Lariam and my six months of madness

I once went mad in Africa and it was no fun at all. I was snorkelling off the coast of Zanzibar and I dived a little too deep, and something in the middle of my head went click. And then I came up and fell on to a boat that took me back to the paradise sands, and when I got there I couldn’t walk straight and everything started to fall apart.

In fairness, that might not have been madness. That might have just been a problem with my inner ear. At the time, though, it was all bundled together. I’d been sub-Saharan for about nine months by this point, living cheap in the Cape and writing a novel. Three weeks earlier, we had packed up our belongings and caught a flight to Dar es Salaam, with a plan to drift back south over the next few months on buses filled with chickens.