My brother Peter was a year older than me. He had taken a gap year before starting at university, and had been working on an urban support project in Chile. I intended to go straight to uni from school, so we would both start together. That summer I flew out to Santiago as we had made plans to tour Chile, Peru and Bolivia.
We kept well off the tourist route, traveling by local trains and busses, staying at cheap hotels and hostels. After going north along the coast we crossed into Peru, eventually arriving at Lima. We left the Peruvian capital and turned east, traveling on ramshackle trains and buses towards the Bolivian border.
We intended to cross into Bolivia at a small border crossing that closed at night, and planned to arrive there about an hour before the checkpoint closed. However, our bus decided to overheat and we had to wait while the driver carried out repairs to the cooling hose and refilled the system with water. This put us nearly two hours behind schedule, and upon arriving at the border point we found it closed for the night.
Pete was confidant that if we just ducked under the barrier we could enter Bolivia without any trouble. The buildings on both sides of the border looked deserted, so I agreed to take a chance. What we didn't notice was that on the Bolivian side of the border there were two sentry boxes, and each one was occupied by an armed sentry. We were suddenly looking into the business end of two rifles.
The soldiers forced us into their barrack room where we were surrounded by another five soldiers. The soldiers were all about the same age as us, we found out later that they were conscripts. After closing up for the night most of them were in the process of taking a shower, so we were surrounded by a group of teenage soldiers, most of whom were just wearing their boxer shorts or had towels wrapped around them.
Only one of the spoke decent English and he told us that his name was Pablo. He also told us that their officer had gone home for the night and they had no one to turn to for advice. The soldiers spoke among themselves in Spanish for some time, discussing what to do with us. They gave us a drink, which tasted funny, which we later found out was a powerful aphrodisiac.