My bad trip – while reporting on the G20, I made Russia mad and got drenched in peniswasser

One of my most memorable travel adventures involved Vladimir Putin, molotov cocktails and a peniswasser-related gonorrhoea incident.

All in the one night.

In July 2017 I joined a posse of world leaders in Hamburg for the G20 – the World Cup of global diplomacy.

Sarah Martin, my longtime partner in crime, and I were there as part of the press pack lumbering after then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. (Sarah was working for the West Australian at the time, and I was at the Advertiser.)

We rocked in to a lovely hotel, inside the heavily protected green zone that housed presidents, prime ministers and their various hangers on.

Beyond the boundaries of our compound, chaos had erupted.

We were told in no uncertain terms we were to stay away from the anti-capitalist riots in St Pauli, the seething and shady party district. It was far too dangerous, they said. Violent clashes had left 500 police injured. There was looting and raving and Sturm und Drang.

Sarah and I listened, nodded, and grabbed a cab.

There was rubble on the streets, parts of which were illuminated only by the occasional molotov cocktail, burning vehicle or stuttering store light. Swarms of masked protesters flowed through buildings adorned with anti-G20 signs.

We wove through the crowds, agog. Took selfies with military hardware.

We came across an alleyway, with a sign saying “women prohibited”. Infected by the anarchic spirit of the night, we ploughed forward.

It was the red light district, a quaint, short street where the sex workers sat in windows, waiting for customers. Almost immediately, several opened their windows and threw water on us, mostly in my face; but the night was balmy and full of wine, so we hardly cared.

Until, that is, we clocked that the women were seriously pissed at us. And it dawned on our foggy brains that there were valid reasons sex workers might not want rubberneckers trundling through their workplace.

We skedaddled.

It was 2 or 3am, and we had an early start, and we were serious journalists covering a serious event. Time for bed.

Then we saw the red carpet, and the clumps of men in black suits with earpieces, and the sleek black cars sporting Russian flags. Not the usual ones; the president’s special flags, with a coat of arms in the middle.

Putin was about to arrive. Sarah and I looked at each other. We were going to pap Vladimir fucking Putin.

Meaty hands tried to cover our cameras, stocky bodies tried to crowd us away from that red carpet. There’s footage of that night, as the Russians called in hotel management to try to get rid of us.

Sarah valiantly argued for democracy, for freedom of the press. I giggled inanely as I tried to duck.

In the end we didn’t get to Putin. I managed a blurry shot of him swooshing through the lobby (although, of course, it could have been a body double). Eventually we stumbled into bed mere minutes before we had to peel our eyes open again.

The morning began with a debrief-slash-dressing-down from Dfat. There had been a formal complaint, blah blah blah. An international incident, whatever. Our rooms were probably bugged, etc. We could tell their hearts weren’t in it.

We ran them through our eventful evening, for the record.

I included the red light district for a laugh. The mood needed lightening. But it caught the attention of one of Turnbull’s entourage – possibly his personal physician.

They threw water? Yes. And you got it in your face? Yes.

The water, it turns out, is known as peniswasser, and it’s what sex workers’ customers use to wash themselves. And, as with all great international summits, there were STI infections doing the rounds, including gonorrhoea.

Gonorrhoea can travel in water, he said. It can infect mucous membranes; like those, for example, in your eyes. I blinked.

People moved, almost imperceptibly, away from me.

After the trip, a bemused Adelaide GP used a pointy cotton bud to scrape the nooks and crannies of my eyeballs to test for STIs.

It was only as I was writing this that I had a proper look at the research. It does not seem you can catch gonorrhoea from hurled water. Nicely played, bureaucrat. We encumbered you with Russian paperwork and in return you gave me some embarrassing and unnecessary life admin.

I may not have scored a ripper Putin interview, but at least I failed to bring home gonorrhoea of the eyeballs.