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MARCHING POWDER

I couldn't even get into my own room and in the end I gave up and let them do what they wanted. With not even enough room to stand up, it would have been impossible to find space for people to sleep. Luckily, no one was interested in sleeping. They were way too high.

The party kept getting bigger and bigger. People who had never met before decided they would go travelling together, starting the following day. Others, who had nothing in common whatsoever, decided they were best friends and would visit each other on the other side of the world. A few small romances between the backpackers also sprang up over the course of the evening. I even caught one of the Canadian tourists, a blond guy who was really shy and couldn't have been more than twenty, deeply involved in a conversation with one of the Bolivian wives, who must have been about fifty and had no teeth. She was feeding him chicha and they were flirting outrageously. He hadn't spoken a word of Spanish when he came in, but he was now jabbering away at a million miles an hour, and she was enraptured by what he was saying.

'I thought you couldn't speak Spanish,' I interrupted him.
'I couldn't. But I'm fluent now. It just came to me all at once.'
'Be careful,' I warned him. Her husband had fallen asleep drunk, but I was worried that he might wake up and wonder where his wife was, or that the inmates might talk.
'It's OK. She's teaching me to speak Quechua, too.'

Later I caught the two of them dancing together. He was enjoying himself, but I didn't want him to get too carried away.

'I thought you said you couldn't dance?' I called to him as I went past.
'I couldn't. But I'm a very fast learner. This stuff is excellent.'

The party kicked on until seven the next morning. The New Zealander was still sitting in the same position on my bed, chopping up lines, even though everyone had stopped taking them. I wanted to keep going also, but once it was daylight, many of the tourists suddenly remembered that they were in a prison and became paranoid. Some panicked and wanted to leave immediately, but the major, who had just come on duty, made them wait until after nine o'clock and then exit in small groups so that it wouldn't be so obvious. It was clear that none of them had slept, and twenty-two drunk, coked-up foreigners pouring out of a Bolivian prison during

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