BOLIVIA: Hasta luego

I'M AT: The Adventure Brew Hostel, La Paz, where we were promised one free beer, and helped ourselves to three. The scandal of it all deserves recording for posterity.

The people I've met are absolutely making this trip come alive. The hardest thing I have to do is say goodbye to them.

I met Mark in Ecuador and, for the most part, spent the next three months travelling with him through Peru and Bolivia. I got the bus all the way back to La Paz from Uyuni, from where his flight was leaving, because I wanted to see him off properly (as it turned out, the last night was a bit of a damp squib - it was a Monday - so we didn't reggaeton our way into the hearts of the locals as we'd hoped. We did both end up wearing Seventies gear though, so it wasn't all bad. Whilst I'm at it, going back to La Paz in general was also a mixed blessing - after arriving on the outskirts of La Paz to find the streets blockaded, we ended up getting picked up by a fake taxi driver, who admitted a fake copper, who proceeded to search for fake money, which he could apparently, miraculously, smell. As it turned out, Mark was relieved of his CD player and a load of pictures, but even so, we'd heard tales of kidnap, so it could have been far worse.)

You end up going through a lot with people, and spending lots of time with them. Mark is a thoughtful, intelligent geezer, a hit with the women despite his apparent lack of romantic interest in most of them, and he's a very good laugh. A good guy to travel with, easy going, and friendly. He does enjoy his job - some scale-manufacturing company or something - a bit too much for comfort, and preens himself to extraordinary lengths, paying a fortune for some sort of enriching body lotion in La Paz when you only had to step outside the hostel to get covered in toxic waste; and he 'monitors' the length of his eyebrows.

But despite these faults - some would say irrevocable flaws in his character - I have to say it, I was in tears when I said goodbye to him, and, well, lost for the rest of the day. The only thing to do was move on, so I did, that afternoon, on a bus to Oruro, whilst protestors dynamited the central streets of La Paz.

Salud, my friend, and sometime brother. I will see you next year.