📸 Photo

- BANGED UP ABROAD: HELLHOLE -

They offered us something to eat, but all they were eating were these sloppy black beans with rice, with a fried egg on the top. How could they eat that shit? Anyway, by now I was so nervous that there was no way I could have kept anything down - I'd have puked it all back up. We couldn't wait to get the hell out of there, to get the business done and just get on with it. We were both fed up of all the damned waiting.

The men fixed us a couple of drinks instead - we both needed some Dutch courage - and gave us a spliff to help us relax. 'You're good men,' they kept saying. 'You're good men.'

Trying to calm down, I looked out of the window. We could have been a million miles away from the four-star hotel, from the cocktails, palm trees and the beach. All I could see on the hillside outside were the shanty towns of Caracas, the shacks all made out of sheets of corrugated iron. It looked like a really big, ramshackle vegetable allotment. It looked exactly like what it was: a third-world country, full of stinking pollution, overcrowding, despair, poverty and danger.

One of the men vanished off behind a bead curtain. Soon they were all rummaging around out back, and we couldn't quite see what was going on. Naturally we started to fear the worst. What if they came back out and slit our throats? We knew they'd all have guns. With nobody knowing we were there, it was the most dangerous