A budget shower in Lago Atitlán

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If you ever want to have a near-death experience, I suggest taking a shower in a $3-a-night Guatemalan hotel.

Showers here are heated not by water boilers, but by an electric heater in the shower head itself.

I’m familiar with these, since they are common in the humbler parts of Brazil where I grew up. But normally the wires are well concealed, and no live copper is exposed.

For $3 a night, you don’t get that luxury.

One of the shared showers in my hotel in San Pedro La Laguna, a town bordering the majestic Lake Atitlán, is low. So low that if I stood on the balls of my feet my head would touch it. It’s also made entirely of metal.

And so it happened, as I was showering and going through the mechanical motions of soaping up my underarms, that my elbow touched the metal shower head.

At first it felt like I had touched a vibrating object, like an electric back massager. But it wasn’t a mechanical vibration I felt; it was a full-body buzz that kept me paralyzed in my position. Wait a minute, I thought. This isn’t a vibration…. This is … electricity! I’m being … shocked! And I’m completely wet!

My first thoughts went back to high school chemistry class: pure distilled water doesn’t conduct electricity. I remembered the experiment where you stick a live wire in a beaker of distilled water and lower a lightbulb inside. Nothing happens. But dissolve some salt in it and the sodium and chlorine ions relay the electrons from wire to bulb, bringing it to life. At that point I wondered just how pure the shower water was.

At the same time, I was thinking: What a silly way to die. They’ll find me naked with the water running in this cheap hotel in San Pedro. How embarrassing. Oh well. I think I lived a good life so far. My parents would probably be proud.

This is the shower that actually zapped me.

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This all lasted no longer than two seconds. My body must have activated an automated emergency muscular shutdown, because no sooner did I feel that initial vibration than I found myself on the orange-painted cement floor of the bathroom, wondering what the hell just happened. I looked up and saw the shower, raining down the water just as normal.

A few seconds passed and I got up and finished my shower, making sure to avoid getting close to the shower head.

Some religions teach that you are only fit to contact the divine after cleansing yourself — your feet, your head, or everything. A purified body symbolizes a purified heart, expunged of base earthly pollutions.

And so, it was in a $3-a-night hotel in Guatemala that this procedure was slightly abbreviated and I almost met my Creator while cleansing myself. That my hotel is called Paraiso and that it’s near enough an evangelical church to make the priest’s nightly wailings to the Lord clearly audible made it all very a propos.

The old saying goes: “cleanliness is next to godliness.” In some parts of our fair planet, this is frighteningly literal.