I'm a keen traveller,
and spend all my spare money travelling round various odd bits of globe. Two years ago I was in Inner Mongolia in China, photographing steam railways and various bits of industry, when I took ill with a rather nasty Mongolian bug.

Obviously, my immune system, which was brought up on nice Western bugs, didn't have a clue what to do with this bug, and I got pretty ill. Added to this was the total lack of medicine available in Mongolia. You can have Chinese traditional medicine, but if you want anything that might actually make you feel better, your best bet is alcohol. After several days in a hotel room feeling sorry for myself it was eventually time to go home. Only one problem. This was the height of the SARS crisis, and I had a raging fever. At Beijing airport, there were heat scanners to detect anyone with a temperature, and lots of official people to 'take you away' if you had one. I must admit that I was really nervous at this point. China was really upset about it's international prestige being hurt by SARS, and I had visions of myself being conveniently disposed of somewhere. So to avoid becoming a statistic, I was forced to tailgate people through the scanners to avoid being picked up. Americans were the best because they cover a wider area and leave you more margin for error.

Fortunately, I got through safely, finally boarded the plane and made it home to nice Western medicine. And I'm flying out again in 4 weeks!
( Milkman Dan, Fri 3 Mar 2006, 12:47, Reply)