be the very end of their “summer holidays” from school. Colin arrived poolside – and stretched out in the shade of an umbrella and continued to snooze. The fresh air of the ocean, with that ozoney smell, was better than in the room. “All rooms at this hotel have air conditioning”, according to the blurb we were sent before we left home – well there is a fan, so noisy that if you put the television on it is very hard to hear unless the volume is right up!

We stayed round the pool for the rest of the day – I ordered a sandwich from the bar for lunch and a huge smoked salmon and avocado bap arrived - Colin still couldn’t face anything to eat – and then spent the afternoon doing crosswords. From around 16.00 large flocks of gulls, cormorants and other sea birds flew across the beach, gathering on the inshore rocks, just metres from the patio where we were sitting. Then “strings” of ducks started to arrive, followed by large pelicans – about twenty in a line – as they came in from the ocean, very low over the waves pounding on the rocks on the incoming tide. The pelicans were quite ungainly in flight – seeming almost too large to stay above the sea. They must have flown in circles - back out over the ocean and round to the beach again, as they kept appearing every ten minutes or so. They didn’t settle on the rocks with the other birds. The sun here doesn’t rise before about 09.00, but equally doesn’t set till abut twelve hours later, so that it is still very warm well into the evening – probably why the restaurants don’t serve dinner before 20.00.

We wandered back to the room, and changed before making our way to dinner. Colin was feeling a little better and felt he had to eat something. The waiter, though, was very surprised when he ordered just “Northern Zone fish” – no vegetables or rice or cous cous or quinoa that they tried to tempt him with. This turned out to be a white fillet of fish, with very large flakes, and no bones. It had been simply poached, so that was fine for his sore tummy. I had lamb shank (known by another name here – garron - so I wasn’t actually aware that that was what I ordered). It was not the most tender shank I have tasted, but it was lamby and the sauce was delicious. I had changed the cous cous for potato and mushroom galette, and the potatoes were like our “new” varieties, soft and floury, and tasted a bit like Jerseys. For desert Colin risked a panacotta with raspberry sauce, while I chose a passion fruit cheese cake with a local fruit and mango coulis. The local fruit was called “guayaba” and was served as dried slices, a bit like fig in appearance, but very hard – not crunchy, just extremely tough to chew. The waiter, seeing me peering at the slices, brought a fresh guayaba – pale green skin, and “apple white” flesh inside with soft white pips (more like a firm kiwi fruit only different colours). He cut it up and when we tasted it, it had a refreshing flavour, not strong, with the texture of an apple – much better than the dried slices.

We finished the meal, and by that time, Colin was feeling exhausted again, so we returned to the room – he to go to bed and me to watch some television – I found an episode of “Prison Break” – far in advance of what I had seen at home – but easy to catch up on. We don’t fly from Arica until about 18.30 tomorrow, so Colin should have some more time to recover. I just hope he’s feeling better in the morning.