Somebody call the Flying Doctors!
I left camp hand headed north riding into the station at Banka Banka just after 1pm. It’s a cattle station with camping facilities as well as probably the smallest bar in Australia. I was barely in the place half an hour when I suddenly got sick. I’m not sure if it was the heat, bad food/water or what but I can’t remember feeling so bad for those few hours.
In a bad way!
I took a ride in a truck (my first vehicular experience in weeks!) to see a waterhole near the station homestead. Just after we got back from the waterhole I started to feel a little ‘crook’ as the Aussies call it. I went to the loo just as a precaution and almost instantly I was spewing my guts up. Things got worse from there, it was not pretty, I wasn’t able to breathe due to constant retching and my vision went white, fainting, falling off the bog. I don’t think I’ve ever fainted before. I was sweating buckets too, it was dripping from me so fast it was like I was under a shower!
After a few hours of this things started to calm down, although I could barely move. I made it to the shower and sat there for a few minutes with cool water flowing over me. Vince was enjoing it I think, he had is camcorder recording my misery. I was so thirsty it was maddening but even a small sip of water wouldn’t stay down.
I had a similar food poisoning experience before and that took 5 days before I could keep anything down. Somebody suggested maybe calling the doctors. It would be cool to get a flight with the Flying Doctors for sure but I didn’t imagine doing it as a patient. As I probably wasn’t dying it might not have went down too well if they had called. That said, at the station there is an airstrip so they could have easily landed.