A man was mugged and robbed on the beach in the dark area just south of BC's, near where an alleyway runs up to the road, oh, maybe 1-2 years ago. By dark alleys, where there's an easy getaway route, that's where you want to be most careful. I don't actually agree with your analysis of what hurts the most, Seashell - I think it's the fact that you've been violated and were totally vulnerable. But as we know, it's not only in muggings that people ride roughshod over other people's rights here.

The worst that happened to me was when I was a passenger in a car in Kampala a few years back. I had my watch arm resting on an open window when we were moving very slowly, and someone grabbed my hand, slipped a very sharp knife under the leather watch strap and up my arm, and took the watch. He didn't actually cut me much, but I'm sure he would have been quite prepared to.

Actually, that's not the worst now I come to think about it. Inside a closed shopping mall in Johannesburg more recently than the above, I was grabbed from behind by four very big and very black guys and held very securely, while three others went through my pockets, and took my watch, wallet, small backpack etc. They each had a large panga (a long knife, at least 18" long, sometimes curved) and when I struggled they used them on me. I ended up with several non-critical cuts and three broken ribs. But I did manage to grab the head of one of them and ram it hard into the stone floor a few times. He became incoherent and was carried/dragged away by his friends. I hope he at least had a bad headache for some time. What got me about this was that the whole incident was watched from a few yards away by three armed guards who did absolutely nothing to intervene, or to help me afterwards. The police said they were probably part of the "scam", or had been threatened that if they did intervene they wouldn't see their children again. This is a city that in terms of violent crime makes Belize City look like a vicar's tea party.

There's always a common element here - the people who commit these sorts of crimes don't need to. The people who are really poor are usually totally honest. I remember how generous most people were on my travels through Africa, when often the only way they could give me food was to go without themselves. It's a fine line between being gracious and accepting gratefully when you know the cost to them is immense, and declining and risking offending them just because you know you will be depriving them. There was the one occasion in a black township in apartheid South Africa when my hosts insisted that I stay the night, and I realised too late that I would be taking the only bed in the hut. These people were desperately poor but happy and content, and honest to the extent that to be dishonest had never occurred to them.

I'm minded of something a local businesman of Guatemalan extraction who also has a home in the USA said to me a couple of years ago. He said he despised Guatemalans for being honest and nice people - you never got anywhere by being nice.

Sorry to put people through this - it helps take my mind off other things!