Well, I suppose there is no "convenient place" for food poisoning but some places are worse than others.
Rood poisoning is a very real fear when traveling abroad. If you get it you are going to catch a bug that can put you out of commission and in need of being near a toilet at all times. It has only happened to me a few times but man oh man do I remember them well.
Normally when this happens people tend to blame it on poorly cooked meat but according to my nurse friend most "food poisoning" incidents actually come from improperly cleaned cutlery or plates, or because the person handling the food had dirty hands rather than the food itself being the culprit. I have no idea how she is aware of this or even if she is just making it up. I'll go ahead and believe her since she is a medical professional and I am not.
Anyway, there was one particular time that my food poisoning incident couldn't have possibly come at a worse time and while I don't know exactly what caused it, when it kicked in I was on a very long train ride.
Some friends and I had decided that we were going to travel from where we were in Northern Thailand at the time in a train ride all the way down to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in order to catch our flight to Nepal that was about a week in the future. We figured there was no reason to hurry and we could enjoy the scenery along the way.
If you looked at a map this is not a terribly long journey but since the city-to-city trains move at a very slow pace (for the most part) in that part of the world, it was going to be a multi-day trip. We loaded up our phones with credit and figured we would just get some work done since we all work online.
I do not know what it was specifically that I had that triggered my stomach to go into "survival mode" but to this day I can't stand the smell or taste of egg salad, so I am going to blame it on the egg-salad sandwich that I had in the train restaurant car.
Now these trains we were on weren't exactly The Orient Express so the dining options were kind of slim pickins. You could have sandwiches or noodle cups and that was about it. I don't know what compelled me to get egg salad but it, as far as I know, took me down a bad road of needing to be near a toilet for 2 days.
Now I don't know if you have ever been in a bathroom on a train in South East Asia, but it isn't exactly a luxury experience. The toilets don't have reservoirs but instead just whatever your body puts out simply falls onto the tracks below the train. I don't know how many times I went to that bathroom, but I am sure it is over a dozen. There is also very little in the way of water in these bathrooms, so washing my hands wasn't really an option.
I don't need to get into the gory details about my exact affliction, but there was liquid coming out of both ends of me, on one situation at the same time.
When I was back in my bunk - which was a top bunk and was a terrible choice for me since I am "longer" than the space on the top bunk, I had fever chills and was having difficulty keeping even water inside of me for very long. When we did finally arrive in Kuala Lumpur I was extremely weak and I am very happy that my pals were there with me because I needed a bed, some sort of accommodation - just any accommodation to get me through this.
We ended up in a cheap hostel in some dorm rooms with shared toilets... which I had to visit frequently and even though it was mid-day at that point, I tried to sleep as much as possible, which wasn't easy since most of the other tenants were being noisy and or moving on to their next destination.
Our flight to Nepal was the next day and I was feeling so terrible I was contemplating not going even though the ticket was already paid for. Thankfully, an unlikely savior is what took me out of my funk.
My friend regaled me with a story of how he had terrible food poisoning in India years ago and just on a whim, decided to drink a bunch of beers instead of the water that they recommend that you drink. I was willing to give anything a try at this point so I crawled out of bed and joined him in the lobby. About 4 bottles in, I was stunned to feel that my stomach was not resisting the liquid invasion. I didn't feel the need to throw up and a few hours later, I feel as though I was cured.
The fever subsided, and I no longer felt the need to be within quick running distance of a bathroom at all times. Could it be that beer is the actual cure for food poisoning? Someone needs to study this!
In all my years of traveling this was probably 3 of the worst days I have ever had doing so. In fact, it was probably the worst I have ever felt in my life other than some multi-day hangovers that I had from when I was in college and severely overdid it on the partying. It is a bit ironic to me that the thing that got me in trouble with my college hangovers is the same thing that cured me of my egg-salad food poisoning incident.