The World’s Best Hitchhiker

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/magazine/voyages-worlds-greatest-hitchhiker.html

Ride

By WES ENZINNA
Photographs by BRENT STIRTON
MARCH 22, 2018

Juan Villarino counts cars. If one passes him every minute, that's excellent; one every five minutes, and he gets worried. One every 20 minutes, and he knows he's really in the middle of nowhere. He once waited for two days in Tibet before a single car stopped; for 24 hours, on a frigid winter route, in Patagonia. Based on notes he keeps in pocket-size spiral journals, he compiles statistics, including average wait times in every country he has ever hitchhiked across, and the numbers aren't what you would expect — which is, in part, why he collects them in the first place. As he noted in a "Guide to Hitchhiking," a primer published in 2016 with his travel partner, Laura Lazzarino, the countries with the shortest average wait times are:

Iraq: 7 minutes

Jordan: 9 minutes

Romania: 12 minutes

The longest:

Norway: 46 minutes

Afghanistan: 47 minutes

Sweden: 51 minutes

People generally believe hitchhiking takes no particular know-how; and it's true that to catch one ride, you don't need to do much but stand there. But when, like Villarino, you rely entirely on hitchhiking to traverse tremendous distances, there's a great deal of skill involved to quickly and safely arrive at your destination. Villarino has cataloged every ride he has ever caught: 2,350, totaling about 100,000 miles in 90 countries, or enough to circumnavigate the globe four times. I met him on the final leg of his latest transcontinental journey, this one through Africa, about which he is writing a book with Lazzarino. For the 14 months before our meeting, Villarino had been thumbing it 20,000 miles along a route that included the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he skirted the country's civil war, and Somaliland, where he was stoned by an angry mob and held at gunpoint by border guards after refusing to pay a bribe. My plan was to join him on his travels from central Namibia to Cape Town, South Africa, a route of about 1,000 miles, or roughly the distance from New York to Florida.
Hitchhiking from Namibia to Cape Town

Equal parts Don Quixote and Che Guevara, Villarino describes his peregrinations as protests not just against boredom but also against parochialism and even capitalism. "The 12-hour workday," he wrote in an early manifesto, "is more dangerous than hitchhiking." As a Latin American, from a downwardly mobile middle-class family — he watched his parents be crushed by those 12-hour days — he defies the old characterization of hitchers as "uptight, middle-class white people, imitating poverty," as James Baldwin once famously put his pin in the Beats' balloon. Villarino didn't choose to be poor, but he did choose how to be poor, and for him, hitchhiking is less about simulating poverty than about chasing after the world he wants to live in. "The media shows images of the world that are worse than it actually is," he said. "And it's a feedback loop — those images make us think we're actually worse than we really are. It's a cycle of fear."

We were perched on Namibia's B4 highway as it snaked toward a coastal town called Lüderitz. Around us, the desert unscrolled in every direction. Villarino wore a big grin slapped across his face — "an idiotic smile is the only weapon I carry" — the sun squeezing through the cracks of his squinted eyelids. Broadcasting his beaming optimism, he stuck his thumb out as if telling the world: Good job!

-more-

[LizStreithorst]

I've been looking for my nest good read.

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I've been looking for my nest good read.

..if you haven't clicked the link... ...do so, it tells much more and mentions his (their) books...he has a gal partner later on.....

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...competitive hitchhiking.......?  ?

http://hitchwiki.org/en/Main_Page