January 2005 — The turistas, as travelers’ diarrhea is often called, is no fun.  I can’t count how many times I have had it over the years (even with following the guidelines of being very careful about water, raw food, and food prepared on the street or in market stalls), but in our previous two trips to Mexico I didn’t get it at all.  I do think that public health in Mexico is better now than in the past — for example, bottled water is widely available — but I don’t know if that was part of my good luck.

Anyway, several days ago I felt quesy and soon developed a mild case of diarrhea, with a delicate stomach, fatigue, headache… hard to tell if it was a flu or the turistas. I took it easy, ate more yogurt than usual, and yesterday morning I woke up thinking I was about over it.

Wrong. The diarrhea kicked into high gear. So I pulled out my trusty People’s Guide to Mexico and scanned through a long list of things that Carl Franz had tried. Best of all, he said, was Pepto-Bismol. So I got some at the pharmacy in a Soriana grocery store and tried it. And it worked great! I was way better by late afternoon and continue to be better today.  I also got a bottle of electrolite (that’s the Spanish spelling) there too, so it may have helped with my feeling better fast.

Naturally, if I had any clues that I might be dealing with something serious, I would have gone to a doctor — or asked for one to make a house call to our RV — seriously, they do that for less cost than you could imagine — but in this case it wasn’t needed.

I think that eating the extra yogurt may have been a mistake, as it turned out not to be live cultured, so it wasn’t helping my digestion any and the sugar in it was probably feeding the bad bugs. However, in Mexican grocery stores you can find yogurt that advertises it has live cultures. There’s also something called Yakult that is a kind of probiotic, I think — that is, it helps your digestive tract. I’ve seen it in Mexican grocery stores, the supermarket kind, near the yogurts.

Hope I didn’t gross anyone out too much with these details. But the turistas can be a very real part of traveling away from home, a matter of adjustment for your digestive tract to the bacteria it finds. Once Kelly got it when we returned to the US after several months in Mexico.

Enough of this.