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SAN PEDRO PRISON TOURS

main courtyard. Once they were inside, I would introduce myself properly before taking them straight to my room where I would offer to make them a cup of tea or coffee. When everyone felt comfortable, I would give them some background information on the prison. Then I would show them around the various sections, except for the five-and-a-half-star section of Posta, which you needed permission to enter.

Everything was quite peaceful in San Pedro during the day and there really wasn't all that much to see. What the tourists enjoyed most of all was the thrill of actually being inside a prison, as well as hearing about how the San Pedro system worked. As I took my visitors around each part of the prison, I told them about my own experiences. I showed them the prison church, the abandoned building where I had slept the first night, as well as la piscina - 'the pool' - and explained a little about the property system, the prison economy and the prison hierarchy. They were always fascinated by the luxurious cells they saw and by the fact that there were young children about as well as cats and dogs.

The tour itself ran for less than an hour. What happened afterwards depended on what the tourists wanted. Sometimes we ate a meal at one of the restaurants, which the tourists often claimed served better food than the ones outside. Then, if there wasn't another group waiting for me, we would go back to my room for a chat. When it came time to leave I would accompany them to the gate to make sure that they got their passports back and made it safely out of the prison.

Running the tours was quite easy money and a lot of fun. Within a few months, I had worked out which parts of the prison and which stories the tourists found most interesting. I established a kind of routine in the way I did things, but I never got bored because no two groups were ever the same and I never got tired of seeing people's reactions to how crazy San Pedro was. However, being a tour guide wasn't all smooth sailing. There were a lot of people I needed to keep happy, which involved a lot of juggling.

First, some key members of the police wanted their cut. In the beginning, they were content to receive ten bolivianos per tourist, which was three bolivianos more than the standard entry price paid by the locals. However, they worked out very quickly that the foreigners would be willing to pay more. I had no choice but to agree to whatever

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