The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross Page B

century of French colonialism meant pâté, red wine, and onion soup were vernacular dishes. But put together, they all reminded me of my ongoing failure to penetrate Vietnamese culture.
    Which still might not have been so bad—had I not been constantly sick as well. My guts had begun to rebel a few days after I arrived in Vietnam, during a trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels, where Viet Cong guerrillas hid underground during the war. The journey took forty-five minutes on the back of a motorbike, and at first I mistook my intestinal rumblings for vibrations from the rough road out of town. But once I arrived and started to clamber awkwardly through the tunnels, like any other less-than-limber Westerner, I knew something was wrong. Only through sheer sphincteric fortitudedid I forge on: I saw the underground hospital and the underground mess hall, and I was properly amazed that human beings had spent so much time—years, in some cases—down here, going about the day-to-day processes of their lives in the bowels of the earth. They ate, slept, plotted strategy, survived shelling, set booby-traps, and even, as I remember it, watched movies underground, until one day the war was over and they emerged, flowing en masse into the sunlight. The release, I imagined, must have been wonderful. For the ride home to the Lucy, I took a taxi, not a moped.
    Returning to my home toilet was not enough, however. For days my guts cramped up, I belched unceasingly, and my diarrhea—well, let’s just say I had diarrhea. Finally, I’d had enough. Through the English-language newspapers, I located a Dutch doctor who diagnosed my troubles instantly: I had giardiasis.
    Now, before I’d left the States, I’d taken some health precautions: vaccinations for typhoid, Hep A, Japanese encephalitis. On a Virginia doctor’s advice, I’d even started taking Lariam, a malaria prophylactic also known as mefloquine. (Neither of us understood there were no malarial swamps in Saigon.) But none of those had protected me from the shrimp curry I’d eaten that first night in Saigon. Or the ph I’d been eating daily. Or the ground-pork omelette at the cute little Thai restaurant around the corner. Or the tap water I used to brush my teeth. Or the fat chunks of ice in my beer—ice that had been produced in sterile factory conditions, then zipped across town on the back of a motorbike, protected from the grit and dust only by a filthy damp piece of canvas. Or the fact that I used to bite my nails unthinkingly.
    Any and all of which could have installed in my gut the protozoan parasite known as Giardia lamblia . A single-celled creature that is one of the most primitive organisms on the planet, it lives in the intestinal tracts of both humans and animals, and passes from host to host through water contaminated with feces. Under a microscope, the flagellated anaerobe looks like a pair of buttocks with five legs anda cape. And its macro effects were precisely what I’d experienced, give or take a bit of vomiting.
    In my case, the only strange factor was that I’d gotten sick so quickly: According to the Centers for Disease Control, it takes one to two weeks for giardiasis symptoms to emerge. But I didn’t care what Atlanta had to say—if the Dutchman said he could cure my giardiasis, I was willing to believe him. He prescribed a five-day course of the antibiotic metronidazole. I bought the metronidazole. I took the metronidazole. And voilà! I was better.
    For a little while.
    Within days, the diarrhea was back. I took more drugs, it went away. Then it came back again. For at least the first half of the year I spent in Vietnam, I had the shits.
    This wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds. After all, there’s nothing travelers in Third World countries love more than discussing their bowels. The subject was an icebreaker at scuzzy cafés, and if you couldn’t top your tablemates’ tales of