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BANGED UP ABROAD: HELLHOLE

from Leicester. We'd never been abroad in our lives. And now we'd been busted for smuggling ten kilos of cocaine and were being interrogated by armed police in a South American country, in a language we didn't understand. Nobody knew where we were. We didn't really know where we were.

Nothing can prepare you for deep shit like that.

There were what seemed like hundreds of people in the room: the two undercover cops who'd nabbed us; members of the National Guard who were dressed in army outfits with gun holsters, red berets and shit-kick-ing boots; and others who told us they were from Inter-pol. They were ready to nail us.

We were totally screwed.

Everything was happening so fast, it was impossible to take it all in. All the talking was done in Spanish – there were ten of them banging on at any one time, nobody spoke English and they didn't provide an inter-preter. My Spanish began and ended at 'Cerveza [beer], por favor,' so we might as well have been on Mars for all we understood.

As I sat there, trying to take it all in, I couldn't stop thinking about our arrest. A dodgy-looking guy had boarded the plane right after we'd been stopped and searched, and he'd looked back at us, flashing us a glance that had seemed to say: 'Don't you dare grass me up.' At that moment, it just seemed so obvious to me that the whole thing was a set-up – we'd been