Cunard’s Queen Victoria
I am the only person in the history of the Twentynine Palms Glider Club who ever got sick in a glider. That was fifty years ago, so my credentials as a candygut go way back. I am therefore drugged as I write this, having just popped Dramamine. We are quartering southeast and the wind waves are exactly wrong; we are yawing back and forth enough that I took my breakfast not at the cafeteria on Deck 9 but in the Brittania restaurant on Deck 2. Much less unpleasant wagging down there.
This morning I and 1847 other guests surrendered our passports for examination by Brazilian officials prior to our going ashore Wednesday. It was an odd feeling; I am very protective of my passport, and now it is in other hands. I am signed up to go into the rainforest near Manaus.
Tonight Queen Victoria will turn off all the deck lights, the better to avoid attracting mosquitoes. She will turn them on again after we have cleared the Amazon and returned to the open sea. DEET, nasty though it is, will be slathered lavishly about in the interim.
At Sea
Yellow fever and Dengue fever are both mosquito-borne (each uses a different species of mosquito), so in preparation, I went to a local clinic for a yellow fever immunization. There is no yellow fever serum on the Olympic peninsula, so I crossed Puget Sound to seek it in Seattle. There, a kindly doctor successfully talked me out of getting the shot, giving me instead a signed statement that I am not a good candidate. Apparently the chance of contracting yellow fever is actually much smaller than the chance of causing an adverse reaction if one shoots live, though attenuated, virus into an eighty-year-old grandmother.
The other biggie is malaria. There is no immunization for malaria, but avoiding mosquitoes, or repelling them, helps, and quinine is a pretty good natural deterrent. I view it as an excuse to drink. Gin and tonic. Rum and tonic. Vodka and tonic. Tequila and tonic. The opportunities are endless.
A host of other unseemly diseases run rampant in the moist tropics, and I shall, as much possible, avoid them. Knowledge of them has improved exponentially and I received eight pages of cautionary material when I was being deterred from getting a shot.
Poor old Charles Darwin did not get eight pages of medical info, nor even one, not even the rudiments about vectors. His voyage aboard the Beagle ruined his health and eventually killed him as his modern medicine looked on, unable to help. My modern medicine still cannot help much, but it is so much better that I gladly take my chances now.
On to Brazil.