After a week of feeling like my stomach had been whacked by a baseball bat, a week of fevers and various unpleasantries I'm sure you don't want details of, I'm back.

Last Saturday morning, I awoke hungry and ready for my Southern-style breakfast. I decided on eggs and ham and Simon and I trotted along to the sports bar beneath our hotel to indulge.

“How would you like them eggs?” asked a waitress who looked a lot like the singer Rihanna, complete with tiny hotpants.

Immediately, I realised poached wouldn't pass muster so I uttered the first cliché that came into my head: “Over easy”. I thought this meant I was ordering a double-flipped fried egg. But no, it turns out 'over-easy' in Huck Finn's Sports Bar means salmonella to go.

The first signs were a loss of appetite and, by the the time we toured the cemetery on the Sunday, I was racing back to the hotel with a bad case of New Orleans Belly. However, I was determined to go on the Voodoo Tour in the evening, only to leave halfway through after feeling like I was going to simultaneously faint and throw up. The curse of Marie Laveau was upon me.

The next day I was feverish and unable to keep even water down but I was determined to go on the swamp tour. Overdosed on Immodium, I almost made it and, after a brief visit to a dunny-like outbuilding (complete with a gigantic devil bug that called the dunny home), I braved the apoplectic shaking of the air-boat. The guide thought his marshmallows tempted the amphibious dinosaurs but I am sure they smelt my sickness (or maybe the biscuit smell of my now-fading fake tan – my natural colour is a kind of white with a touch of blue pallor so, because I didn't want to stick out like a sore thumb, I dyed my skin a Fanta colour).

After surviving the swamp, I was relieved to make it to San Diego – it felt clean and homely next to the sweltering sticky heat of New Orleans.