Traveler Cycling From South London to South Africa Says He Went to a Guinea Hospital Sure It Was Malaria Until a Nurse Pointed to Another Line on His Lab Sheet and It Was Typhoid

Left: cover still from an Instagram reel by @anotherbloodycyclist. Right: two cyclists riding road bikes along a beach (Unsplash photo by Coen van de Broek).

On a red dirt road in Guinea, a cyclist in a white cap and a red, yellow and green football shirt holds his phone at arm’s length and describes being corrected by a nurse with one finger. He had pointed at his lab results and said malaria. She said no, then pointed at a different line.

He posts as @anotherbloodycyclist, and a label on the reel gives his route, cycling from South London to South Africa, with Guinea as the country he is in. The video, posted on October 2, runs 2 minutes 47 seconds and opens on a title card saying he went to hospital in Guinea thinking he had malaria and did not expect what came next.

The illness followed a rough stretch that he recaps in the first twenty seconds and in his written caption: five days stranded with a broken bike, a missing person report to the police and, by his account, Interpol looking for him. The footage shows a truck throwing up dust ahead of his handlebars and the cyclist crouched over a wheel. He expected to sleep it off. Instead, he says, the tiredness stayed, his appetite went, nausea set in and even breathing took effort. One shot looks down at his feet on a bed under a mosquito net.

He admits he tried to talk himself out of getting checked. In the caption he writes that he “convinced myself it was just exhaustion” until a fever arrived. The on screen captions mention a medical advisor, and the next shots are inside a hospital that he describes as busy with serious cases, where he felt guilty about sitting among people who were worse off. He writes that he walked in certain it was malaria.

A printed lab sheet fills the frame, headed Hopital Regional, with a section labeled Parasitologie near the top and one labeled Salmonelloses further down. He says the disease names were in Latin, on a page whose French he was already struggling with. Once the nurse had turned down his malaria guess, he was already mentally packing. Then she moved to the second line, and the caption on screen names it as salmonellosis. He signalled that he could manage a few rough nights of that. She wagged her finger at him.

He went back to his medical advisor chat, the Latin was translated, and the word that appears on screen is typhoid. The doctor, he says, then confirmed it. He admits he had thought of typhoid as a disease from the Victorian era, and he writes that he had been vaccinated against it before the trip.

From there, he says, the language barrier became a real one, and he jokes about how little comfort there is in discussing infectious diseases through Google. Collecting the antibiotics took what he describes as a pub crawl of pharmacies, and he came away with an assortment of different types. The reel ends on a tent pitched on the porch of a building with blue doors, captioned as his first night back, and his written caption tells South Africa he is still coming, eventually.

For anyone planning a long trip, the most useful thing in the reel is the person on the other end of his phone. The medical advisor comes up twice in his captions, once before the hospital and once to decode the results. Before you leave, pick yours: a travel clinic, a doctor you know, or the medical line on your insurance policy if it has one. Save the number offline and agree that you can send photos of paperwork.

Settle your own rule for when to stop arguing with yourself. His sequence was tiredness that rest did not fix, then lost appetite, nausea and hard breathing, and by his own account he stopped arguing only when the fever hit. Write down, before the trip, which of those sends you to a clinic the same day.

At the hospital, get the printed lab sheet, photograph it as he did, and ask whoever hands it over to put a finger on the line that matters and say or write the name. Send the photo to your contact straight away. He pointed at his own answer and was wrong, so ask which line it is and wait, then have the doctor confirm it, as he says his did.

Prepare for the language gap before you are sitting in a waiting room. Download the local language for offline translation, and keep a typed note on your phone listing your vaccinations with dates, your allergies and any medicine you take. He says he had been vaccinated against the illness he was diagnosed with, a detail to show the doctor.

His antibiotics took more than one pharmacy to collect. Ask the doctor to write every medicine, the dose and the number of days on one sheet, photograph it, and tick each item off as you find it. Do not leave town until you are holding the full course.

His week began, by his caption, with being reported missing. Give one person at home your route and a daily check in time, and tell them what to do if you miss it.