We had an argument. It was then that he broke down in tears and confessed that he was addicted to Crack. He needed one thousand colones (about $1.80 or 1.5€) for his hit. He told me he hated himself for doing this; that it was the drugs talking. He cried so much, I could do nothing to comfort him except hug him tightly as he sobbed heavily.

I never saw Remi at night. He slept in a part of the town known as the Coke Cola district. I visited the area in the daytime. It is an area of despair and loss. While travel writers and tour guides will warn you to keep away from the Coca Cola district, I urge you to go there and see for yourselves the evil side of capitalism and the despair that people have to suffer as a result.

The Coca Cola district is so called because it was built by the drink’s company to house its workers. When Coca Cola shut its plant down, it had no need for the district or its families, so left them to their own devices; becoming the unjust fears of tourists and travel writers.

Remi has taught me so much about San Jose and the world; not just through his words, but his lifestyle too. He has helped me see poverty and desperation, and my place as a tourist and human being within it all. To me, that’s what travelling is all about.

But all that is meaningless if nothing is done about it. If we see it, photograph it, write emails home about it, even feel some of the pain but then walk away, we are just as bad as those who don’t care to see the reality of a country they come to visit or who write of its poor people as a group to be feared and avoided rather than understood and listened to.

During one meal, I asked Remi how long he had been on drugs. “One year,” he told me, shoving a large piece of burger into his mouth, and then added – more as a desperate question – “but I still have time, don’t I – to make it as a footballer?” It was an easy question to answer, but a far more difficult one to believe. I looked at Remi sat in that burger bar being a teenager like any other: A bright lad with a warm but naughty sense of humour and a mind of dreams and hopes – not a thousand days from the little kids I saw playing in his hometown. In my pause, he looked to me for re-assurance and hope.

I have two distinct pictures of Remi in my mind that I know will never leave me. One is the hard, brittle face of him demanding money; a face that hid so much pain and fear behind an expression of anger and hatred of himself. The other is the cheeky, sparkling eyes and grinning expression he has when he is eating and chatting away. “Yeah,” I said. “You still have time – as long as you still have that sparkle in your eyes.” He grinned, and his eyes shone ever brighter.