Truck driving. Physical therapy. Project management. Home inspection. Software analyst.

And eventually, nursing. Perhaps the most important contributor to making the commitment was the support of Anastasia. She’d finally heard something that she really believed I would (and could) do.

So, here we go. I found out today that I got into Shoreline’s RN program. Starts in six weeks. Time for another adventure.

In the event of an unexpected landing, please move quickly to an emergency exit, keeping in mind that the nearest exit may be behind you.

This was the physiologic announcement broadcast by my brain to my gastrointestinal tract sometime between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. Monday night. Apparently my body had enough of the ride and just wanted to get off. But more on that later.

We awoke warm and cozy at Agaw Berat, prepared but perhaps not excited for our 36 km hike all the way back to Lalibela. Zinabie expected it would take us about 8 hours and, after another delicious breakfast of eggs and bread with hot tea, we began our trip back across Abune Josef’s flanks. We were accompanied for a short time by one of the camp guards with his old M1 Garand rifle, but he split off shortly after we rejoined the trail from the day before. Given the distance we had to cover, I thought he might come along just to keep us moving toward the end of the day.

As with our first time along these trails, we moved quickly once we were past the steepest terrain. We could see our camp from the first night and our feet pounded out the miles for the second time, up the ridges and across the plateaus. We traded out Fuzzy II at our lunch spot, where a good friend of Zinabie’s (and the most outgoing and talkative of our local guides) shouldered AP’s bigger backpack. He was staying overnight in Lalibela and had no place to leave his donkeys, so he was doing their work himself.

Most of the walk back to the first camp was sprinkled with Zed’s stories about his friend. The first time he’d been to the big market in Addis, where his sister made him dress in city clothes and leave his stick behind and, when he got separated from her he was accosted by a couple of thieves. The first time he’d used a public toilet and, when someone knocked on the door to see if it was occupied, he went completely silent because he was afraid the thieves had followed him to the bathroom. To this day he contends that, had he been allowed by his sister to keep his stick, he would have come out of both encounters much better.

Watching Zed and his “best guy” (whose name I’m afraid I didn’t get) playfully chat and wrestle on the walk out was a great way to pass the time, but by the time we stopped for lunch our feet had gone numb. From Ad Medhane Alem we saw Lalibela again in the distance, 3000 feet below and 8 miles away, with 16 miles behind us already. AP and I both felt okay, but it was noon and the last third of the trip was going to be a long grind, without a doubt. We retraced our steps along the donkey highway.

The rest of the march back was reminiscent of many long hikes back to the trailhead in the Cascades, if the trailheads were all at 8,000 feet and the Washington sun was twice as strong. We moved fast with few breaks, but the last miles seemed to stretch out like hot, dry taffy. Eventually we made it to the heavily beaten paths close to Lalibela, then the top of the city’s broad slope, then the cobbled streets that led to Tukul Village for the night.

We bid Zinabie and his friend goodbye (they refused a tip – “it’s my job”), and checked into our room, where Anastasia slumped into a chair, dirty, sunburnt and at the edge of breaking down. The extent of her sunburn and dirtiness was clear when she got ready to shower – shoulders and hands were cooked, as were her ears. Despite wearing pants, the Ethiopian dust coated her in brown from the knees down. I’d faired a bit better since I was wearing a long sleeve shirt, but my neck had been toasted a bit, as had my scalp, since the hat I brought was a bit too small to be comfortable. We showered and rested, then enjoyed dinner and beer (and lots of water) before tucking in for the night.

But now we’re back to that emergency broadcast from my brain. While Anastasia had lost the sunscreen battle, it turns out I had lost the heat stroke war. My body decided it did not have enough water to process any of the food that it had on board, so all of it had to go. By three a.m I was an empty vessel and slept fitfully until six, battling back nausea the entire time. Anastasia slept perhaps a touch better, but her sunburn (and my emergency landings) kept her awake, so when the light came into the sky we were both still pretty exhausted. We caught our shuttle to the airport, both hoping that I’d be able to keep it together enough to avoid puking on our fellow passengers.

The long journey home began with the flight to Addis, then 13 hours at Bole International. I was cautiously rehydrating the entire day, nibbling on five Gu Chomps from an old package in hopes of restoring some electrolyte balance along with the precious water. Anastasia was fighting nausea as well and we were both incredibly sore from our 50 mile high altitude trekking boot camp – walking from the domestic terminal to the international (about 500 feet) was rough and just leaving our chairs for a trip to the bathroom set us both shivering with the chills.

It wasn’t until we finally boarded the flight to Amsterdam and I was able to sleep for an hour that I started to feel better. I woke and took a hot sandwich from the flight attendant, my stomach finally ready to do its job. Anastasia, from what I gather, was blissfully asleep in business class for the entire trip, recovering from our trip in her own way.

So now we’re homeward bound on KLM 6033 to Seattle. It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been gone for less than a week, but we packed so much in that I guess that feeling shouldn’t be a surprise. Despite paying the price for overextending ourselves a bit, it was an incredible trip and a real treat to get to join Anastasia for one of these trips, to get a small taste of the kind of experiences she has in her travels. And, really, I wouldn’t change much about it. After all, it’s always got to be an adventure. Some kind of adventure.

Abune Josef is the third highest peak in Ethiopia. A broad, sloping bench more than 2 miles across rises up to become the 4295 meter summit from the south, while the north face is a sheer granite cliff. This massive chunk of rock sits in the high afro-alpine 36 kilometers from Lalibela, above Agaw Berat, our second day’s destination.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention and doing the math, you’ll deduce that, if Josef is 36 kilometers from Lalibela and our first camp at Ad Medhane Alem was 13 kilometers from Lalibela, our second day of travel is 23 kilometers, or roughly 15 miles. In fact, Agaw Berat is 23 kilometers away and climbing Josef adds another three, for an even 26 kilometer, 17 mile day. Starting at 11,000 feet and climbing to just over 14,000. Have I mentioned that Anastasia picked this trek?

We woke at 6:30 and crawled out from under the four heavy woolen blankets that kept us toasty warm all night. The sun was just beginning to rise and the air was still and cool – a perfect day for a long walk. Breakfast was eggs and bread with honey, served with more hot sweet tea, all prepared by the wonderful community members that run the camp. We ate our fill and started walking at 8, with our fuzzy-headed donkey leading the way. Abune Josef was prominent on the horizon from the start, but it seemed improbably far away – so far off that it was hazy and washed out. Knowing we had a long day ahead, we quickly rejoined the donkey highway and started walking.

What surprised me was how quickly you can cover ground here. For the most part, these trails have seen so much traffic that they truly are a highway – they’re fairly flat, firm-packed and wide. They have plenty of bumps and ruts and rocks, but overall it’s easy to swing one foot forward after the other and move very fast. Four hours after leaving the camp we crossed our last drainage and began climbing onto the flanks of Josef, having put 20 of our 26 kilometers behind us.

We did our best to take in the sights on the way. There were still dozens of people and their donkeys, moving supplies along the route from village to village. We passed a small health center and two community schools, boxy and out of place compared to the round stick-stone-and-straw tukuls. The road rolled along the plateaus, at times a hundred yards wide with dozens of little paths, at times steep and rocky as it rounded ridges to drop down into a new expanse of farmland. Shortly before we came to the flanks of Josef we had a picnic lunch in a fallow straw field and traded out our fuzzy-headed donkey (and his accompanying guides) for a new fuzzy-headed donkey and local guides for the next leg.

Twenty kilometers down, we climbed the steep-sided ravine that separates Josef from the neighboring plateau. The first 500 feet was akin to a poorly calibrated stairmaster on top of Mt. Adams and AP and I both slipped into low-gear “grind” mode. We were mostly alone with our guides now, though the donkey train still rolled through from time to time. At the three km mark we watched “Fuzzy II” and one of the guides contour off toward camp, while we managed to find an even lower gear and put one foot ahead of the other until we stood on the summit’s dulled blade of Ethiopian granite with Zinabie and our other guide. We shared out sour gummy bears, which I’m pretty sure Zeb is now addicted to.

Agaw Berat lay 1500 feet and three km below, nestled in a broad saddle below the east shoulder of Josef. Still under construction, we were probably only the 2nd or 3rd group to visit, but the campsite staff had their routine down and greeted us with hot tea and bread when we arrived. After we settled in we took advantage of our early arrival to nap, write and read in the sun.

When the sun disappeared we were reminded that this campsite was at close to 13,000 – the warmth turned off like it was on a switch and we bundled up as best we could, sitting in our tukul. It became apparent that part of “under construction” meant “no window shutters”. The icy breeze swirled around us even inside.

I was ready to go straight to bed without dinner, but we soon found ourselves squeezed into the cooking area in the kitchen tukul with the entire group, camp guards and all, as our hosts cooked us spaghetti. It was our young chef’s first foray into Italian food and, though the noodles were perhaps overcooked, the sautéed onions, tomato sauce and spinach-potato-cabbage mix more than made up for it. We ate well, but the highlight of the evening was watching that same young chef eat spaghetti for the first time, to the delighted giggling and laughter of all of us, packed around the fire sitting on our water jugs.

AP and I retired by nine and slid under our four-blanket pile together, on a tiny twin mattress. I’d fashioned a window pane out of a tarp to block the worst of the wind, but it was still cold enough inside that, to my great delight, I got actual physical contact from my wife, which is something I never thought I’d say about a trip to Africa. All that suffering to get to our high camp was totally worth it.

But ah, the math comes back to bite us. Perhaps you know already that it was a three day trek. If so, you’ve clearly figured out what tomorrow has in store.

Day three

I’ve learned a couple of things today. For one, there are tour groups that describe their trips in the most benign way possible to take advantage of your perhaps-optimistic assessment of your own physical abilities. Once they get you to commit, they go to great lengths to make you aware of that optimistic assessment by putting you on a trail with dozens of children that can run circles around you while carrying a 35 pound bag of barley.

Our first day of trekking started at around 1:30, in the heat of the Ethiopian afternoon. We met our guide Zenabe (Zeb for short) at the Tesfa Tours building. We’d gone into this adventure with no idea what to expect, so when we began walking right from the front door, climbing through the city with our stuff, we weren’t too surprised. Our destination for the day was Ad Medhane Alem, an established tukul campsite outside Lalibela, which our guide informed us was a 13 km walk (about 8 miles). We were meeting our hired donkeys at the upper end of the town and, once AP’s bigger pack was secured, we joined the procession of locals of all ages as they climbed out of the city on the donkey highway.

We’d noticed the huge crowds across from our hotel earlier and Zed told us that Saturday was market day, so people came to Lalibela from the surrounding villages for their shopping. Instead of bringing their own grocery bags, they bring their own donkeys and load them down with all manner of things, most of them stuffed into a durable woven bag and lashed down with leather straps. We filtered in with this procession and were quickly climbing out of town toward the ridges and plateaus above the town.

The geography here is pretty incredible. Lalibela itself sits on a broad, sloped bench, capped at the top by a steep butte and surrounded on the other three sides by similarly steep terrain – it’s pretty contained and doesn’t really have a lot of room for expansion. The donkey highway moves quickly away from the town, passing through a vast patchwork of farmland and small villages, gaining ridges, crossing benches and winding ever higher into the distance. Some of the folks that were climbing along with us had come to the market from up to 36 km away (24 miles, more on that later).

Anyway, we plugged away in the heat, resting under the acacia trees from time to time, climbing from Lali’s 7500 foot elevation toward our camp at 10,500. Anastasia had two days of acclimitazation on me from her stay in Addis, which is at 6500 feet, and she’s been working out a lot more, so she and Zed did a lot of waiting for me as I plodded upward. Among the travelers on the donkey highway was a fuzzy-headed young girl who, as far as we could tell, had taken on an informal role as our tail guide. Though she was clearly faster than the out-of-shape American, I could not get her to pass me – every attempt was met with a shy smile and a wave of the hand. I’m quite convinced she wanted to make sure she was on hand to provide CPR if I keeled over on the approach.

Eventually we rounded a corner and saw, on a cliffside in the distance, the cluster of tukuls that was our home for the night. We departed the donkey highway and bid farewell to our tail guide and climbed up a steep scree gully, popping out on the broad plateau that was the first stage of the next day’s walking.

I was pretty knackered when we rolled in, but we were served a simple bread and delightful hot tea with sugar, which kept me going until dinner. As the sun set we took in the views – the broad expanse of the valley spread out below, with the donkey highway clearly visible all the way back to Lali in the distance. It was hard to believe we’d come so far.

Delicious soup and an enormous plate of chicken curry with rice around a fire in the big kitchen tukul came next. Once we were done, Zeb made every effort to find English music that we knew on his cell phone – turns out I know a lot more Shakira than I thought. Also, AP is not as bashful about singing Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” in front of two older Ethiopian men as I would have expected.

On to Abune Josef tomorrow. Twenty-six kilometers and a summit at 4295 meters – how the hell did Anastasia find this trip?

The march continues

How the hell did I get here?

Three weeks ago, upon hearing that she’d have to fly all the way to Addis Ababa for a two day meeting, Anastasia decided it would be silly to come so far and then turn around and fly right home. She started asking her friends for travel ideas for Ethiopia and, before I knew it, she was using her extra miles to buy me a ticket to join her for “a few days in Africa”. I’m not great at last minute changes in travel plans, but she did all the legwork and all I had to do was show up. Fast forward a few weeks, tack on a 24 hour travel day from Seattle via Amsterdam and Khartoum followed by a few hours of sleep and an early flight out of Addis and here we are, in the central Ethiopian highlands.

The flight into Lalibela was only a couple of hours and we arrived this morning jet lagged and low on sleep. The plan for the day was to tour the churches around the town, but we’d put this trip together so quickly that we really had no idea what to expect. Our shuttle from the airport brought us to Hotel Tukul, where we dropped our bags in our surprisingly nice room (with shower, even) and quickly scooted back out into the pre-noon sun to meet our guide for the day.

What to say about our guide? He was quiet at first, a young Ethiopian man with a thin mustache and matching pants and vest that are clearly part of his “tour guide” uniform. We walked from the hotel along the cobble and dirt streets, slowly breaking the ice with small talk, which soon became regional and international politics, about which he was probably better informed than I. But when we arrived at the entrance to the Lalibela rock-hewn church World Heritage Site, he turned into a mobile church history machine.

In the 12th century, King Lalibela traded with a local property owner for the rights to use the land at the center of what is now the town. On this land he built his vision – a recreation of Jerusalem in the form of a “museum of churches”, all carved as monolithic structures from the same broad, dust-covered hillside. They range in size from the tiny “house of the virgin”, whose entrances are the only visible portion of the 5×7 meter inner chamber, to the enormous “savior of the world”, a completely freestanding monolith 25 meters wide by 32 meters long, complete with external columns (some now reconstructed) to support its meter thick granite roof.

I can’t do justice to the descriptions of each church (or, if I could, this travel entry would consume our laptop’s battery completely), but our guide Alyewa went to great lengths to show us how carefully crafted and infused with biblical references each church was. From the number of columns carved to support each church, to the style and quantity of windows and the shapes carved into the walls, there seems little about these churches that wasn’t carefully planned and done for a reason, which makes the fact that they were carved entirely from the living stone even more remarkable. I mean, even the downspouts to shed the rain off the carefully sloped stone roof are part of the monolith. Really amazing.

The 11 churches are spread out over perhaps a square mile of hillside, clustered into three groups. The six churches around St. Mary’s, the four churches around the “Bethlehem” cone house (where bread and wine for all the churches was once made) and the single church of St. George, the final and most impressive one in the museum, shaped like a cross and carved into a perfectly square hole in the hillside – all of these groups are linked together by a series of tunnels and trenches that serve double-duty as rain drainage. To my unending delight, we used these tunnels and trenches to walk between most of the sites, including the completely lightless 50 meter tunnel from Bethlehem to St. Michael, which is meant to symbolize the passage through hell and back into heaven. My inner 7 year old, never very well hidden, was thrilled.

After church-a-palooza today, AP and I have collapsed in exhaustion (I’m still 11 hours behind, after all) and we’re looking forward to day two of the big adventure tomorrow. Our trekking guide will pick us up in the early afternoon for our four hour walk to Ad Medhane Alem, a community shelter that’s been built on one of the plateaus that tower above Lalibela. From there, we’ll continue over the next couple of days to Abune Josef, Ethiopia’s third highest peak, then loop back here the next day to complete the whirlwind Bubble’s Africa adventure.

Trek begins

Took me a while to sort through these — two weeks on the road will give you a lot of pictures. There are a ton in this album, but I’ve tried to trim it down to give the flavor of the trip. I’ve probably not trimmed it quite enough…

[Show as slideshow]

Ok, maybe I have a few words. Traffic is bad in Dhaka. It’s like trying to drive among a billion people all hopped up on PCP. It’s an aggressive, loud, complicated dance right up against the line of insanity. But once you leave the city, the roads open up. Which means that you get to do this aggressive, loud, complicated dance at sixty miles per hour! At least in Dhaka city, there are so many cars, bikes, rickshaws, people running across the street that you really can’t go much faster than a few miles an hour for longer than a few seconds. But on the open road… I could not look out the front of the van. It was too terrifying. I had to will myself to just look out the side window and not look out the front where I might catch a glimpse of the bus barreling right for us as we swerve around another bus at 7 million miles per hour. And the drive back was even more fun because we included the added excitement of it being dark! If Marcus was driving, I would have been emitting a constant stream of ‘Bubbles!!’ alarms.

Well, in between the terrifying drives, being out in the rural communities was fantastic. Every person that we’ve interacted with here, be in the doctors, nurses, scientists, patients, villagers, or whoever, have been incredibly warm, welcoming and wonderful. We visited with a few patients being treated for kala-azar at the local sub-district health complex. Two small children who were recovering well and one young woman who, unfortunately, was diagnosed probably too late. She was so anemic that her tongue and conjunctiva were white. She needs a blood transfusion which they cannot do at this facility. There is a medical college hospital about 30 minutes away that has the capacity to do transfusions and while treatment for kala-azar as well as all services at the medical college hospital is free for the poor, her family cannot afford the transportation costs or the costs associated with having a family member stay with her during what would likely be a month long stay. So she remains at the health complex, receives her daily treatment to kill the parasites, but too much damage has already been done.

After leaving the health complex, we went out to a community health outpost where people with kala-azar may go to first to seek a diagnosis. We walked around the community and visited a household that has had the disease. They had about three small mud huts for 5 family members. We went in one which had just enough room for one bed and a pile of grain. On the walls, we found several little sandflies. We of course, gathered quite a crowd with us we visited with them with people just appearing from nowhere and following us around. We amused the kids by taking a few pictures and showing them. They don’t like to smile for the pictures but they crack up hilariously when you show them how serious they look.

From there, our hosts kindly fed us mountains of food. They tried to make it not spicy for us, but, at one point some kind of green pepper made it into my mouth and I swear I almost passed out in my mutton. Seriously, I had to take a moment and actually, couldn’t really eat after that. Just one small slice of a small green pepper took me down. The other thing I kept thinking as we ate was how much Marcus would HATE eating here! I mean, you have access to silverware in most restaurants. But a home-cooked meal in someone’s house is different. They piled our plates with rice, mutton, chicken, fish, dhal, and vegetable curry. I don’t think Marcus could get through that meal using just his right index finger and thumb as he does for chicken wings. And after dinner, we were served a dessert of sour curd and milk bread. I took one look at that and channeled Andy. In order to not be totally rude, I told them that I couldn’t eat dairy! I did taste a tiny little bit, just out of curiosity and, wow, I did not like it one bit. Not to mention that dairy products are not pasteurized here so I’ve been trying to avoid them at all costs.

We arrived back at the hotel at 9pm, totally exhausted but also really thankful for the opportunity to get a glimpse of a community dealing with kala-azar.

Across the street from me, there is a huge construction project. In fact, all over Dhaka city are huge new construction projects. Everywhere you look a new tall, sketchy looking tower is going up about 6 inches from the neighboring building. I wonder how long this rapid urban growth can be sustained before everything collapses on the fragile infrastructure. The traffic, the constant power outages, the hundreds of tangled cables spiderwebbing up each tall building, the construction, the waste — there must be a point at which it cannot be sustained. And this is not just Dhaka city, I think about this every time I visit a developing world mega-city. Though I think Dhaka city might just take the prize here. The traffic is even worse than Manila.

Anyway, it has been interesting watching the progress on the building across the street. While we were out today, piles of gravel were delivered to the site and women, who have not been on the site before, are carrying basket loads of gravel from the pile to the cement mixer while a man sits in a plastic chair on top of the pile directing them as they dodge cars and rickshaws with their baskets of gravel balanced on their heads.

So, what have I seen so far? We’ve visited a TB clinic, a children’s hospital, a cholera hospital, and two urban health care clinics. It’s been a little overwhelming, the amount of information and experiences that I’m taking in. I went to bed last night and woke up this morning thinking about it; trying to sort it all out. We visited the neonatal ward of the children’s hospital and saw some of the tiniest humans I have ever seen. There was a one month old baby which weighed merely 850 grams. Low birth weight is a big problem here, mainly due to malnutrition in the mother. The neonatal ward was trying to coax along the very worst off.

We saw several of the other wards, large open rooms, beds filled with sick children and their mothers. We saw the cholera beds which have a hole in the center so that patients do not have to get up to evacuate and doctors can easily obtain a sample for diagnosis. Very convenient. Usually right now is peak season for cholera, but this year, they haven’t seen the normal peak that makes them have to extend the hospital to rows of beds under tents out in the dirt lot by the building.

At one of the urban clinics, we saw a very healthy, 10 minute old baby. At the other urban clinic, there was a woman in labor and all I could think was, Wow… it is really hot for that. At that same clinic, we saw mothers with their babies lined up to get the babies their routine vaccinations. Everywhere we visited was hugely busy and those urban clinics do amazing work with really limited resources, equipment, and infrastructure. But this is the highest level of public health care which means that these are the best facilities for the public. Tomorrow we travel out to the field where, I think, things are going to be much different.

Ok… another power outage. I’m just waiting for the time that I happen to be in the elevator for one of those. There is a very nice sign in the elevator that says In the case of a power outage and the elevator stops, don’t panic!! — I love it. Don’t panic! And the answer is 42…

The trip to Dhaka, the capitol city of Bangladesh, took me and my colleague through Beijing and Kunming, China and started off, from the very start in Seattle, with shenanigans. I met my colleague at the check-in counter. She had been there for an hour already, trying to figure out how to get Hainan Airlines to let us on to their flight to Beijing. We were flying Eastern China Airlines from Beijing, through Kunming and onto Dhaka, however Eastern China Airlines had not posted any departure or arrival times for their flight. Hainan did not want to send us to China only to have China send us right back because we don’t have a transit visa.

My main question is, what kind of airline does not know what their departure and arrival times are for a flight THE NEXT DAY?? Even stranger, nobody could get a hold of anyone at Eastern China Airlines. When it was finally sorted out and Hainan Airlines let us onto their plane, my colleague and I just hoped that once we arrived in Beijing, there would, in fact, be a plane to take us to Dhaka.

Our first test was immigration in Beijing. We didn’t get a transit visa because everyone said that as long as we don’t wander out of the secure area, we would be fine. But since we were changing from international to domestic, we had to go through immigration. My colleague and I exchanged glances during her extended wait at the immigration counter while the immigration officer called the immigration police over to sort it all out. In the end, we got a 24 hour stay permit and were free to go.

Our next stop was Kunming where we were told was that we would stay on the plane and wait on the tarmac for about an hour before continuing on to Dhaka. Sadly, when we landed, we were ushered off the plane with everyone else. Both of us were exhausted and had been fast asleep on the trip over and were looking forward to just sleeping through the transition — oh well. We followed the other Dhaka passengers into the airport where we gathered around in one large confused circle. The passengers who were lucky enough to speak Chinese got directions on what to do next and walked off. The rest of us could only watch.

Eventually we were led through the small airport, through security (again), and to the gate where we sat down and waited some more. Gate 2’s sign showed our flight number to Dhaka and said that it was waiting to board. My colleague and I just zoned out for a while until I noticed that everyone who had been waiting by Gate 2 had suddenly disappeared. I got up and saw people going through Gate 1, all the way on the opposite end of the building. We grabbed our stuff and hurried over there even though our tickets said Gate 2 and the screen above Gate 2 still displayed our flight number. It was lucky for us that I noticed the mass exodus because Eastern China Airlines was sneaking people out through Gate 1 for the Dhaka flight. If I hadn’t looked up right at that moment, we would be still sitting in Kunming.

Finally, we arrived in Dhaka at 1:30 in the morning. The heat and humidity punched me in the chest as I exited the plane. Considering it is 1:30am, this is a bad sign. By the time I got to the terminal, I had 3 mosquito bites. By the time I got through immigration, I had three more. All my colleague and I could think about was crawling into bed and sleeping for days.

We checked in at the hotel, went up to our rooms and, while my room seems to be ok, my colleague’s room was possessed! The lights went on and off at about 15 second intervals. Preceding each black out, a high-pitched alarm went off. The whole thing was quite disorienting for both of us considering our lack of sleep and the fact that we have been traveling for 24 hours. We helplessly punch some buttons on the weird master electrical panel before giving up and going back down to reception to ask them to cast off the demon. They somehow manage. It’s now 3am and I am finally in bed.