Hello from the roadside! Your friendly neighborhood worldwide hitchhiker just arrived in Santiago de Chile, which is Chile’s capital city. To get here, Jonas and I hitchhiked an empty bus/van of sorts. We met a guy who lived in Punta Arenas. For reference: Punta Arenas is close-ish to Antarctica and my goal for traveling southward. He was planning to just stay there for two months, but then he lived there for fifteen years! I wonder if the same will happen to me… We exchanged phone numbers so by the time I reach Punta Arenas I can give him a callContinue reading
South America
La Serena: Reading in the Japanese Garden (Chile)
En route to Santiago de Chile, there are many cities worth a visit, but somehow there seems to be only domestic tourism. One of them is the city of La Serena, which has a sweet Japanese garden. It’s good for book reading and a mandatory relaxation session with ducks, koi fish, and some scary looking swans. It was so peaceful until someone with a few too many kids showed up with eyes set on destroying plants and harassing the animals. Then the peace was gone. There should be more childfree places in this world. Now I’ll need to continue readingContinue reading
Atacama Desert Hitchhiking—Trees + Rain, Please! (Chile)
The Atacama is a huge desert, yet it only takes a handful of cars to get going to where you need to be! As in the entirety of Chile, you can basically only travel North or South, nearly all traffic goes a long distance. It’s easy to find a ride to Chile’s capital city Santiago. But seriously, one can only appreciate so much Atacama Desert. I need to see a tree or a bunch of trees. Something taller than a shrub. I’m traveling in the wrong season to see the (annual?) blooming of the Atacama Desert. The people I’ve takenContinue reading
Paranal Observatory, Chile: Tour Group Crashing
“Paranal Observatory, Chile: Tour Group Crashing” has a Russian 🇷🇺 translation: «Паранальская Обсерватория, Чили: Незваные Туристы» Today cannot be described as anything else than plain epic. Together with Jonas, I hitchhiked from Antofagasta to the Paranal Observatory. Our drivers were kind enough to drive us up the mountain out of their way. They drove back downhill and we anticipated hitchhiking another car down within the hour. I definitely didn’t expect to come closer to the Very Large Telescope than the security guys at the gate. But it is a Saturday today and the tour group was just about to leave.Continue reading
Perú to Chile by Hitchhiking (Tacna – Arica Border Crossing)
Goodbye Perú and hello Chile! I hitchhiked from Perú to Chile by starting at Tacna’s airport. Then I caught a ride to the border with Chile and onward to the beach city of Arica. Besides the heat, it was fairly easy to stop a ride. But I can’t complain as I had a nice palm tree to provide me shadow. This is where I stood in coordinates: -18.049486297999366, -70.27823982373954 I’ve been adding all kinds of information to HitchWiki.org recently as there are not a whole bunch of articles on South America. And I’m currently here anyway 😉 What can I sayContinue reading
Cuevas Waterfalls, Samaipata Bolivia
I didn’t jump from this waterfall. Just chilled an entire day at the three falls of Cuevas, close to Samaipata in Bolivia. Ultimate chill alert! What a beautiful place to cool down one’s feet and enjoy nature. I did get my camera a little wet with all the micro sploosh that’s floating in the air at the bottom of the biggest waterfall. There are two other waterfalls with beaches to relax at. Cuevas is about 20 km from Samaipata in the direction of Santa Cruz and costs 15 Bolivianos for entrance. Unfortunately, it gets really busy in the afternoon onContinue reading
Samaipata and Bolivia’s other “Death Roads”
When hitchhiking through this amazing valley to get to Samaipata, Bolivia, football-sized rocks fell down a cliff. It’s such a strange thing to witness. They barely missed the car in front of ours. My driver told his daughter who was sitting in the roof-window of the car to come down and sit inside between Jonas and me. “We have to do this quick”, he says in Spanish. He slows down the car and waits for the dangerous stretch to clear. This doesn’t worry me at all; I grew up with the assumption that if there’s any danger, other people willContinue reading
Paraguay from the Back of a Pick-Up Truck
Just another day at the office… for a hitchhiker! Today I hitchhiked in the back of this pickup truck toward Mariscal Estigarribia, the last village with a sizeable population in Paraguay before the border with Bolivia—and that border is still 250km away! In Paraguay, you usually get your entrance/exit stamps in your passport at the migration office in a town before the border rather than at the actual border. This also happened to us when leaving Brazil and entering Paraguay. Besides being a little strange and not straightforward at all, this is a complicated process of asking around for ‘laContinue reading
Salto del Guaíra to Asunción: Paraguay by Hitchhiking
Paraguay! I’ve been weirdly and inexplicably excited about going to this country for a while now and I’m finally here. We crossed the border from Guaíra in Brazil to Salto del Guairá in Paraguay. And no, those áććéńt́ś are not a typo on my part, and the name Guaira is apparently in the Tupi Language, and not in Spanish or Portuguese. There used to be waterfalls here on the Paraná river, but they disappeared after the building of the Itaipu Dam. That’s a little heartbreaking. Hitchhiking is fairly easy. Yesterday Jonas and I did 400 kilometers in seven rides to hitchhike fromContinue reading