British backpacker Bethany Clarke, who survived a suspected methanol poisoning at a Laos hotel, has revealed the horror symptoms she suffered and has said she is lucky to be alive.
The harrowing ordeal saw six international tourists killed.
While on a working holiday in Brisbane, Ms Clarke met up with her childhood friend, British lawyer Simone White, 28, who was holidaying in Laos. The two women stayed at the Nana Backpackers Hostel in Vang Vieng on November 12, where they and dozens of other tourists enjoyed free whisky and vodka shots.
However, the drinks are suspected to have been tainted with methanol.
Both were rushed to hospital the following morning, where Ms White died just a few days later.
Two 19-year-olds from Melbourne, Holly Morton-Bowles and Bianca Jones, Danish friends Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman, 20, and Freja Sorensen, 21, and American James Hutson, 57, also died in the same incident.
Ms Clarke said she and Ms White each drank six shots, adding that there was little to suggest the drinks were poisoned.
“If it looked dodgy, I wouldn’t have drunk it. We went up to the bar and I watched him pour them out from a glass bottle with a vodka label on it,” she told 60 Minutes.
Ms White’s mum, Sue White, added: “You don’t question it, do you really, if you’re on holiday. If it’s come out of a bottle with a label on it, you just assume that’s what’s in the bottle.”
Both women began to feel unwell the next morning, suffering from severe lethargy and were taken to hospital by fellow tourists.
“You just physically can’t move. It’s like you are more or less paralysed,” Ms Clarke explained. “You can still walk, but everything is much, much, much more difficult than it would be ordinarily, but yeah, mainly fatigue, nausea, I fainted.”
Ms White’s condition rapidly deteriorated upon arrival at hospital and she was placed into a coma. Ms Clarke then had to phone her mother back in the UK to get her consent for Ms White to undergo brain surgery.
“It was the worst experience of my life,” the mother said.
Rushing to be at her daughter’s bedside, Ms White was told by the hospital several days later that she would have to turn off her daughter’s life support because the doctors’ religion prevented them from doing so.
“I then had to take the tube out of her mouth. It was just absolutely terrible. It was just so traumatic,” Ms White added.
Ms Clarke has since fully recovered and returned home to the UK. She suspects that she survived because her drinks had a lower concentration of methanol than Ms White’s.
“Yeah, could’ve easily been me (who died),” she said.
The fathers of best friends Holly Morton-Bowles and Bianca Jones, both aged 19, who also died in November after drinking suspected methanol-laced alcohol, are furious at a lack of action over their daughters’ deaths and claim that investigators in Laos have refused to meet with them.
“For them not to reach out, that’s just not good enough,” he told 60 Minutes. “People have died and someone’s responsible. So we absolutely want to know how and who is responsible for it.”
