BOGOTÁ

Calle Simon Bolivar, where I found my hostel, was a pretty bustling kind of place. Lots of street life, as hot as hell and humid with it. But then I’d just left East London in August: a pretty bustling kind of place. Lots of street life, as hot as hell and baking dry with it. Humidity was the only really new ingredient in the pot. Nothing I couldn’t handle.
Best news was that my Spanish worked. I could do better than get by, I could chat away, and I could feel it getting better with every conversation. I bottled out of calling home. I texted my parents that I was in South America, I’d call again soon, and I was turning the phone off.
Tears and regrets wouldn’t make it easier for anyone. I was having too much fun to get dragged down by a sackload of family guilt.
The hostel was cool. At home, being sixteen means lots of crappy things. Asking permission, being refused in pubs, struggling to get in 18 movies. Being a kid. Generally being less cool than you would be if you were 18 or 19 and going off to learn how to be a spoddy student or pulling your first wage. Here it was different. Hostel Club Mondo was full of drifting travellers, and Aussies and Kiwis of all ages and the odd Gap year kid; the more usual kind of nineteen year old Gap year kid. I don’t look old for my age. I can pass for fifteen easy. Being so young was the coolest thing in the joint. This was my audience: people who thought a sixteen year old Gap year was just the wildest, most out there story they’d heard (that day, anyway).
When it turned out I’d skipped out without permission, I was the dogs cojones. (That’s the bit of the dog that makes it squeal if you give it a little nudge). I had a few beers, a couple of tequilas, and turned down more than my share of weed and Colombian marching powder.
Bruv, drugs are so Twentieth Century.
I was sitting around there in the open courtyard in the middle of the hostel, centre of attention, imagining how good all this would look in my diary. Doesn’t every Gap year kid write a diary? And aren’t they all more or less exactly the same? So why should mine be any different? I might be younger, maybe more stubborn, but there wasn’t much else separating me from the rest of the travellers.
Not yet.
I didn’t know I’d end up writing not a diary but a whole damn autobiography. Hell, maybe the adults were right about the precocious thing. Sixteen year olds write postcards and emails, texts and Eng Lit essays and wish lists and to do lists. Not autobiographies. But things would change for me, so I need to tell my story.
Things would happen and my life would change.
Honestly, it really would.
I spent a few days in Bogotá, getting my Spanish exercised, chatting, haggling, chewing the fat with waiters and shopkeepers and street kids. Apart from forgetting that South Americans don’t do that lisping thing that the Spanish do, it was great. And the lisping thing did no harm. It reminded people where your Spanish came from. Proper, old country, European Spanish. I was treated nice. I could tell you all about Bogota, all the impressions I got. But to be honest, the big kick for me was being somewhere Spanish speaking where there was little or no English except in the few places where the backpackers hung out. I already speak English so I wasn’t hanging around those places much.
Apart from that, Bogotá? You want to know? Read a travel book. This isn’t a travel book. It isn’t a diary. I read my dad’s travel diary, which he doesn’t know. That’s how come I made that Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll crack. Sounds like he had a great time; did a lot of stuff. But it’s good for him he’s good in the tax office, because he’d starve if he needed to live off his writing. He writes like grandads dance. I’m not writing a travel book. If you want ‘Backpacking from Bogotá to Bolivia and Back on Twenty Bucks a Day’ you can bet twenty seven people already wrote it or something very similar. Go to Amazon. Go to the library.
I have something more important to do.
I have a job.
I have something dangerous I have to tell you.
I’ll warn you when it’s coming so you can back off and get away before it’s too late.
I’ll tell you now, we’re getting there. Not far to go.

After a couple of days I booked a bus to take me the first couple of hundred miles down the Trans American Highway. I had to go to the next pretty big place, because if I didn’t go somewhere where a good number of people would get off, I might not be able to find a space on the next bus through. The day I was getting on the bus, I called home.
‘Hey Dad.’
‘Mickey!’
I felt bad. He sounded weary and grateful at the same time. He sounded greyer.
‘You OK, Dad?’
‘What do you think, Mickey?’
‘I expect you are pretty worried, Dad. Sorry about that. But I did say I was going to do this.’
‘Don’t you listen, Micky? We told you that you couldn’t go.’
‘But you were wrong, Dad. I could. I’m in a hostel in Bogota. I’m fine. My Spanish is a treat. I’m having a good time. I’m learning stuff.’
‘Your mum is worried sick.’
‘No, Dad. Mum is worried but you’re worse. She’s too cool to worry that much. She’ll get distracted and think about something else most of the time. You’re the obsessive.’
‘Thanks for the analysis, Professor Jakes. Let’s not argue. You’re doing your thing, there’s nothing I can do except sit back here being worried and angry. Just take care, be careful. And remember we love you.’
Time to get off the phone before it gets weepy.
‘You too, Dad. I’ll watch myself. But believe me, it’s a lot less leery than Hackney Market. Bye Dad.’

Arse ache The bus wasn’t quite the Third World jalopy I expected. It was a pretty nice bus. A lot like the ones they use to send football fans to away matches. West Ham fans anyway. They have to use OK buses but they don’t risk the newest models on football fans. Or pensioners either.
Those leaky pee-bags you understand.
This one was even air conditioned, which made it about the most comfortable I’d been on since I arrived. When it cooled down in the evening a young kid came around with blankets.
Every now and then he come around with a lemon face spray so you could freshen up, and every couple of hours they’d stop for a pee, a drink and a snack. I caught a bunch of those buses. Sometimes riding with the Aussies, the Kiwis and the Europeans, sometimes not. It was fun whichever way, but that’s travel. Who cares. I spent weeks. I got through Colombia, I didn’t do drugs, even though there were plenty on offer; I did drink a good bit of ice-cold beer, and stuck at that. The spirits made me feel terrible so after the first couple of times doing tequila because it showed how big I was, I decided I’d rather not remember South America through the filter of a sickening headache and a vague wish I wasn’t conscious.
I passed through Ecuador.
I stood on the equator.
I went through Peru.
I stayed close to the main routes in Peru. They still have some pretty nutty terrorists who target tourists: tourist terrorists; maybe they’re dyslexic (why is that such a hard word to spell?) and I didn’t want to worry the folks too much who’d be fretting back home about every poisonous snake, drug, robber and pointy splinter in the continent without me telling them I was off in the territory of the Shining Path terrorist militias.
Next I could have headed straight into Chile, but first I nipped into Bolivia. Kind of ticking a box more than any real need to see Bolivia—except I thought it sounded cool. All these places were pretty amazing. I met indigenous Indian people in the countryside, all the Spanish descent people everywhere else, and my Spanish was already more or less like a native. I was having a truly mind-burstingly great time, and my arse was aching from the buses.
I’m not trying to put anyone off travel, up to this point it was a whole lot of totally memorable fun.
But like I said, that isn’t what this story is about.
We’re getting closer, now we’re in Chile.
Stuff happens here, and the Truth is, that’s what this book is about.
The big stuff that’s coming up and what that meant to me.
And what it might mean to you.
Beware.
Dangerous Materials.
Cautious Handling.