Day Four

The plan is to leave at 0600 in 4 wheel drive trucks, and head off to a game reserve, to see the tigers.
Sod off! We're not getting up before 5 am on the off chance of seeing a tigers arse disappear into the undergrowth. Sarah wants to sleep in, take advantage of the stationary train.

So we wake at 0730, as a train passing our window decides that an air horn outside our closed blind would be hilarious. We have breakfast alone, and are just finishing when the intrepid hunters return. Not a tiger to be seen, and lots of sore muscles from the potholes on the way.

We made the best choice. I don't carry a telephoto camera, so no chance of that classic tiger rectum at 200 paces. The few photos I take with either my phone or iPad, are more for a sense of where we are, rather than some kind of photo exposition to bore the family witless once we get home. Also, Sarah is allergic to cameras, so the odd shot that shows her in the background have slipped through the censor.

I would have also been miserable on that kind of a drive. I am one of those fortunate few, who only needs to get into the back seat of an old car, and I start dry reaching. The smell of that cracked leather, the old car smell. Oh, the memories!!!

Rather than be doped up to the eyeballs with something that Sarah says makes me dopey, I have found some chews from Australia that seem to work. They must have some sort of medicinal content, but the main ingredient is ginger. Some people can't stand the taste of ginger. I don't like it in cooking, but give me a bag of crystalized ginger, and it will be gone in minutes. I don't care how hot it is. The ginger taste doesn't last long, so I pop one of these chews every 10-15 minutes, and I'm good.

Which leads me to a wee experiment I have been performing on myself. I actually think that the biggest trigger to motion sickness, other than the obvious, is taste. Start feeling crappy, and the taste in your mouth is the first to go. So that's my cunning plan. Change the taste in your mouth, and change how you feel. Tail. Dog. Wagging.

My first test was a couple of weeks ago in Sydney. Sarah wanted to visit a factory outlet store, and the only way is by bus. No train. No ferry. Bus. Yuck.

I had left my ginger chews at the hotel, so had to find a solution. Fast.
There was a 7-eleven next to the bus stop down at Circular Quay where we were leaving from, so I went looking for ginger chews. No. Crystalized ginger? Nope. What to do. What to do. Sarah won't be best pleased if I got off the bus looking a fashionable shade of green. She already thinks this is psychosemantics.

Mints. A whole rack of mints. Eureka! I get the strongest mints I can find, and I'm good to go.
As soon as I take my seat on the bus, I pop the first mint. Holy crap! That's a 6.4 on the sphincter scale!

But it works. When the taste in my mouth subsides, pop another one. Did the trip without any adverse effects. I just have no feeling in my tongue.

So the combination of ginger chews (Sarah bought a shitload at a pharmacy at Sydney airport) and off the scale mints (any supermarket) seems to be doing the trick.