For those who travel extensively, getting sick is a rite of passage. At some point travelers experience Delhi Belly, Trotsky's Trots, or Montezuma's Revenge. Whether it's from bad food, a parasite, or a virus, if you travel long enough, you will eventually catch one of them, so grab the wastepaper basket or toilet seat and hold on for a bumpy ride. Later, much later, you'll realize that you have earned the best gift any traveler can acquire - a good story to tell.

Yes, you can take all the usual precautions. You can drink bottled or boiled water, avoid ingesting anything washed in tap water, and be extra careful about the ice floating in your drink. Harder yet is to diagnose the mystery meat hidden under a blanket of delicious sauce or gravy. A few hours after eating a couple of chicken tacos in Chihuahua, Mexico (yes, yes, I know: eating chicken in Chihuahua should have been a red flag right there), I complained to my girlfriend that I didn't feel exactly right.

"Yes, well, I thought maybe I should have warned you," Sarah told me. Sarah was a vegetarian, and she always scrutinized the meat on my plate during meals a bit disapprovingly. Now I was getting my come-uppance.

Come-uppance indeed. A few hours later, I began to grow irritable, and strangely thirsty. By evening I was leaning over the hotel's bathroom toilet, losing the contents of my stomach, the horrible noises I was making reverberating off the bare tile walls. My awful wretching could be heard out into the room, down the hall, and in the hotel's lobby. I hoped the cooks in the restaurant who served me the goddamn tacos could hear me.

"Ahhhh, I feel much better," I explained to my girlfriend as I limped out of the bathroom, my stomach purged of all toxins. She on the other hand looked a bit pale from having to listen to my near death experience. I crawled into bed next to her. "Give me a kiss goodnight, honey!"

Food poisoning is one thing; catching a disease is another. I have always been morbidly fascinated by tropical diseases, ailments that fester in the exotic climes of the world. Varieties of exotic maladies that cover the whole color spectrum - yellow fever, scarlet fever, and green monkey fever - hold me captivated. And then there's Dengue fever, a sickness so debilitating that it's called break-bone fever. Deep in the heart of Africa, in Malawi, lay a fetid, sultry region that epidemiologists consider a Petri dish for diseases, where viruses mutate at an amazing pace, giving birth to new afflictions such as HIV and the horrific E-Bola virus, a disease that reduces internal organs to pudding and causes the victim to bleed out from all orifices.

And then there is the whole zoo of parasites that fester in the gut or the larvae that lay dormant under the skin - pin worms, tape worms, hook worms.

"I went to Nicaragua to help in a poor village, and came back with these bumps on my arm," an acquaintance told me. "One day the bumps began moving!" A doctor diagnosed thriving Bott fly larvae under the skin of her arm.

During our Peace Corps training, the medical staff gave us a thorough run-down on potential afflictions. The most common disease was ghiardia, a parasite-induced disease caught from drinking bad water. Symptoms include chills, fever, and excruciatingly awful diarrhea, so bad that it totally rids you of any self dignity.

While in Uzbekistan, I was stricken with ghiardia twice, and a mystery bug once. The mystery bug struck me while attending a gathering of volunteers at the home of Don's host family one weekend. In the evening a group of us ventured out to a shabby Russian cafe where we slammed back shots of the restaurant's vodka.

In between shots of vodka my body suddenly broke out into a cold sweat and my stomach suddenly bottomed out, as if I was plummeting down a steep roller coaster. Something wasn't right down there, and I had an awful realization that I might . . .

"I need to step outside!" In the cold evening air I caught my breath, and everything seemed to be okay. We returned to Don's house where the party raged on. I found a space on the floor amongst other volunteers who were either passed out or slumbering. Shooting pains devastated my stomach, and I lay doubled over wishing only to lose consciousness.

In the morning I felt fine, no nausea, no abdominal cramps. And then I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I stuck out my tongue. What I saw made my blood run cold. My host happened to saunter by. "Don, look!"

I stuck out my tongue. What should have been a healthy pink had turned a sickly brown. Don grew serious. "We're going to call the Peace Corps doctor in Tashkent right now."

I went outside to show others. "Look!" and revealed my tongue. Marcy rolled her eyes and whined at me. "Did you take those Pepto Bismol pills in your health kit?" As a matter of fact I had, but I didn't bother to admit that I had take a dozen of them upon waking in the middle of the night. I was desperate, and they went down like candy.

"Pepto Bismol makes your tongue turn brown!"

Although they cured me of my mystery affliction, Pepto-Bismol pills, however, do nothing for ghiardia, as I was to find out later.

On a Saturday afternoon Chris, Jonathan, Israel, and I had gathered. We were going to get beer and watch TV, hopefully something other than boring Uzbek programs. "We'll watch 'The Incredible Hulk.'

'The Incredible Hulk' is about a man who turns green and goes on a rampage. But the movie was checked out from the corner video store, and instead we drank beer and watched Jonathan's host father get drunk and stumble around, providing his own imitation of the monstrous Hulk.

At first I thought it was the combination of greasy rice pilaf and beer that made me hightail it to the outhouse a few times during the evening, squatting over a dark hole in the floor. Despite much previous practice with pit toilets, my aim was bad, and by the end of the evening I had left the outhouse in a state that would have made Jackson Pollock proud. I tried to clean the floor up by pouring water everywhere, but it simply got worse. I ended up tracking brown water into the family courtyard. The family dog sniffed at me and waddled away.

In the morning we bid goodbye, but not before I ran off to the bathroom and used the last of Jonathan's toilet paper.

After arriving home, the bug progressed, and my body attempted to fight the invading critter by turning up the temperature. Uzbek custom dictated that sick family members be abandoned to avoid infection. By dinnertime I lay in bed feverish and shivering with chills. I suddenly, thankfully, remembered the medication that I had been given by the Peace Corps nurse during a previous bout of ghiardia - Cipro, guaranteed to wipe out every invading entity in the body's system. A few hours after the first pill, the fever broke. After a second pill the next day, the diarrhea ceased. A third and fourth follow up pill, and I was as good as new.

How had I contracted ghiardia? Could it have been from the vile vodka that was reputed to be watered down with tap water? Or from vegetables washed in the sink?

In retrospect I am amazed that I avoided worse diseases. The living conditions in rural Uzbekistan are unsanitary, and half of the nationals who I met had, at one time or another, suffered from Hepatitis. In the bazaars and kitchens of homes and restaurants swarms of flies buzzed about, and rats scurried everywhere. For our protection, the Peace Corps medical staff inoculated us against a variety of diseases.

Sometimes during my trips throughout the years I was overly cautious. In India I avoided all meat. By my third week as a vegetarian, eating nothing but rice, lentils, and greasy omelettes, I had grown anemic and malnourished.

Other times I threw caution to the wind, such as my last day in Istanbul. It was a beautiful Spring evening, with the sun setting over the wide blue Bosphorous. To hell with being safe. Turkey had been a pleasure land of friendly people, beautiful weather, and intriguing ruins. Tonight was the night to top it off. I began my wandering feast at the open air market in the tourist district, and sampled 20 cent stuffed oysters from a vendor with a display box of shells suspended from his neck. The taste of tangy sea made me think of fish, and I suddenly remembered reading somewhere about the fishing boats that plied the Bosphorous Strait. The boats had cooking grills in the aft, and the captains doubled as cooks and sold fish sandwiches to pedestrians along the sea wall. Before I could get to the seafront, I had to stop at a doner stand for a lamb kebab wrapped in pita. I averted my eyes from straying to the greasy kitchen in the back, concentrating only on the sizzling spit of meat at the counter. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and finally arrived to the fishing boats, and then with a warm fish sandwich in hand, strolled along the sidewalk amongst the families and balloon salesmen. To top off the meal was of course a wedge of flaky baklava dripping with honey and sprinkled with bits of green cashew. Burping and licking my greasy fingers, I thought, now what? Turkish coffee or a tiny glass of fiery raaki?

"We do not serve alcohol here," a waiter in a white uniform told me at an outdoor cafe. He gestured to the minarets of the Blue Mosque poking heaven-wards from a canopy of trees a few yards away. The adherence to Muslim law forced my decision. Turkish coffee it was. Strong and smooth and sweet, all at the same time.

I boarded the plane the next morning destined for London, a souvenir brass table resting against my knees. It was a peaceful flight over southern Europe, the end of a wonderful trip, with my meal from the previous evening sitting thankfully dormant in my gut. I looked at the safe, bland packaged tray of airplane food the pretty stewardess was handing me. I thought to myself, no turning into the Incredible Hulk, no riding the porcelain Honda, and no new story to tell. Praise Allah.

Tom Fleming