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MARCHING POWDER

inviting people I met on the tours in the weeks beforehand. Others, I invited from the tours on the actual day. Over the course of the afternoon, the small crowd in my room grew bigger and bigger. When we did a headcount at four in the afternoon, the total number of tourists came to forty-five. About half of them stayed the night. We tried to do another headcount at two in the morning, but no one would sit still. Everyone was moving around, talking and dancing. There was cocaine everywhere. It was absolutely out of control.

There wasn't enough space in my room for everyone to be in there at once, so they took it in shifts. There was a constant line of traffic going up and down my wooden staircase as the tourists came in to charge up on cocaine before returning to the main party in the courtyard, where the band was playing. But some of them got stuck talking and forgot to leave, so every now and then I had to drag people out of there to make space for new arrivals.

I eventually gave up on making the lines of coke for everyone myself. It was too slow; no sooner had I finished making ten lines than I'd have to make another ten. If things had stayed like that, I would have had no chance to go downstairs and socialise myself.

'Here, man. You seem to know what you are doing,' I said, dropping ten grams onto a CD case and putting a guy from New Zealand in charge of it. His eyes were already popping out of his head and his hands were shaking, but he was proud that I had chosen him over the other tourists and set about carefully carving up the crystals. He seemed to like his new job and settled in for the night. The fact that he would be in the same spot making lines of coke the entire time didn't worry him in the slightest, and it didn't stop him from talking, which he did a lot of.

When I came back upstairs for my next line, the conversation in the room had stopped completely. I assumed they'd had too much coke and I tried to liven them up.

'Who wants to come downstairs and meet some of my Bolivian friends?'

But no one would look me in the eye. Everyone looked very guilty, none more so than the New Zealander, who was kneeling on the ground holding two credit cards in his hands. Something bad had happened.

'I'm really sorry, mate. It was my fault. I admit it. I'll pay for it all.' He looked down at the carpet in front of him where the CD with all

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