Being a bloody decent bloke I thought I could get through this quietly without disturbing Heide. But why is it that whenever you try to be quiet you inevitably end up making more noise than a jet aircraft readying for take off? My tip toe to the bathroom involved more collisions with backpacks, table legs and indeed the bathroom door that you´d expect to see in a spectacularly poor slap stick comedy sketch. Remarkably this didn´t wake Heide, who clad in eye shades and fully bunged up with industrial strength ear plugs could have slept through World War III. What I was convinced she wouldn´t get through was the horrifying gurgling that was coming from my belly. It sounded like I´d swallowed an ancient espresso machine that was trying to prove it's worth and that it still could knock up a cappuccino but was failing miserably. This alas, was but the beginning. Things got worse and were heating up at both ends.

The thought of getting on a plane was, to say the least, not very appealing. Not just for me, I was thinking of the well being of a
plane load of other passengers too. By now I was curled around the toilet and was almost wishing that I hadn´t eaten that burger that resembled steak tartare (but it tasted so good!) or had quaffed a few more beers and not so many mineral waters; knowing as I do that the exacting standards of Peruvian beer production would only allow the most crystal clear of aqua anywhere near their heavenly product. The only plus point was that my wonderful wife had selected a great hotel who had, with phenomenal foresight, seen the benefits of marble flooring. Ahh, the cooling nature of this stone was just delicious. Except when I was cold when I considered it perhaps the dumbest material in the world that should be used for sculpting images of David and exactly nothing else.

Then, just when I thought "I´m really in a bit of trouble here" I had a glorious vision. It was my own personal Florence Nightingale, doing a bloody good impression of Heide. With the kind of understated poignancy that really does enliven such situations, Heide said: "You don´t look too good!" I don´t think it was a sleight. It didn´t take long for her to asses the improbability of flying and it was at this point that the gloriously laid plans would have to be butchered and reformulated; though luckily not by me. As you know Heide is pretty bloody good at the planning sort of thing and so went into overdrive.

The small matter of altering the flight tickets, organising extra nights in the hotel, chatting with the pharmacist, finding a doc who might do house, well hotel, calls in a country where they don´t really do house calls and doing all this with just a smattering of tourist, high school, Spanish is impressive. Just not as impressive as the fact that she also had to complete the far, far more demanding task of unpeeling me from the toilet and draping me across the bed with my head in the bucket that she´d managed to blag from housekeeping.