📸 Photo

MARCHING POWDER

I had seen photos of this incredible place. It is flat and white as far as the eye can see and many people have lost out there, because there are no roads and it is completely empty except for the pure white of hard-packed salt.

Yasheeda didn't want to leave right then; she wanted to spend a few more days in La Paz. The Potosí mines and the salt plains of Uyuni would still be there next month, but it wasn't every day you could live in a prison. It was the experience of a lifetime. Sharon started yelling, saying that she and the others weren't prepared to wait. She left the prison, even angrier than when she had arrived. We waved goodbye to her from inside the gates, but she didn't look back. I felt a little sorry for her, but I was also glad that Yasheeda was going to stay. I was really starting to like her – a lot. Besides, they could meet up in a week or so and go travelling together again then.

Yasheeda stayed that night and the next, and then all the following week. Sometimes she left during the day to check her email and visit friends staying at El Lobo, but she would always return with provisions and small gifts for me. After ten days, she was friends with all the guards and had moved her belongings out of the hostel and into my room. We started living together in prison, sharing my single bed and eventually negotiated a weekly rate with the major, which worked out to be only slightly more expensive than the hostel she had been staying in.

Yasheeda's friends came back from the Salar of Uyuni tour two weeks after she had moved in with me. Their next adventure was going to be a downhill bike ride to a town called Coroico. Yasheeda had to go with them because they had planned this trip together back in Israel and she felt she couldn't let them down. She kept apologising and saying that she wanted to stay with me, but I could tell that, deep down, she was quite excited about going. I didn't want her to leave, but I also knew that I had no right to ask her to stay. She was young and beautiful and free, and she was in Bolivia for a holiday, not to live in prison.

'OK, then. Goodbye. Have fun,' I tried not to sound sad.
'Don't say that, Tommy.'
'Don't say what?'
'Goodbye. Never say "goodbye", Tommy. I don't believe in goodbyes. Goodbye is too permanent. You should always say "Hasta luego", like the Bolivians do. That way you will always meet up again