Years ago a dear friend asked "How much sicker do you have to feel to be dead?" It was a good question. Sadly, Dot did die and I often think about her tragic comment. A simple question that asked one hell of a lot.

That morning I really did feel like death. I'd been up all night with one of the worst acute gastric attacks I have ever endured. And it was the first time I can remember that I was totally unable to get out of bed other than to race to our toilet. My head pounding, I was dizzy, nauseous and just ill. Unlike Dot however, of course I recovered. I was feeling very sorry for myself but I did think about her a lot at the time.

Being sick in a remote place is a traveller's nightmare. I was very lucky however to be at Pevek in our nice comfortable hotel, and thank god with our own private room and bathroom. And fortunately, as we had six days in Pevek we could be flexible with our local tour plans. Oh, and I might add we had taken with us what I considered to be a truck load of Lomotil, the anti-diarrhoea medication no traveller can be without.....

On the other hand and like many remote settlements we have visited, sewerage facilities in Pevek leave a fair bit to be desired. A big sign on our toilet said "Do not flush toilet paper. Please place in the basket provided". You can use your imagination as to how difficult a situation it was having a severe stomach problem. And of course it was the weekend when the hotel rooms are not cleaned, nor garbage bins emptied... And even if you accidentally flushed the paper, the toilet would not empty.  Instead, it just stayed irritatingly shredded and circulating with everything else in the bowl. I may add, that you only accidentally flush toilet paper once... Retrieving it is an unmentionably shocking task.... You get the gist.....

And so, that was my morning, day and evening on the 8th September 2018; being totally bed bound. Alex and Alan went on a couple of walks, coming back intermittently to check on me and try to coax me out for a stroll. But it was impossible.

Late in the afternoon, Alex and Alan returned to tell me about an incredible story they had just heard about an American guy who had taken off in a tiny boat from the shores of Alaska with the intention of reaching the China coastline. He had in fact somehow crossed the Bering Sea but instead of heading south, had been blown off course, landing at a cape near Lavrentiya in Chukotka. Frozen and exhausted he was taken in by a local Chukchi family and cared for. They were however bound by law to report him to the Border Guards. He was then flown to Anadyr where in lieu of jail, he was allowed to remain in hospital.

Incredulous about such a bizarre attempt, Alan explained that Alex may be required to travel back to Anadyr to assist the authorities with translation for this guy. My head spun. I was having trouble coherently taking in any information at the time. But the thought of Alex suddenly having to leave us for official duties in Anadyr while we were in remote Pevek seemed like well, just another challenge.... It is the sort of things that seems to happen to us. Quite often.

In August 2018, 45 year old homeless activist John Martin III set out alone in his 2.5 meter sail boat with nothing more than a bucket of salmon pieces, a jug of grape juice and water, some hard tack and a compass. According to authorities the boat was barely able to sail on a lake let alone out at sea. Martin had a rough plan to sail down the Yukon River in Alaska, then out to sea until he reached the sliver of Chinese territory sandwiched between Russia and North Korea. There he planned to beach himself and ask to be let into China to be re-united with his wife and small child who he had not seen for more than a decade. 

"I had hoped I may be able to appeal to them to let me stay. I think sometimes a desperate act can open a door" quotes journalist Michelle Theriault Boots in her article in the Anchorage Daily, November 2018."

While the naive Martin had obviously not met the fearsome Chinese officials we had encountered during our travels, he was in fact extraordinarily lucky. He did manage to make the distance of some several hundred nautical miles before being blown off course in the exact opposite direction to that which he had planned, heading north-west to Russia where the officials were surprisingly lenient with him.

Although Martin was not carrying many belongings with him on the boat, he was indeed carrying a large amount of personal baggage. In fact, he had quite a history.

In 1995, he was charged with having sex with a 15 year old child he and his then-wife had fostered. Just twenty three at the time, he was jailed for eight years. 

In 2011, he made headlines for his months long protest at Anchorage City Hall over the city's policy of removing personal belongings from homeless camps. 

In 2015, Martin was also tried twice for manslaughter over the death of a girlfriend in a rollover car crash in which he had been driving under the influence of alcohol.

Later Martin met a woman on a Chinese chatline and travelled to Guangdong Province to meet her. They married and had a son. 

The story gets even more bizarre. While in China, the US revoked Martin's passport because he was behind on child support payments for the children he had with his first wife. He later claimed that because he was a sex offender, the US would not allow him to bring his new Chinese wife to America. 

And so Martin returned to the US alone. Later he took up religion.

On entering Russia, Martin was charged (not surprisingly) with entering a country without travel documents. He stayed in hospital in Anadyr under the watch of Russian Border Guards - quite bizarrely for the next three and a half months. 

Charges against Martin were dropped and although he was issued with a deportation notice, he was allowed to remain as a free man in Anadyr until he could pay his fare back to the US. But Martin was broke. 

Arctic Anadyr is of course no place to be homeless. A family of a man he met in a restaurant took him in and apparently looked after him until he finally raised enough money to return home to the US. How he did that is not at all clear.

A con man? Or a lucky man? Obviously a lot of both. Anyway, it was a good story which did distract me from my own misery.... 

I didn't leave my bed that day. And as Alan solemnly reminded me, I'd left a nasty hole in our Lomotil medication supplies.

In desperation later that night, Dr Alan asked me if I would like to take some vodka with salt. I had forgotten this age old Russian remedy that we had learnt from our driver Slava on a tour some years back in Kyrgyzstan - and that worked miracles for me.

You really need to watch someone make this concoction. The amount of salt defies imagination. Luckily we had a bag of salt we had saved from some obscure reason from Yanrakynnot and of course we always had vodka. Alan made me a super saturated solution of salt and vodka and in a mega human effort I somehow managed to swallow most of it. I am not sure how or why, or even if it works, but I guess it could because of the severe dehydrating effects. It was not a miracle cure, but by 11:00 pm I felt heaps better. I even managed half a slice of stale bread. 

Most probably I would have got over my acute gastric attack within 24 hours anyway.... Who knows? It is however a trick well worth considering, especially if nothing else works.