At this point in our trip, we had been traveling for a month and a half. We both had some serious homesickness. There were a few times that we actually considered cutting the trip short and returning home after Vietnam. We felt run down and in serious need of re-energization. In addition to the travel fatigue, I was taking a cheap anti-biotic we picked up in Hué for some stomach bug I had. It was making my face feel like a shriveled up prune. I stopped taking it, the second to last day in Saigon and immediately things started to improve. It was also at this point in the trip that I started to have real problems with the malarial medication we were taking. I was having regular violent dreams, depression and I assume the tiredness was partly from the meds as well. It started in Cambodia and intensified throughout Vietnam. We took Larium. My advice is to stay away from it, it’s the nastyness. There’s a new anti-malarial med out on the market (with few side-effects), but we balked at the $1000 price tag (for two people for 2 1/2 months), so we went with the cheap shizz and in Vietnam it really started to catch up with me. We spent the last three days in Saigon, taking it easy, eating lots of Pho and watching the Australian Open Tennis Championships on the tube at our guesthouse. We didn’t see nearly as much of Saigon as we wished, but it was a good thing, by the last day in Vietnam we were both feeling a million times better. The downtime really helped get my head straight as we headed to India…
