It was either in Lima or Cusco that I found a novel that would change my life. The novel, The real life of Alejandro Mayta, was by Mario Vargas Llosa. It was not one of his best.

Anyone who has ever spent time backpacking will recall the makeshift libraries in every hostel corner, the books swapped so many times that their pages start to lose their heft, growing thinner than Rizla paper.

Crammed behind the ubiquitous copies of The beach or Siddhartha you could usually count on at least one book that you hadn’t already read.

I picked up Llosa’s book three months into a six-month visit to South America, at that moment when living out of your backpack for months on end, perfecting the art of a nicely rolled cigarette, befriending other travellers who looked exactly like yourself – mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly educated on our parents’ dime – begins to wear on your conscience.

It began to dawn on me that I might not emerge from South America as I had expected: fully bilingual in Spanish; a rookie writer for a leading North American daily newspaper; a Martha Gellhorn in training.

I was 24 years old and I was failing at the only career I ever wanted – to be a freelance journalist.

Things in South America started off well. Somehow, within a week of arriving in Quito, I had managed to land a ‘job’ as an unpaid freelance photographer for Narco News, an online news bulletin dedicated to exposing the social and economic devastation wreaked by the US war on drugs.

I was assigned to shadow a petite, chain-smoking Bolivian journalist named Luis who had been ferried from La Paz to Quito to cover the run-up to the election of Lucio Gutiérrez, Ecuador’s president from January 2003 to April 2005.

Luis was a small, spirited, excessively candid man. “How tall are you?” He fired at me when we first met, in a bar in Quito, having been put in touch with each other by the publisher of Narco News.

“5’10,” I replied.

He shook his head. “That’s too tall.”