XXVI. Tibetan Chew, Part One

I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. I was hiking in the foothills of the Himalaya and I passed a stream. I knew I shouldn’t. I was usually very careful about this sort of thing, but it looked so cool and clear and clean and I was thirsty. This flowing stream that trickled off the glistening snowcaps of a holy and legendary mountain range, how could it possibly be unclean?

Two days later, I was curled up and moaning on the bathroom floor of my hotel in Dharamsala. My bowel movements had, shall we say, tremendous gusto, and I was vomiting at fairly frequent intervals. My belly felt bloated and I continuously belched sulfur. When I was strong enough to get up off the floor, and eventually out the door, I went searching for medical help. The first place I found was the Tibetan Medicine Clinic. I didn’t want to walk too much farther, and I felt it might be a good idea to try something holistic. After two years in Asia, I was rapidly becoming one of those travelers, the kind who embraced everything and anything Eastern and rejected harmful, left-brained, Western ways.

I had gone native once before, while wandering through China. My nose had become congested. It was really nothing at all, really, but when I passed the weathered, wooden doors of a Traditional Chinese Apothecary, I thought it would be an interesting opportunity. An old man welcomed me from behind a huge, ornately carved desk. He came straight from central casting. He wore an ankle-length black robe with a Mandarin collar and had a mole on his face sprouting two long and wiry hairs. He didn’t speak any English, but it didn’t matter. I merely pointed to my nose and tried to inhale. He came from behind the desk, examined my eyes and my tongue, and then took my pulse, TCM style – three long, bony fingers on my wrist. He wrote something in Chinese with a small calligraphy brush, then rummaged through the hundreds of tiny drawers behind the desk, muttering and humming to himself while I waited, hoping for something cool and exotic like Deer Antler fuzz or dried Tiger Penis.

He found what he was looking for. With a small flourish, he handed me a box of Contac cold capsules.

To be continued…