re: Worst Travel Experience

I only do whole place rentals on AirBnB. (Side note: I really like ABB descriptions that emphasis that guests should be quiet, that a given building is quiet & unsuitable for parties. Those are always listings I consider.)

My worst was a trip to Guatemala a few years ago. It started on the United flight, where I ordered a ginger ale....and 20 minutes after drinking it, I began to develop a migraine. So I ordered another one....unbeknownst to me at the time, Seagram's took out some of the sugar in its non-diet ginger ale & replaced it with sucralose, yet did not label said soda as "diet". I drank two on the plane, leading to a full scale migraine. By the time we landed, I could barely walk, had visual distortions, and was in abject misery. (You don't realize how brightly lighted airports are until you stagger through one with a light-sensitive headache.)

So my friends pick us up at the airport & all I can do is lie down in the back seat. I manage to sit upright at dinner in a quaint open air restaurant....then I have to go back to their apt and lie down in the dark. We get up the next day & I still have about 25% of the headache from the day before, so we cancel our van ride to Chichicastenango and go to Antigua instead....piloted by a driver in a van that can't get out of second gear. We stop on the side of the road on the outskirts of Guatemala City so he can poke around under the hood, he calls his boss. Boss tells him to finish the trip and go see cousin Hector after he gets us to Antigua. The weather was nice, I was feeling a bit better, and the driver told interesting stories, so I'm thinking things are looking up, despite the snail's pace through the countryside.

Arrive in Antigua, check into the very pretty Quintana de las Flores, go out to lunch, go sightseeing, have a nice afternoon/evening. Day two is also fun, until I start feeling terribly dizzy from the altitude & faint in the courtyard of a hipster coffee house. Later that same day, we walk across town for dinner. I start feeling nauseous during the walk, flee to the restroom immediately upon arrival, and then must schlep back across town on foot while trying not to barf every three blocks. My better half decides I need to ride in a tuk-tuk.....with shot suspension over cobblestones, adding motion sickness to my traveler's stomach.

I spent the next two days lying on a chaise by the pool, with side trips to the toilet, while my fellow travelers hiked the volcanoes, visited a coffee plantation, etc. I just tried not to die of dehydration and admired the pretty flowers growing on the hotel grounds.

And my friends couldn't understand why we wouldn't return to see the Santa Semana celebrations....no thanks. No more Guatemala for me. Granted, the migraine wasn't brought on by Guate, but the altitude and unclean water nearly did me in. So I've scratched trekking thru Nepal off my list.