I'm alive and I'm out of hospital

I am craving something green. Brocolli. Cabbage. Cauliflower. Green. Green. Green. Feels like since forever since I had something to eat that felt totally healthy. I'm actually having fantasies about green veg at the moment. Sad, innit?!

So, I survived three days and two nights of being in the hospital in Bylakkuppai on the Tibetan settlement. Illegally. You need a permit to stay there but I guess I was being exempted. The settlement is huge. I think most tourists probably just see the spectacular Golden Temple but I got to see a whole lot more and the size astonished me. There's about 3,000 Tibetans living there and an extra 3,000 kids who board at a school on the settlement. The main income is from agriculture and the people are all so so lovely and chatty and told me all there stories and all about the settlement. I feel very privileged to have experienced this. In a weird kind of way, and despite my pee smelling fowl after three days of eating momo (kind of like gyoza or dumplings) and being injected with strong antibiotics.

I rested a lot. I read a lot. I talked a lot and I made friends with people around me and a lovely dog! And I rabbitted away in my diary like there was no tomorrow. Maybe I'll update some of the stuff onto here, sooner or later.

I'm taking this for what it is. It was another experience. It would be easy to get frustrated or annoyed that I 'lost' three days of my holiday nearly - but I'm not going to do that. Plus, the food I ate was cheap, the hotel - er hospital - charged me about one pound for the two nights and three days and about twelve quid total for a heap of drugs used while I was there and that I had to take away.

And it was my first hospital admittance EVER!

I got back to Madikeri - the bus didn't break down - and bless them, the hotel had been good to their word (we phoned them from the hospital) and hadn't charged me the two nights I wasn't there and had packaged up all my stuff as requested and stored it safely. The manager insisted I checked everything was okay and they gave me my room back - with a little discount. They made me pay a charge for having to break into the room (I had the key with me and they'd lost the spare) - but the charge was just 40 rupees (just over 50 pence).

I decided to take on board the hospitals advice to take it easy for another day or two and not walk too much and so am going to skip out of Karnataka - as much as I like it - and fly down to Kerala tomorrow, into Thiruvnanthapuram and then onto Varkala to chill for a couple of days and recover fully.

I've done some spice shopping and got very excited to find a homeopathic clinic to stock up on a few bits including arnica tablets to push on the recovery of this damn infection.

And that's me kind of up to date!

At some later date, I'll add more notes to all this India posts (in a different colour, of course!) so keep tuned.

xxx