📸 Photo

MARCHING POWDER

couldn't speak Spanish but couldn't speak any English either. I wondered how he got around Bolivia at all, because with me, he just kept bowing and smiling all the time. He drank about fifteen cups of tea. When I came back from buying him more tea bags, he had left without saying goodbye.

There was also the former corporate high-flyer who now liked to climb really high peaks, where he would spend the night on his own, without telling anyone. For altitudes above five thousand metres, he had two high-tech thermal sleeping bags which fastened up so tightly that he only had a tiny mouth hole to breathe through. 'Once, it was so cold that I had to close it right up and breathe through a straw to avoid getting frostbite on my lips,' he told me.

Why do people do these things to themselves? I wondered. Don't they have families? Doesn't anyone care about them?

The strangest thing about all these strange people was that they thought I was strange too, and that we had some sort of connection, like I was one of them. I didn't know whether I should have been flattered or upset by that. Things could be tough in the prison and I had probably suffered as much as they had, but I certainly hadn't done so by choice.

The most unexpected visitor was Fat Joe, although when I first met him I didn't know how bizarre the purpose of his visit would turn out to be.