Video Work In Bali Leads To Dengue Fever

I'm writing this update from a hospital bed in Phuket, where I'm being treated for Dengue fever. This is not a lot of fun.

Ley and I have just spent three weeks filming (high definition video) in Bali, working with our friend Jon Stonham, CEO of Private Homes and Villas. We managed to cover 25 luxury villas in 21 days, working at a cracking pace. OK, so we did enjoy the services of a private chef and a butler at almost every villa, and the food was fantastic. However the pace of work prevented us from relaxing at all, and the delights of the villas flashed past us without being sampled.

We captured lots of video, requiring over 200 gigabytes of hard disk storage space. Our new camera equipment records onto solid state memory cards, instead of video tape. At the end of each day we download from the camera directly onto a laptop computer. The high definition video is good enough to extract decent still photos - thats where these two images have come from. Whilst it was great to be behind a viewfinder again, the last few days in Bali proved difficult.

I started showing a range of symptoms including fever, joint pain, lethargy, headache and dizziness. A subsequent week in Singapore brought no improvement, and I spent our last day there in the "fever" department at Singapore General Hospital. Then it was straight to the airport for our flight back to Phuket, and then straight back into hospital again. This morning the doctors assured me I would be out of this in 24 hours or so. Both Ley and Jon also managed to contract the virus, with Jon spending several days in hospital in Singapore. Ley is made of tougher stuff - her symptoms were very mild until the last day of the fever when she broke out in a typical Dengue rash.

After six days in hospital it will be nice to feel normal again, and I'm very keen to see Crystal Blues. So, apologies for the delay in refreshing this weblog. We do have lots of updates to post, but they need to wait until I'm clear of the Dengue.