Viewing Humanity

 The yellow police caution tape told me a grave accident had happened near the corner of the muffler shop and the park where they sell street tacos. A policeman was guarding the area and writing, or pretending to write, in a little notebook. I'm not morbidly curious about vehicle accidents but I am heavily invested in avoiding them so I will stop and study an accident scene to try to learn how I can prevent my future problems. There were pieces of a motorcycle strewn about the area and the large remains of the chassis was near a cement light pole. The motorcycle was closer to a scooter because the large banana seat was dangling off the side of the frame. Then I saw a pool of dark red blood with flies hovering around it on a steel sewer manhole cover. Then I saw the chalk outline. The policeman paid no attention to me as I paused and examined the shape of the chalk line. The legs were facing the wrong direction of the flow of traffic and the head area was over the steel sewer manhol

An often overlooked dimension of the travel experience is profound sickness, be it food poisoning from Guatemalan goat meat, flu caught on a Shanghai barge, or dysentery caught in the open latrines of Ghana, nobody wants to write about such events and no one wants to read them and nobody wants to video themselves in such a condition. But it remains a travel staple, the ghastly delay between stomach spasms and that moment when MUST be on a toilet or have spare sheets nearby.