A Bridge of Clouds

By Yasseen

(From a recent Instant Messenger conversation.)

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I could imagine the clouds that built up before Ivan struck. I learnt to watch clouds as a child and became a cloud watcher. Nowadays, I watch televised cricket matches in the West Indies for the clouds that appear above the pavilion and the palm fronds.

Clouds have nationality. You can’t see West Indian clouds anywhere else and they have the power to take me back to my childhood: waking to the pre-breakfast chatter of crockery in my grandmother’s pantry; the taste of sal’fish’n’ackee; the earthy smell of Caribbean rain; and the pandemonium of colours over the sea at sunset.

I like visiting the past as it was, not what it has become. Damn Ivan!

I see my friend Vincent again, laughing fit to burst, near the Montego Bay Creek. I’m collecting scattered oranges, tomatoes and mangoes, returning them to a donkey’s hamper and apologising -- from a safe distance-- to a market lady sitting on the ground before an omelette of raw eggs and broken shells.

Vincent and I, six-year–olds, or thereabouts, had rollicked downhill on a couple of adult-size racing bicycles, from Jackson Town towards the Dome. Head down, streamlined, I hadn’t seen the donkey and my front wheel had rammed it between its back legs. Language! The donkey had had a lot to say. So had its mount when she landed in the street!

One day clouds gathered above our old, red brick house at Church Street, harbingers of a hurricane that blew down our giant guango tree. That was when I began cloud-watching.

Later, we moved to a farm in the hills near Brown’s Town. We lived with oil lamps, a radio powered by a car battery and a tank for rain water. Reading, horse riding and the wartime broadcasts of London Calling in the Empire Service were the entertainments. On holidays from Munro, my brother and I made charcoal for our antiquated stove. We churned the milk and made butter for the house. We also made mango chutney, though I couldn’t tell you the recipe today.

The farm, it seemed to me, could somehow generate huge clouds. It was like a fountain I saw on a student rag day in Birmingham. Puck had thrown a bucket of industrial detergent into it and bubbles as big as baby elephants sprang from it, one on top of the other. Foam and suds flowed down a nearby statue of Queen Victoria. On storm-threatening days, a similar show in cloud form developed above the farmhouse.

Eventually, the illustrations in the outsize edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” that lay on a table in our drawing-room came to life above us. Angels fought with fiery darts and set the coconut trees afire. Rain extinguished the flames. Celestial artillery roared. The house trembled.

I left Jamaica in 1947 and visited it in 1984, and then again in 1993. Our Montego Bay house had disappeared. My great uncle’s house, once next door to it, had become a police station. A bicycle hung incongruously from a veranda rail. Union Street had been widened, eating up the front garden of my grandmother’s first home. Her last home, opposite it, had vanished.

My great aunt’s Jackson Town cottage, once known in the family as “the doll’s house” for its air of prefabricated perfection, had become a slummy schoolhouse. Dust patches had replaced its lawn and croquet hoops. Children had stoned the painted carving of a man in a tamarind tree at the gate, crumbling his morning coat, pinstripe trousers, shoes and spats. A fraction of his face remained.

In contrast, a small, circular Georgian house, that I had known as The Round House Surgery, was a joy to see. Once my grandfather’s medical clinic and then that of my doctor parents, it had become a ritzy restaurant. That, I thought, suited it better.

Open cast bauxite mining, somebody said, had wrecked the farm. So, we stayed away, and on my last visit, the family took a bus trip from Montego Bay to Black River and YS Falls. On the way, we traversed the Pedro Plain. The Santa Cruz Mountains appeared and, perched on a pinnacle, was Munro College. The school’s football chant echoed in my head again:

“In arce sitam quis!
When we shoot,
We never miss…”

Beyond Savanna-la-Mar, signs announced Bluefields, but where was the plantation house that had inspired “A High Wind in Jamaica”? I had known it as a hotel. It had been visible from the road. And where was the ford? Our bus should have splashed through a stream, but the road was dry.

The stream had tinkled down the hillside behind the hotel and run through the hotel garden on to the road, across a beach and into the sea. My brother and I, on holiday there, had often waded downstream to the beach, putting a basket under the cascades, pulling it out to look at the wriggling crayfish we’d caught and then throwing them back into the stream.

Suddenly, the wisdom of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism on ignorance struck me. I swallowed my questions. “The foliage blocked your view of the hotel,” I told myself. “Drought has temporarily dried up the stream.” I didn’t want something else to regret.

Our oarsman at Black River, who told us the names of the river birds in English and Spanish, was a magician. He knew where the alligators hid and could summon them to the surface.

“We must go quickly if you’re to see the Falls,” our guide said when we returned to the bus. “There’s a storm at YS every day at four o’clock.”

A few frayed cotton buds sped across the sky. Nowhere in the world, I thought, are storms predictable to the hour!

I soon revised my thoughts. As we bounced towards the Falls, darkness overcame the afternoon. Sheet lightning flickered and a monsoon-force downpour of rain washed the bus. What better climax could we have had to our trip, I thought, as we watched forked lightning claw the river. The clouds had come up trumps.

I should have asked our guide how come there was a storm there at four o’clock every afternoon. I forgot to. But then, I had a fairy tale to take home with me. “Ignorance,” as Wilde said, “is a like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”

I guess I’ll be watching West Indian clouds on TV for some time yet... I live in Cairo with the call from the minaret, the sight of date palms under litmus skies, the silence of the desert and the smell of ‘molokheya’ soup...

Sorrel, that cooling Jamaican drink, by the way, is called ‘karkaday’ in Egypt. Somebody did ask if we drank it here...

I hope they restore the school to what it was.

Yasseen is the author of a coming-of-age story called 'Emigrating Home', which takes you from his birthplace, Jamaica, a British colony at the time, to his schools in Britain, and to the home he did not know, in Egypt. Born a dual British-Egyptian national, he was called into the armies of his two countries when they were in conflict. The experience spreadeagled him across a divide and Yasseen often felt akin to the mythical Jason and the Argonauts in his travels. You can visit Yasseen at www.emigratinghome.com.

Copyright © Yasseen 2004

Bullfighting Ernest Hemingway

by The "EX" Patriot

Like many married couples, my wife and I like to take a break from the city once in a while. We’ll pack a couple of night bags, hers inevitably much larger than mine and hop in the car. More often than not, these weekend getaways are spent in the pueblo of El Retiro, a little mountain town about an hour outside of Medellín. The air is cool and fresh, like early autumn in my native Canada and the faint scent of cut wood wafts out from the doorways of the carpentry shops.

We’ve gone their often enough that we’ve developed our little traditions and rituals, one of my favourites being drinking beer and aguadiente in this little cantina off the main square. It is run by this peasant woman whom I would guess to be in her mid forties and the music played form bootlegged and home burned CD compilations is a mix of rock tunes and traditional Colombian arrangements.

The walls sport posters advertising Pilsen, a local beer. Each ad comes complete with a gorgeous model in a bikini. The rest of the wall space is papered with bullfighting placards from years gone by. My wife doesn’t really like the beer ads very much, and objects if I spend too much time looking at them, so I normally content myself with analysing the bullfighting placards. They remind me of movie posters, the matadors depicted in paintings, like old caricatures of Bogie or Brando, and each one locked eternally in a moment of mental and physical struggle. Each matador is stern and straight, holding himself with dignity and grace, while the bulls are drawn as savage and growling, yet noble creatures. The muscles and hair on their backs ripple in anticipation of the upcoming struggle. The names of the matadors are even painted in bold letters like the cast of a movie. The star’s name is printed in letters larger and bolder than the rest. This is the man you’ll pay to see, they say.

These placards possess a sense of romance and manliness, recalling the novels of Hemingway and the stories of Kerouac, stories that had been my mental escape when I was young and miserable, stories that still live in my fantasies.

I can’t remember when I first learned of the concept of bullfighting, but I do remember my first encounters with the passages from these works of fiction. I first read Hemingway when I was twenty, during my second vacation from university. I was working at an electric power generating station that summer and was driven to work each morning by one of the regular employees who lived nearby. Each morning, I’d sit on a bench in the parking lot of the store where he met me, reading The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, or one of three or four other novels that I read during that period. Jack Kerouac, I began shortly afterward, inspired by a biography that I friend had loaned me. To this day, the works of these two men remain close to my heart, as does the depictions of bullfighting found within their pages.

Hemingway considered himself an “aficionado” of the sport. The Sun Also Rises deals with the festive spirit of Pamplona and the finesse of bullfighting, its sense of tradition, and its place within the hearts of the people of Spain. Yes, there is the famous scene where it briefly focuses on a man, gored during the running of the bulls, but in true Hemingway fashion, its primary goal glorify the contest and hold it up as something to be cherished and admired.

Kerouac too, dealt with bullfighting in his short story collection, Lonesome Traveller. In the final story, the traveller makes his way to Mexico City where he takes in an afternoon of bullfighting. It emphasizes the feelings of the narrator, his anticipation, disappointment, and horror. He builds up the greatness and beauty of the events in his mind prior to witnessing the fight, creating expectations so vivid that the reality could never hope to live to. The bullfighting story ends with the sickness and horror he felt, having witnessed the dire spectacle.

One day this past February, my third in Medellín, I finally worked up the nerve to check out the bullfights for myself.

It was a perfect afternoon for a little blood and gore. When my wife and I left our apartment for the bullfight, there were a few clouds hanging over the mountains on the outskirts of the city but overhead the sun was shining, warm and comforting. We joined a group of about ten other gringos; my wife and the woman from school who arranged this annual outing for expatriate teachers were the only Colombians in the crowd. When we arrived at the newly renovated stadium, there was still an hour before the fight was scheduled to begin but already the Plaza de Toros was filled with people drinking aguadiente and beer purchased from the stands outside. Most of the women were dressed in the low rider jeans and shirts that exposed their midriffs. The men were wearing jeans and shirts unbuttoned sufficiently to expose their tanned chests. Nearly everyone was wearing white vaquero hats, and filled with anticipation of an afternoon of showmanship.

Our seats were in the new stands that had been built just this past year on top of the older section of the stadium. When we arrived three inflated advertisements, for cigarettes, aquadiente, and the local internet company occupied the ring in the centre of the arena.

One of the teachers passed me the bota. I held the skin up to my mouth; the plastic spout aimed at my throat and squeezed the sweet, red liquor into my mouth—the first attempt left a red streak of warm wetness on my shirt. My wife wiped the wine that had dripped down my chin. It looked a little like blood on her fingers tips.

We were sitting so high up that even when blood was streaming down the backs of the bulls, it simply didn’t seem real. Most of the bulls were killed easily and cleanly, except for the second fight. The matador misplaced his sword, spearing the animal off to one side so the metal did not pierce any major organs. The sword was retrieved from the animal and the matador tried again, and again. Each time the metal hit bone, scrapping another wound in the bull’s hide. Finally, the weakened animal collapsed from loss of blood, and in minutes, strapped to the chariot that dragged it from the ring.

The local Colombian, matador, Cesar Rincon, had the first and fourth fights, and although competent and clean with his two kills, the bulls just had no spark in them. “Your going to kill us, anyway,” they seemed to say, “so why should we bother playing your silly game.” Try as he might, he could just not get them to put on much of a show. If he hadn’t been the local hero, he certainly would not have received the warm applause that the crowd offered him.

The matador of the afternoon was named, Victor Puentes I believe. (To be honest, I didn’t get a program, and was not even thinking about writing this article, so I didn’t bother to learn it.) His fights and his style played to the crowd. As the bull ran around the ring, the matador turned his back to the animal, dancing and taunting the creature, showing the crowd which of the two competitors was truly in charge. He was the only matador who truly demonstrated a touch of the beauty and the grace that Hemingway wrote about--drawing the bull toward him, stepping off to one side at the last minute, pirouetting to bring the bull back so that it ran circles around the master of the ring. As he played this dance, the crowd shouted “Ole” with every charge of the bull and music blared over the speakers, prodding the spectators and the matador to wring every drop of excitement and enthusiasm from the fight.

And it was a thrill.

I sat in the stands as I sit at a baseball game, absorbing every detail, every charge and step made in the ring. It was during this fight that I finally caught a glimpse of the coup de grace, the plunging of the sword into the flesh of the bull. I discovered in the first two fights, that this happens so fast, if you blink you miss it. Then, all you have left to watch is the bull slowing down, blinded by pain, until its feet gives out and it falls to the dirt, dying. It took two fights for me to learn what to look for so that I was paying attention when the metal was plunged into the animal’s hide.

Despite the excitement and emotion of the day’s events, there was still a feeling of disappointment I could not seem to shake. I felt the same sensation when I attended a Pink Floyd concert about ten years ago. The show was breath taking, if more than a little reminiscent of their previous tour and the songs and the performances outstanding. Yet there was still a problem, this nagging feeling I couldn’t place. It wasn’t that the band was bad by any means, but there was still something just a little off about it; Roger Moore wasn’t there, David Gilmore was a little too old; the songs a little too worn. I left with a strange sensation that I had seen this wonderful band about fifteen years too late, past its prime. I longed for my own personal Time Machine so I could travel back to the glory days and see them when they should have been seen.

This is how I felt as I watched the matadors lead the bulls to their ultimate demise. The wine skin had a plastic top. There were advertisements all around the ring. The music blaring through the PA system was tinny and obviously a recording. And many of the people were chatting on cell phones as they watched the performance. I wondered what Hemingway or even Kerouac would have thought of it.

But, ultimately, I left the Plaza de Toros that evening with the darkness growing full around me, lost in thoughts and memories and a sense of fulfillment that I had finally seen an afternoon of bullfighting. Yes, there is a thrill, an excitement to the sport similar to that of watching a horror movie and I found myself wondering if I would want to go back again next year, or even the next week.

Check out the photo album.

Sun, Surf, and Former Pirate Hideouts: San Andres, Colombia

by The "EX" Patriot

San Andres is the largest island in an archipelago of coral islands four hundred and eighty miles north of the Caribbean coast of Colombia. In fact, it is actually closer to the countries of Central America. It is small enough to circumnavigate in about an hour, but the beaches are so nice and the waters are normally so calm that you probably won’t even notice the size.

The island itself was first discovered by the British in the early to mid seventeenth century who then fought with Spain over rights to the land until the Treaty of Versailles in 1793 when the Spanish obtained official and permanent control. The archipelago became something of a Kashmir of the west during the twentieth century as Colombia and Panama each claimed rights to its shores. In recent years, however, it has fallen under control of Colombia (where it will most likely remain) and, for all intents and purposes, has become the country’s only serious international tourist attraction where visitors don’t seem to be worried about being kidnapped.

San Andres is a free port which means a lot of cheap shopping, at least by North American standards. From the perspective of someone who has lived in Latin America for ten years, however, there aren't many bargains to be had. There are many knock-off products and a lot of contraband, and several interesting stores like the oddly named Gourmet Shop in the photo at the upper right. The drawback to the island's position in the Atlantic, of course, is that it provides perfect shelter for the drug trade; it is rumored that many pounds of illegal substances are exchanged off the coast every month.

The first thing one notices upon arriving, is that San Andres does not have any visible signs of Spanish colonization. Every other community in Central and South America has the pre-requisite Spanish architecture and layout, but San Andres has houses and towns that seem remarkably familiar to those from the Northeast Coast of America and Maritime provinces of Canada.

San Andres also has the highest literacy rate in Colombia as public education is free up until the twelfth grade. Most islanders speak English and Spanish, as well as their native Creole. Not only is the trilingual nature of the locals impressive, it is necessary in a culture where the dominant trade is tourism. And San Andres’ unique location makes it an economic vacation locale for both North and South Americans. Even the usually finicky Quebecois seem to have a good time on the island.

The sheer number of tourists is, in fact, the only real drawback to vacationing here. Do not expect any solitary romantic walks along the beach or hidden trysts in the surf. Do expect to indulge yourself in just about any style of water activity you can think of. There are wind surfing and water boarding facilities, in addition to great scuba diving and snorkelling opportunities.

The major hotel chain on the island is the Decameron which has five resorts ranging in price and quality of facilities. Each hotel is based on “all inclusive” packages where food and, more importantly, drinks and cigarettes are included. And, for you North Americans and British who are used to having your recreational lives regulated by those pesky laws and restrictions that your governments feel they have to place on your private lives, don’t worry about closing time or having to smoke in special rooms.

Not every Decameron hotel has everything you may want to do, however, so there is service provided where the clientele of one hotel will be welcomed at another during the day. The first thing to do, however, is study the Decameron brochure to find out the details of how to make reservations. When my wife and I were there we spent the first two nights eating in the lesser quality Buffet Dinner restaurant because we couldn’t wake up in time (eight o’clock) to make reservations in the good restaurants. The second day we were there, we realised that you could sign up at the good restaurants for the other hotels the day before. Sound strange? It did to us as well.

There are also several services that provide tours of the island. Spend the money and take the smaller private company tour. It offers an air-conditioned mini-van and free booze throughout the four hour tour. You get to go to this restaurant on the highest point of the island which serves great coconut drinks, a small museum displaying life on the island when electricity and telephones were not readily available (nor even invented for that matter), a trip to the cave where the pirate Henry Morgan used to hide his treasure, and the “blow-hole” a small crevice in the coral just off the shore which acts as a whales blow-hole spurting water all over tourists at irregular intervals.

The first thing the North American will notice travelling to these locations is the complete lack of government regulation. Whether or not these things are being slowly destroyed by the numerous tourists hanging out there, I couldn’t really say, but it is nice to be able to actually walk down into the cave rather than simply admiring it from afar.

All this being taken into account, the best thing to do in San Andres is relax. Whether it is sunbathing, sitting at the bar or on the hotel board walk with a good book, or simply watching the moon hanging over the surf breaking on the distant coral reefs, you can spend days on the island doing nothing and enjoying it.

Check out more from The "EX" Patriot about San Andres

Santa Fe de Antioquia

Last Christmas I took a trip from Medellin, Colombia to Santa Fe de Antioquia, the oldest municipality in Colombia. It is a small, hot town that conjures images from the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The main square is filled with vendors and restaurant/bars where people sit on the street drinking and dancing late into the night. The architecture is Spanish Colonial and the people are friendly and talkative. A must see for any trip to this region of Colombia.

I thought that I'd share some of the photos from that trip with ScribeCentral.com.

The road to Antioquia is lined with small restaurants and tiendas, but at one particular spot there is a string of Ranchos selling fruit and baked goods. Goods made from tamarindo (or tamarind) are the classics in these stores. My favourite is this candy made from tamarindo and wound into a stick. It actually looks like some kind of hardened animal dropping, but tastes great. The photo itself, I snapped while we were stopped by the police, a regular occurrence along the Colombian highways.

Last June, as I was making the same trip. My friends took a bus, but my girlfriend and I decided to take her car. She got tired of driving, so I took over for a while. Of course, I managed to get pulled over at one of these stops and had a brief conversation with the cop who was wearing fatigues and carrying a big heavy-looking automatic rifle. He informed me that I had been in the country so long that I needed a Colombian licence (here in Latin America they don’t recognize any form of international driver’s permit). I got out of the car to change seats with my girlfriend so she could drive the rest of the way, only to find her immersed in conversation with the police officer. A few minutes, and twenty thousand pesos later, we drove away avoiding the formal hundred thousand peso fine. The cop, my girlfriend said, was pretty adamant at first about not accepting this “roadside fee” because I, being a gringo, would tell on him. She convinced him that of course I wouldn’t, and I haven’t until today.

Antioquia, like every Spanish colonial town is laid out around a central square with the main church on one side and the town hall with the jail and courthouse on another. The square is the social center of the town, usually filled with merchants offering wares unique to that area. The three photos I have here shows two stands selling food similar to what I described above. You can see bottles of tamarindo mixed with water designed for making juices, tamarindo candies, sweetened grapefruit preserves, jars of honey, sweet desserts, and many other flavourful goodies. The third photo depicts a staple in any Latin American marketplace: the black-market CD centre. What the First World record companies just don’t get is that CDs are so overpriced in Latin America (and the rest of the world for that matter) where many people live on ridiculously low wages that many people have no alternative but to buy bootlegged copies of their favourite music. These copies, in addition usually get transferred to enough cassettes so as to service an entire community.

I also made my third trip to the “bus terminal” which has a more traditional style market on its second floor. The first time I was there back in August of 2001, I ran into a group of men coming out of the mountains with donkeys laden with packs of red coffee beans. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera to capture the “Juan Valdez” scene and have gone back two times hoping to catch the site again. No luck of course.

This is a picture I found of beans, corn, and rice being sold at one of the stalls. A true collection of the natural staples of Colombia.

I found this poster left over from the Presidential elections five months earlier. It depicts the current and popular President Alvaro Uribe. In the past few months, Uribe has increased security along the highways and in the cities, making his use of a Colombian version of Marshal Law. His efforts to put an end to the decades long civil war which has left the country at the mercy of the terrorists groups of the FARC and right-wing ParaMilitary have been met with mixed success. These last two weeks, for example have been filled with bombs exploding in some of the major urban centers.

This final picture is one of a butcher’s store in the market. After I asked the owner if I could take his photo, I was told that he made some quick efforts to fix his hair when my back was turned. So here's a photo of the handsome guy.

The rest of the trip was devoted to enjoying the warmth and sun and sipping beer in the main square. In the future, I'll share some of those photos with the ScribeCentral.com community.

Sincerely,

The "Ex" Patriot

Punishment Capital

--by Stuart Kent

Ever wondered what the inside of a South American Prison was like? Get caught smuggling some cocaine out of Bolivia or for that matter any South American country and you are sure to find out. But there is some good news for all of us who do not want to commit a crime and still want to see the inside of a South American prison.

In La Paz Bolivia, the cities central prison has been opened up to visitors. I can with great assurance say it is has not been opened up with the formal authority of the state but with the tacit approval of the prisoner governor and the guards who are supplementing their wages with a 50 percent cut from the 10US$ fee wide eyed tourists who are visiting the prison pay.

It all started 7 years ago when a British inmate of the prison realised there was money to be made here. He charged interested backpackers 50US$ to spend a night partying in the prison’s recreation hall. All they had to do was turn up, bring the booze and pay. After bribing the guards he was able to ensure a regular flow of money from tourists searching for something different -a chance to party for a night in a South American prison and leave the next day with nothing but a hang over and great memories of a unique travelling experience.

The prison is situated in downtown La Paz; it covers a city block, has high walls and a significant police presence in the area. Three days a week, visitors, lawyers, family members and a collection of nervous looking back packers line up at the entrance to enter the prison. It is a picture of chaos as bags are searched in a haphazard manner and nervous looking tourists await the signal for them to enter the prison.

The sign on the wall saying, “The governor of the prison forbids all tourists to enter the prison” is ignored by all, both uniformed and tourists alike. I line up, hand over my passport, have a number written on my fore arm and prepare to enter the prison. The scene I can see through the bars is one of chaos as prisoners yell out and beckon the tourists to enter. I am filled with understandable apprehension as I go through the gate that in many ways would represent a nightmare to me if it was for real.

Upon entering the prison the first thing I notice is the lack of uniformed guards. I am told that the prison guards never enter the prison unless they have to and then in numbers of 20 or more. This does nothing to calm my fears as myself and 20 other inquisitive tourists are about to be immersed in the daily life of 1000 of Bolivia’s worst offenders, murders, rapists and drug smugglers. I take a few deep breaths and look around at fellow tourists and prisoners for some sign of assurance that all will be OK, none is forth coming

Soon I am ushered into a quiet courtyard where we meet our guide for the tour. His name is Hans a German national who has been behind these walls for three years. He is very thin and it is obvious that he has no trouble getting his hands on substances that make his time in the prison a little easier.

He explains the tour and the rules, simply put we are to stay with him, feel free to ask questions, do not be afraid; this last one he keeps repeating. I am starting to think all of us cannot hide our worry. Soon the members of our group are asking all sorts of questions. The most interesting are about Hans. Hans got busted with a couple kilos of cocaine at La Paz airport. His story is one of bad luck, after being strip-searched and getting the all clear, a customs official took Hans’s coat off the hook it was hanging on and realised it was very heavy – 2.5 kilos heavier than it should have been, the rest is a story of trials, corrupt police and a 30 year old German national doing an 8 year stretch. He hopes to be out in December. I have never felt sorry for a drug smuggler in my whole life but here I was talking to a man who was caught because a guard was too polite and wanted to help him with his coat.

As we leave our corner of the courtyard we begin our tour. We are told how the prison works. It all revolves around money! There are 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 star sections of the prison and just like the hotel ranking system the 5 star section is the best. The prisoners buy their cells in a one off payment for the length of their sentence and depending on their available funds they go to different sections of the prison. In the 5 Star section a cell costs 5000US$, there is hot water, Satellite TV, restaurants to eat at, all the comforts of the outside world. Now it is hard to believe but there is a waiting list to get into these areas. Many inmates have the money, not hard to believe when there are guys in the prison doing 25 years for smuggling 4.5 tons of cocaine.

As we walk through the prison we visit the 4, 3, 2 and 1 star sections. The conditions get worse and I am reminded of scenes from Midnight Express. It is in the one star sections that I start to see what it is like for the majority of the prisoners. They are fed twice a day by the government who allegedly put tranquillisers in the food to keep the prisoners calm. The stench of sewerage is strong and the smell of unwashed men crammed sometimes 20 to a cell seems a world removed from the relatively luxurious conditions of the 5 star section.

The whole prison was a mini free world where elections are held for prison representatives, soccer matches take place and are sponsored to the tune of 10,000 US$ by Coke, I mean the soft drink company – no Pepsi in this prison. Wives visit and if a prisoner has enough money she may live in the prison. There are 300 children currently living in the prison and the funds from the tour groups are helping to build a kindergarten for them.

As our tour wound up, I realised that whilst this was a surreal experience it was also the purest form of capitalism I had even seen. Here was a community of 1000 men who live by the rules of supply and demand and where the rich get richer and the poor are trampled on.

As I departed the prison and left to enjoy the benefits of freedom I asked Hans what he will do when he gets out. His response, “Deal drugs all over Europe”. I realised that his prison experience nothing to re-educate him or deter him from future criminal activity, in fact it seemed that the punishment aspect of prison life was nonexistent.

Money made the world go round in there, 50 bucks got a kilo of Coke into the prison, 30 allowed your wife or girlfriend to spend the night, 150 bucks was enough to buy a night of freedom on the town dancing the night away at the local discos.

Ironically greed and money put many of the offenders in the prison and yet this is exactly what each prisoner needs to survive in a prison in La Paz, Bolivia. Some prisoners leave richer than when they went in. Who says crime does not pay!