The song of the sausage

Today I had my very first case of "Tourist Tummy", also known as Thai Belly or Bali Belly if you're in that part of Indonesia. Now I feel like a real tourist! All of my friends were getting it from our Chiang Mai trip, and I was beginning to feel a bit left out. Not any more.

It was the sausages that did it. In my defence, they had been taunting me ever since I arrived in Thailand, and like a sailor strapped to the mast while listening to the call of the sirens, I've resisted their charms for two whole months.

Last night I was out wandering around the Phuket Indie Markets (a great little local haunt with none of the usual tourist fare for sale) working up an appetite. There were several food options around, but most of them involved the arduous task of sitting at a table and ordering from a menu, and then having to wait while they cooked the food! Boring.

I opted for the street vendor with the charcoal grilled sausages instead. It's like home-cooked McDonald's - fast food, but tasty. Lovingly prepared by a very friendly chap, who had formed the sausages by hand earlier that day. Rustic. And I'm pretty sure organic. As it turns out, there was a lot more organic material than I had bargained for.

I don't think it was just the sausage that had me feeling a little green (and not very environmentally friendly) the next morning; it was probably more the quantity that I ate. I ordered two of his finest what I think were beef, cased sausages. While he sliced them up for me (all part of the service), I spied a little bundle of uncased pork sausages - hand-rolled, just like I do with sheftalia back home (almost).

When he started bagging up my original order with my very own eating stick, and I saw that it came with a fresh cut salad, I ordered one of these juicy looking boys that had been calling to me everyday on my way home from work. "Mr Hii-iiiw!", they called. "Don't we look tasty?" Their songs wafted on the breeze as I walked through night markets: "Dawi-iiid, we smell delicious, nah?"

I ate half of them on the way back to my hotel. They were aromatic, spicy, with good texture, and not at all like the greasy, fatty things you get outside Bunnings on a Saturday morning in Brisbane. And the raw sliced cabbage served with it was sweet and crunchy - the perfect accompaniment. The flavour was not unlike a pepperoni, though without the greasy film left on tongue and finger.

I finished them off at the hotel, felt full and slept well.

The next morning, the sausage was kind enough to let me wake up, get out of bed, and get a drink of water before it started to ring the alarm bells in my stomach. Actually, it felt more like Rolph Harris playing his wobble board while jumping on a trampoline.

That's when my stomach decided to kick Rolph, his wobble board, sausages, and trampoline out.

I have had what I can only describe as a "no passing wind day". I couldn't take that risk. I won't go into all the gory details, but let me just say that I didn't eat a lot today, and what I did eat was very bland. Bottles of water, Coke Light, and black tea ruled my gastro-intestinal world today.

So I'm now sitting at a five-star resort on the Southern tip of Phuket, which has four or five gourmet restaurants and its own private island. I'm hoping that by tomorrow my stomach will have sorted itself out, because I was really looking forward to sampling most of what they have on offer here.

I'll probably give the gourmet sausage a miss though.

D.