What they had in common was youth, a simple look about them, an an apparent will to help without asking for anything in return. They were good-hearted Vietnamese, in our opinion, above any suspicion.

Or would you doubt the intentions of a monk inside a Buddhist temple?

The first case: the perverted monk

It was our first visit to a Buddhist temple in Southeast Asia. We were in Can Tho, largest city of the Mekong Delta. And we were given, without any request on our part, a guided visit by a young man who seemed, to our ignorant eyes, an apprentice monk.

What started as sacred, with incense lit for the ancestors and three bows before the shrine, devolved into comical. The so-called monk, who spoke no English, made himself photographic director. He told us to pose with the bell. Under the stairs. With the view to the city. With the view to the street. We got the idea.

the 20th picture he started posing by my side, and the game of permutations resumed: the monk and me before the bell, the monk and me under the stairs…

We obeyed, a little out of respect, a little out of the weirdness of it all and a little out of curiosity as to where this would all culminate. After a certain point Roberto stopped pressing the shutter. He just aimed the camera and smiled. Disobeying a monk, after all, must be wicked bad luck.

What started as scared and devolved into comical soon turned to suspicious. At each shot this Vietnamese Annie Leibowitz found a way to get close to me. His hand migrated from my innocent wait to my hip. Alarmed, I said: “Roberto, the monk just grabbed my butt!”

But the exotic appeal was strong. A part of me wouldn’t believe in what I just felt. It had to be an accident. But the monk, not content with a successful fondle of a Brazilian butt, decided to push his luck.

After exploring my southern zones, he decided to migrate north. You know when you take a picture with someone by slinging your arm over his neck? Well, I think plenty of boys know the technique of leaving the land a little limp if his picture buddy is a lady of sizable bust.

The monk knew this technique. What started as sacred, devolved into comical, and turned suspicious, became startlingly clear. Take note of my expression:

No more pictures. No more joking around. We left in an instant.

The habit does not make the monk. It really, really doesn’t.

P.S. In the photos I’m wearing a tank top, a real faux-pas that I corrected a short while later. In a Buddhist temple, one must cover one’s shoulders and legs. My fail.

We went up PNG’s second-highest mountain expecting a straightforward camping trip. What we found was the most challenging and rewarding bush walk of our lives.

The road had ceased being a road and it was now Mars after a bombing. Even when it was a road it still didn’t deserve being called one. It was as if the local authority had cleared the bush, dumped loads of rocks on it and said, “There, deal with it.”

Whatever holes were there, the morning rain enlarged them so they could, in theory, support a small reservoir for the nearby villages.

It’s no wonder the only car dealership in Mount Hagen, capital of the West Highland province in PNG, only sells four-wheel drive Toyota Land Cruisers.

We were returning to Hagen after an overnight trek up Mt. Giliwe, the second-highest peak in Papua New Guinea. We were tired from the eight-hour return hike, soggy from the rain, and still a bit frazzled from having slept in the middle of the jungle.

The Land Cruiser our guide was driving was admirably handling the terrain. In the car, his kids, wife, and nephews – who all climbed up the mountain with us, and none of whom spoke fluent English – were singing along to Abba with scary precision. Every time we went over a hole, our internal organs played a round of musical chairs.

But one hole was too formidable even for the mighty Japanese machine. It made the right half of the road rise far higher than the left. And as we heard that money must be funny in a rich man’s world, we felt the car tilt to the left.

We’ve all seen videos of cars flipping upside-down. I’ve always wondered was it was like to climb out of a capsized vehicle. Would it be through the window? The back door? Would the seat belt keep me glued to my seat?

Bianca, who was sitting between me and the driver on the front seat, was screaming as we realized that the car had tilted past the point of return and it was really about to flip over. But I was kind of excited as I squeezed the oh-shit bar on the passenger side.

But then, the car stopped. It stood at a perfect 45-degree angle to the imaginary horizon. Fearing it was just resting before completing its roll, I opened the door and slid out, taking Bianca with me.

It was a memorable sight, the big beige Japanese monster with its right-side wheels feebly in the air. The other passengers trickled out of the back door. Suddenly, we were surrounded by villagers who were pouring out of their huts.

It was like science fiction. An event set forth a reaction in its environment as though a collective consciousness was simply programmed to respond. One by one, villagers lined up against the car and began pushing it, an effort so natural and practiced, it reminded me of ants removing and obstruction in their hive.

Not one minute had passed since I escaped the car and it was back on four wheels, past the big hole.

After thanking the smiling villagers, we huddled back inside and off we went. The CD player was now on The Winner Takes it All and the children were singing along flawlessly.

A budget shower in Lago Atitlán

.

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.

.

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.

You first lay your eyes on her, her unspoiled cobblestone curves, her plump plazas, the pastel blush of her houses, all seemingly unsullied by men. Then it hits you: is that a McDonald’s? A goddam Subway? Fuck me.

Serves me right for nursing illusions. This is, after all, the #1 destination for UK backpackers, according to some gringo publication. And a town where throngs of kids come to learn Spanish by day and forget it all at Reilly’s Irish pub at night.

Yes, many a men have been inside her before. On the other hand, you understand why she knows how to show you such a good time.

Antigua is a Cartesian grid of dollhouses, if dollhouses were made in the Spanish Baroque style. It’s a little too clean. The brightly-painted homes, cracked and peeled just enough to be endearing, are a little too elegant on the inside, housing posh restaurants with candle-lit tables.

But far be it for me to talk it down. It’s undeniably enchanting. Strolling down its warm-coloured streets offers hours of distraction to the lazy philosopher: do the tourists come because the colours are so vivid or are the colors so vivid because the tourists come? And then you turn a corner and stumble on a magnificent church, or the eerie ruins of a former one, and they will arrest your breath for a portentous few seconds. And reading a book in Parque Central, a leafy memorial to bygone glories, is a rare pleasure with no peer.

And then there’s the market. Christalmighty, how do you begin to describe it? It’s an endless covered maze of poorly-lit stalls, hundreds of them, selling anything from fruits to Mayan textiles to cell phone accessories to pirated DVDs. You feel like you’re navigating a claustrophobic cave with plastic and corrugated metal stalactites. I dare anyone to find the same stall twice without a compass and two days’ water.

And then night comes.The streets empty save for a few bars blasting Top 40 tunes, which, in this mountain town hugged by ancient volcanoes, an oasis of serenity in a mad world, is as fitting as a coke-frenzied gangster crashing a Zen meditation circle screaming, “Ram yo’ boooooooty!”

More photos here: http://picasaweb.google.com/robroc1/GuatemalaWeek1