Jen and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Very Shitty Vacation

Each year, my company hires a fortune teller to recommend the luckiest days to close the office for Chinese New Year. We don’t know those dates until a week prior, making it difficult to plan vacation.

I took a chance and booked a five-day trip to Bohol based on a recommendation from my husband’s co-worker – and none of those days were ones the con artist ensured would prevent us from getting sued again. Bastard.

Because we were booking at the last minute, flights on the airline we usually take to and within the Philippines, Philippine Airlines, were sold out or overpriced. We ended up on Cebu Pacific, which is like the real-life version  of “Soul Plane.”

The flight from Hong Kong to Manila was due to leave at 1:40 a.m. but didn’t depart until after 3 a.m., and the song they played as we boarded was Cee Lo’s “Fuck You.” Snoop Dog may or may not have been flying the plane.

Cebu Pacific flies new Airbuses, but there are no TVs and the in-flight entertainment is limited to a brief trivia game about the company. Hint to future passengers: The answer to “What is Cebu Pacific’s website?” is not “Service unavailable.”

We landed in Manila around 5 a.m. and then spent 4 hours in the airport. A lot of people complain about the quality of Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport, but they’ve clearly never had to spend 9 hours in Doha airport—the crossroads of the world, where mullahs meet mullets and the A&W doesn’t even sell root beer.

The flight to Bohol was unsurprisingly late, but luckily, our ride from the airport wasn’t. That’s about the best thing I can say about the resort: their driver is waiting for you when you arrive, so you don’t have to risk your life by taking a trike.

Yeah, I know, taking trikes makes for an “authentic” experience, but you know why they all have messages painted on the back about God protecting them? Because even the drivers know they’re unsafe and wouldn’t be in one if they had alternatives.

I’ve gone back and forth about whether to name the resort, but because the owner is a lawyer and because this is the kind of review that can cause a place to lose potential customers, I’m just going to refer to it as A Casa de Merda. If you plan on going to Bohol, consider avoiding a hotel named after the Portuguese word for a certain pastel color and that is very well regarded on TripAdvisor.

My first impression of the resort: “There sure are a lot of cocks out.” The animals, not skeevy Russians in speedos. My final impression: “This resort is great if you like food poisoning.”

I have fairly low expectations of hotels. Bed with sheets not caked in blood? No dead hookers shoved in the closet? Bathroom with functioning shower and mold kept to a minimum? Door that locks? We're good.

That's because hotels generally act as a home base, a place to simply lay your head until the next day’s activities. An isolated resort like A Casa de Merda becomes your home, and so amenities and service are more important to the overall experience.

So when a resort does something like charge a fortune for a tour that includes a stop at the official tarsier sanctuary but you’re instead taken to a depressing roadside attraction with a chained monkey eating potato chips and a python with its mouth taped shut – well, it’s somewhat unforgiveable.

And thanks to this trip, I’ve added a new requirement for hotels: Don't try to kill me. I’ll even reconsider my stance on dead hookers if you promise to cook your chicken properly and not give me salmonella poisoning.

I’m not angry with the staff at A Casa de Merda. The reason why it’s cheap to vacation in places like the Philippines is because life is cheap there too. You get what you pay for when you decide to head to a place like that: contaminated food, bus hijackings, ferry sinkings and terrorists kidnapping foreigners. Don’t try to take advantage of impoverished people in a country with minimal infrastructure if you’re not willing to accept the consequences. And there were consequences.

I hadn’t puked that much since my wedding night or shit that much since a bacterial infection in 1983 ruined my entire collection of Underoos. As I writhed in pain on the bed and my fever rose to 39.5 C/103 F, a group of joy-filled Filipinas sang gospel songs under my balcony. I wanted to die. Take me, Jesus. Yes, take me into your arms.

By the third day of the illness, I felt well enough to leave A Casa de Merda to go to a pharmacy and get something to help ease the symptoms.

Having lived abroad and traveled extensively for close to five years, I’ve become an expert in pantomiming, but I’m grateful they speak English in the Philippines because I was stymied as to what gestures to use for “seemingly endless stream of diarrhea.” Buying a can of Boss Coffee and pouring it out at ass level while making pained groans?

And, you know, what’s great about Philippine pharmacies is that I can pop in for anti-diarrheal medicine and pick up umbilical cord clamps while there. Total one-stop shopping!

The pharmacist gave me some pills that would, I hoped, stop the symptoms long enough that I could make the flights back home to Hong Kong.

Non-American friends asked why I didn’t see a doctor sooner. Even a rural hospital with only basic tools to assist me would have been better than going it alone and hoping for the best, they argued.

Look, I’m American and Americans don’t see doctors unless we’re concerned death may be imminent and we’re confident our health insurance, if we have it, will cover treatment (see handy flowchart I created to the right). No matter how inexpensive and accessible health care is in the rest of the world, I will forever carry the insidious American mentality of “Suck it up” with me.

But after arriving back in Hong Kong, stopping the medication and realizing I was still a lean, mean shittin’ machine, I decided to go to the private hospital near my apartment.

Public hospitals in Hong Kong are superior to private hospitals, and if you’re a Hong Kong resident, the cost for treatment is as little as HK$100/US$12. But when you can barely make it from the living room to the bathroom in a 650-square-foot apartment without the risk of shitting your pants—and you have health insurance—fuck it, which hospital is closest? So what if private doctors here are the Keystone Kops of medicine?

The doctor quickly determined I was severely dehydrated and admitted me for treatment and further tests.

When the first test results came back, the doctor informed me that on top of the food poisoning, I also had a bladder infection caused by the bacteria hitching a ride.

Kirk Cameron and his evangelical ilk will argue that the banana, a fruit allegedly made to fit perfectly in the human hand, is proof that God exists. Well, I argue that two holes so close together is proof that there is no God or that the GOP is right and God hates women.

I spent three days in the hospital. Three days with an IV drip. Three days of eating plain congee. Three days of watching god-awful K-pop videos and CNN. And then it was time to pay the bill.

The cost for treatment is jacked up during holidays and weekends, and my visit fell during both. How much treatment costs depends on the type of room you choose: general ward, semi-private or private. The level of care isn’t different. They just know if you choose something posher than the general ward, you’re either wealthy or have health insurance and they can milk you for all they can.

Still, the cost of three days’ worth of hospitalization, tests, IV fluids/antibiotics and take-home medicine was inexpensive by US standards: HK$14k/US$1800. Consider my husband’s four-day hospitalization for a seizure in the US cost US$50k, and my visit seems like a bargain.

I went home with six different prescriptions because doctors in Hong Kong dole out medicine like nose candy.

Filling prescriptions here feels shadier than a drug deal behind a Staten Island White Castle. Every appointment ends with 5-10 baggies or envelopes of pills with no inserts or warnings, and if you don’t check Google to see how many of the drugs you were given are contraindicated, you will probably die. This time, the doctor gave me two medicines that shouldn’t be taken together and that can cause kidney dysfunction, seizures or increased risk of severe muscle damage if you do.

My husband tried to be supportive when I got home, but as he grew up in an Italian-American household in New York City, he has a bad case of Italian Prince Syndrome, which leaves sufferers with a heightened sense of entitlement and lowered ability to empathize with others. So, his contribution to my recovery was limited to eating pizza in front of me while asking, “How ya doin’, Poopiepants?”

It’s two weeks later, I’m just about finished my course of Cipro and Poopiepants can say, “I’m almost better but I am never fucking eating chicken again.”

And for my next trip, I inadvertently booked a stay in Bangkok during the Thai water festival of Songkran in April, so keep an eye out for my exciting blog post about coping with cholera.