Santa Marta/Diving course

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Phil, Sjoerd and Paul left for a six day hike to ciudad perdida, the ruins of a pre-colombian city in the National Park of Tayrona. Eva and I didn't have six days to spare, so we stayed in Santa Marta hoping to go for a couple of days trip to the beaches in Tayrona. Things didn't go quite as we had planned. Eva started getting worse. The weakness became pain all over her body and and very high fever. We went to the doctor´s repeated times, but they couldn't figure out what was going on, just said it must be virus infection.
Since it looked like we would be stuck in Santa Marta for at least a few days while Eva was recovering, I decided to take a four-day scuba diving course. The course was great, the dives were inside the state park close to some amazing beaches surrounded by green mountains. I stayed in a "cabana" (hut) for one night in the park, where I slept on a hammock. I could have stayed longer, but I was really concerned about Eva's ability to get out of bed to get food.
I left her in the hotel room in the morning and went diving, spent the night in the park, dove again the next day and when I got back she had barely moved, that´s how bad she was. Fortunately I had left enough food in the room to last for a day.
Santa Marta itself was not very interesting and after six nights there we were dying to leave (in my case that´s only figure of speech, in her case it seemed for real). We decided to take the direct bus to Caracas, 16 hours, in spite of her being sick. It was probably a bad idea, but things worked out for the best. I had to carry her stuff, so every step was strenuous for both of us. We dragged ourselves with all our luggage to the bus station and waited for the bus that was almost one hour late (no surprises). In the meanwhile Eva only got worse, to the point that we tried to return the tickets we had just taken, but weren´t able to. The 36 hours in the bus were hell for her and by the time we arrived in Caracas we had to run to a hospital. The doctor was really good, educated from the University of Minnesota (!), a specialist in infectious diseases. He said she probably had Hepatitis and ordered a million tests. The tests results came relatively quick and she indeed has hepatitis, probably E, which is very uncommon. Because it is uncommon they don´t have the specific test for hepatitis E in Venezuela. She must have got infected months ago in Mexico, the incubation period is up to 67 days. The bad news is that everyone in the boat, including myself I will probably have it too. The good news is that soon Hepatitis E will be very well known throughout the world. After Mexico she went to every country in Central America, then Colombia and Venezuela before heading to the Netherlands. In the boat she infected a Brazilian, two Americans, a Brit, two Dutch and a Colombian that works with lots of turists. Africa is already infected, so the only continent left is Asia.

Just kidding... The disease is not that bad, the contagious period lasts for about two weeks.

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