Times of London chief Asia Editor Richard Lloyd Parry has been out of commission recently, something AsiaPundit had noticed as he was enjoying Richards recent Thai coverage. Today on his blog, Richard explains the absence.:

I’m sorry for vanishing from this space so suddenly last week. The truth was that, by the time of Mr Thaksin’s resignation last Tuesday night, I was feeling very peculiar, to an extent that could not fully be explained by my elation at witnessing history in the making.

I had a drumming headache, tiredness, aches in the limbs and joints, a fiery thirst, and the shakes - in other words, I felt exactly as most male British tourists in Bangkok do for most of the time. Taking a shower on my last morning was easy enough, although towelling myself dry afterwards required a lot more effort, and packing my three shirts and two pairs of trousers aged me by several decades. At the airport, I looked enviously at the complacent elderly trundling by in their wheelchairs. I spent the flight back to Tokyo shivering under two blankets.

At home on Thursday night I told myself that I’d go to the doctor if I wasn’t feeling better by Monday. On Friday afternoon I made an appointment for that evening. On Saturday morning, the tests confirmed what would have seemed obvious days ago to one better in tune with his own health - I had malaria.

Not the nastiest kind of a malaria - merely Plasmodium vivax, rather than the much more complicated, and frequently drug-resistant, Plasmodium falciparum. The origin of the infection is obvious enough - the trip I made in mid-March to the Thai-Burma border. At some point, a pregnant female mosquito pushed her drinking straw through my skin and exchanged a drop of my blood for the smallest traces of her saliva, in which the vivax parasites were stowing away. Since then they had been biding their time in my liver, and now they were whooping it up in parasitic orgy, new generations breeding one after another in my red blood cells, causing the waves of fever.