Sick on the Road

Pretty much, the next day, Kinsey came down sick with a low-grade fever and a cough. My rules for treating the sick are that you take care of yourself immediately in the hopes that things won’t get worse. So we hunkered down at Sim’s to wait it out.

For pretty much the next week, Kinsey quarantined herself in our hostel room. Her symptoms didn’t seem to get much worse, but neither did they abate. I came down with a more minor version a couple of days later, but was mobile enough to get food, drinks, and an endless supply of dvds. So holed up in Chengdu, we averaged three movies a day. For the first couple of days, I was in secret heaven, watching movies I hadn’t had a chance to see in the past year…and Sim’s had an excellent collection of the latest bootleg titles. I watched The Visitor; Synecdoche, New York; Last Chance Harvey; Die Hard 4 (surprisingly good with subtitles); The Bucket List; with a brief foray into movies with a Chinese theme: The Forbidden Kingdom and The Mummy 3; before we finally descended into previously watched, but entertaining fare like The Bourne series, Indiana Jones 4, and Harry Potter…although with some of the latter, we had to watch in Russian with English subtitles. Harry Potter was especially entertaining, as occasionally the dvd would lapse into English and then suddenly revert into Russian. Chinese Hermione had a very annoying voice. Most of the dvds were in English and in excellent condition. A few were darker or less sharp, but otherwise, most were as good as regular retail versions.

The days passed in a haze. I tried to get Kinsey to take a walk one day, but it was clearly too much, as she had to stop and rest several times and turned a curious pale shade. I went out a couple of times to find cough drops and snacks, snapping a few photos along the way.

I kept cancelling plans and extending our days at Sim’s, but I had already paid for train tickets to Xi’an for October 2, so I knew we had a date to travel by.
 By the last day of September, we both seemed reasonably well. We were still tired, and a little out of shape from lack of movement, but I was determined we needed to get out of the hostel and back into travel mode, so I went to the travel desk to inquire about the bus to Leshan.

The girl at the desk promptly suggested we hire a van instead of taking the bus.

“Someone just asked about a van,” she said. “If you take the van too, we just need two more people to make the van full. This will cost 100 yuan each, the same as the bus.”

It sounded tempting, just to have the van pick us up and drop us off…just the thing for two people recovering from the flu.


“Okay,” I said. “When will you know if there are enough people?”
 “Come back later,” she said.
 Later, when I went back, she told me there were enough people. We were set for a daytrip to see the Big Buddha.