The picture painted of the country in my formative years was dark. A land of terrorists whose sole goal was chaos. Nightly news segments showed bombardments and slain American soldiers. Life is not black and white; there are no good and bad guys.

I think an indifference to bodily harm makes the best traveller. Anthony Bourdain had it. Hitchhiking, trusting strangers, walking unfamiliar streets alone, eating food cooked in a back alley, staying in a stranger’s house. All of it carries risk, but it is also the underbelly of travel. The soft spot where locals speak with you unfiltered.

I would describe the sensation as a high degree of dissociation from yourself and from reality. A state where fear and anxiety do not exist, because you no longer care about the outcome. As if you have surrendered the wheel, and life is your invisible chauffeur.

After jaunting around Baghdad with a friend I previously made in Jordan, it was tim…

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Potts frames it as earning to live rather than living to earn. Most people treat travel as an expensive luxury, rationed out in one or two week increments, when in reality it can be one of the cheapest ways to spend your time.

I have been travelling on very little money for two years now, mostly by hitchhiking and sleeping wherever I end up. Over time, I have brought my daily spend from around $60 to $20.

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As we headed out, something was off. Chairs appeared on sidewalks, tents went up, food vendors assembled along the street. I stopped a Peruvian man about my age. "Qué pasó?" Fiesta, he said, and rushed off through the street with purpose.

My heart had been set on the lake. We stood awkwardly in the town square and weighed our options. A once-a-year festival. The lake would still be there tomorrow. The festival would not.

A good traveller has to be open to serendipity; a rigid schedule kills opportunities. We dropped our bags back at the hotel and changed clothes.

It was still early. We went back to the plaza and found vendors setting up. One man was selling ceviche from a bucket. Abancay sits deep in the mountains, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest ocean. Consuming raw fish here was almost certainly ill-advised. We ordered one.

I will never understand people's aversion to street food. Worst case, you spend the next day at the pharmacy collecting a couple pills. The cost is small against the opportunity. A two-dollar meal that might be the best of your life.

The ceviche was mediocre. Poor roll of the dice.

By noon the festivities had properly begun. Cans of shaving cream were being sold on every corner. Soon, a thick layer of white foam covered the streets. As if a nearby chemical plant had experienced an incident the local duck population would not be recovering from.

Then the parade started. Groups of twelve to twenty people, each with a different theme, rotating through the streets in waves. The first group we saw were dressed as bandits. Black masks and toy guns. If you had stumbled across them without context, you would have had a very different afternoon. Then came a giant inflatable gorilla being hauled through the street by a team of Peruvians. Then traditional dancers in elaborate dress, moving through choreography that looked instinctive.

The festival was called Apu Tusuy. Apu refers to the sacred mountain spirits of Andean belief, the forces thought to govern the land and protect the harvest. Tusuy means dance. Their belief system is rooted in Pachamama, or Mother Earth. The festival expresses gratitude for what the earth had given, and a request for more of the same. I knew none of this at the time. It was explained to me in pieces throughout the day, mostly through broken Spanish and gestures.

The crowd lining the streets had begun to drink. Heavily. The group beside us had filled a pesticide sprayer with cane liquor. Methodically, they went through the crowd dispensing it directly into open mouths. Even the float members broke ranks to join the queue. It had rained recently, and every pothole in the road had filled with water. As the dancers passed, they stomped hard, sending arcs of muddy water into the crowd. Nobody moved.

The festival lasted all day; a genuine feat of endurance. The parade made multiple laps around the town, and by nightfall some of the dancers had succumbed to the cumulative hospitality of the crowd. A battalion of Peruvian grandmothers was deployed from the crowd and quietly escorted the most casualties home. They moved with the quiet efficiency of women who had done this before and expected to do it again next year. As one escorted a man about my age away, she muttered something into his ear. It was unclear whether she was conveying care or disappointment.

We took the natural break in proceedings to find food. The night before we had stumbled across a sushi restaurant and filed it away for exactly this kind of moment. A foreign and wonderful smell drifted through the door, soy sauce and Szechuan spices. After weeks of potato soup and rice, I briefly considered never leaving. I ate an unreasonable number of rolls. It was heaven.

Reinvigorated, we went back out into the night. In a back alley, we found a group drinking around a red plastic table and joined them. They asked about Canada. I told them I had never experienced anything like this at home. A whole city coming together, dancing in the same streets, the same choreography rehearsed for months and performed for one day. They seemed pleased to hear it.

By now the whole town had migrated to an open-air football stadium. Thousands of people crowded the field in front of a professional stage. The artists played a mix of traditional Andean music and reggaeton. Then it started to downpour. Nobody left. The floodlights illuminated the droplets, like something out of a Scorsese film. The Peruvians kept dancing, soaked and entirely unbothered, late into the night.

I woke up the next morning in my hotel room. Shoes damp, shirt still carrying the previous day's mud, a thin film of the street on everything I owned.

We never did hike up to that lake.

The city sits on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The world's highest navigable lake. We had slipped into Bolivia from Peru. The contrast at the crossing is immediate. Asphalt gives way to rubble. You felt your spine rattle the second the van hit Bolivian asphalt. 

If there is one thing Bolivians love, it is blocking roads. Miners had blocked the road from Copacabana to La Paz, which meant we were stuck. The problem was we had already spent a couple of days in the town, and for Copacabana, that was more than enough.

I was getting my morning coffee and quietly sulking when my girlfriend returned from buying a phone charger. She had met a man who lived on the island in the middle of the lake. He had suggested we come out there until the blockades cleared. I was marginally enthused.

We checked out of the hotel, grabbed our packs, and walked through the cobblestone streets down to the pier. A catamaran ferry sat baking in the high-altitude sun. The man introduced himself and …

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People assume hitchhiking is not physically demanding. Picture a bum sitting on the side of the road, thumb out, doing nothing. That is not how it works. The high-altitude Peruvian sun bakes down on you. To improve your odds you keep moving, because you never know where the next car is coming from. If a driver starts their journey from a house up the road, you never see them sitting at an intersection two hundred metres back. A full day of hitchhiking can mean walking twenty kilometres.

After a long day of hitchhiking, we were looking for water. Uripa is a town of around 5,000 people. The streets had just enough people in them to feel inhabited. Donkeys and tuk-tuks. The town spread across the valley floor until the road hit its natural incline at the far end. 

We found a convenience store at the start of town. Inside, two men were drinking; one fat and stocky, the other long and gangly. Both had dark hair and sun-worn faces. They were drunk enough that conversation was barely possible, but they waved us over anyway. The shopkeeper and his wife stood behind the counter trying to talk to us through my broken Spanish and Google Translate.

The usual questions came. How old are you? Where are you from? Why are you here? The last one always gets me. As if they have so little confidence in their town that nobody could want to be there. That is exactly why I wanted to be there.

The two men wanted me to drink with them. We grabbed a plastic chair and posted up next to them. They produced a large clear unlabelled jug. The kind you would normally keep motor oil in. One of them poured the liquid into a plastic cup and slid it across to me. When I gave it a whiff it singed my nose hairs, it was not vodka. Peruvian cane liquor. Common in the highlands, probably for two reasons: it is cheap and it is strong.

I took a swig. The liquid moved from the tip of my tongue to the back of my throat, and my entire body warmed up. A bead of sweat trickled down my face. My mouth was ablaze, like a wildfire had torn through. My tongue was a baby deer that never made it out of the way. I strained to hold a neutral expression so as not to offend anyone. “Muy bueno,” I rasped. They laughed maniacally. 

Eventually, it was time to say goodbye to our new friends. In the never-ending search to cut costs, we decided to camp for the night. Avoiding those pesky hotel fees is essential for budget travel. We walked through town toward the hills. The town was small enough that it only took 30 minutes. Golden hour hit as the sun sank behind the hills.

Uripa had exactly zero open restaurants that day. Google Maps claimed otherwise, but it doesn't understand South America. If a restaurateur decides his time is better spent herding cattle, he closes up shop. No notice given. We settled for the last convenience store at the edge of town.

An old lady ran it. Traditional skirt and cowboy-esque hat. Inside were slim pickings for dinner. We landed on tuna, crackers, and a two-liter of soda. Enough to keep me alive another day. Right as we were leaving, she offered us two pieces of humita. A warm corn bread wrapped in corn leaves. Given the meal ahead of me, I was grateful.

I stuffed it into the top of my bag and hoisted the whole thing onto my back. We started up a hill where there was supposedly a campsite waiting at the top. My legs burned the whole way. After an hour of trudging, we were only halfway up. Luckily, there was a picnic shelter. I dropped my bag and sat on the bench. A dark patch of sweat marked where the pack had been sitting against my back. The view from halfway down was not so bad after all.

After the tent was up, I cracked open the tuna. Honestly, I don't mind the meal. Beats Peruvian black potatoes. The sun set, and dark clouds rolled into the valley below. I ate my tuna as lightning struck somewhere off in the distance. I was just a vagrant on a hill eating out of a can, camping in a thunderstorm. There I sat, untroubled, watching the lightning.

Only citizens of Bhutan and Nepal can enter India without a visa. Citizens of the US, UK, EU, Canada, and Australia require an e-Visa, which can be obtained at indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa.

There are three e-Tourist Visa options. A 30-day double-entry visa costs $25 USD with a maximum 30-day stay. A one-year multiple-entry visa costs $40 USD and allows stays of up to 180 days per visit. A five-year multiple-entry visa costs $80 USD with the same 180-day cap per visit.

I got the one-year visa for a three-month trip and would recommend either the one-year or five-year option, as it is the same process and gives you more flexibility. Print a physical copy of your visa before you go. Your airline will ask for it, and some hotels may as well. You do not want to be scrambling for a printer in a remote Ladakhi village.

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Macha, Bolivia. A remote town, population likely in the hundreds. It's tucked into the Andes and surrounded by golden dirt hills. The roads were patched together with dirt and cobblestone. Once a year the town hosts a festival where locals from surrounding communities come to settle disputes with their fists. For one day the population swells to something a hundred times its normal size.

The next morning we were looking for a ride out. The townsfolk had been drinking through the night. The fighting had stopped. The drinking had not.

As we walked to the outskirts of town, stragglers were still drinking and dancing in their festival getup from the day before. Colourful traditional clothing, wool beanies, feathers. Several carried a small traditional Bolivian instrument, somewhere between a banjo, a guitar, and a ukulele.

The first car to stop was a taxi. Inside were familiar faces, fellow tourists who had come…

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Look as friendly as possible. Well-groomed, clean clothes, no sunglasses, no hat. But do not dress too nicely or drivers will assume you have excess money on you. Find the happy medium between presentable and harmless. The clean-cut bum. Try not to smell. Smile.

Think about it from the driver’s perspective. They have a split second to decide whether to stop for a stranger. Make that decision as easy as possible.

Signs

It is common hitchhiking lore to carry a large piece of cardboard with your destination written in bold black marker. This may improve your odds slightly. Personally, I have never bothered. It feels like too much effort. That said, if you are struggling to get rides, it is a reasonable backup plan.

Money

In some countries, it is common to pay drivers a small amount. Peru, Bolivia, and Kazakhstan are examples. Personally, I do not mind paying a couple of dollars here and there, and most people are reasonable about it. If you want to avoid paying altogether, lea…

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Kaguura's Article

Overview of Price’s Law

In his Substack article, Kaguura cites Price’s Law as the reason most people never make it.

Price’s Law states that the square root of the total number of people in a given field produces roughly half of all the output. In a field of 100 creators, 10 will generate half of all the views. In a field of 10,000, that number rises to only 100. The bigger the field grows, the more concentrated the output becomes at the top. There is no more proportional opportunity as a market grows. There is actually less.

The law was originally observed in scientific publishing by Derek de Solla Price in 1963. Whether it applies with mathematical precision to content creation is debatable. The underlying pattern it describes is not.

Price’s Law is not concrete on its own, but it holds more water when combined with another principle. The Pareto Principle, better known as the 80/20 rule, is one of the most consistently observed patterns across competitive fields. Roughly 80% of outcomes flow from 20% of inputs. It shows up in business revenue, athletic competition, land ownership, and audience attention. Pareto is more conservative than Price, but the conclusion is the same. Most games in life are winner-take-most markets.

That is the mathematical case. The question worth asking is why so many people still believe they will be the exception.

I would argue the following factors in travel content creation create even further concentration at the top.

It Is a Terrible Business

Travel content creation is a brutal niche to build a business in. The fixed costs are high. Flights, accommodation, gear, and visas add up before you have posted a single frame. If you are not budget-minded, you will run out of money long before you make any. You are also competing against creators who have full-time jobs subsidising their content. Your only advantage is full commitment. Whether that counts for anything depends on how long you can stay solvent while you bleed cash.

The revenue side is equally unstable. Creators monetise primarily through sponsorships, platform payouts, or selling a product or service. The problem is that travel is one of the most cyclical industries in the economy. When consumers tighten their budgets, discretionary spending goes first. Trips get cancelled. Travel companies pull back on advertising. Sponsorship rates drop. Several creators I have spoken to have noted significant declines in ad rates over the past year.

Platform payouts have offered some insulation from this, but that buffer has never been truly tested. No major social media platform has navigated a deep recession. The assumption that platform income holds steady when the broader economy contracts is largely untested.

What you are left with is a business with high fixed costs, income tied to one of the most economically sensitive industries in the world, and no guaranteed floor when things turn.

Winner Takes Most

Most companies do not have the bandwidth to manage ad campaigns across dozens of small creators. It is far simpler to write one cheque to a creator with 200,000 followers than to coordinate a campaign across a hundred accounts with 2,000 each. The result is that sponsorship money flows almost exclusively to the top. All meaningful cash flow is theoretical and years away, if it arrives at all. The question is not whether you are talented enough. It is whether you can survive long enough financially and psychologically to find out. The self-doubt will come. So will the prolonged periods of zero income. The middle class creator, comfortably and consistently earning, largely does not exist. You have to break through or you will lose.

Saturation

Nobody wants to see your day in the life Bali video. Instagram is saturated to the point where even obscure destinations no longer guarantee reach. You can search Afghanistan travel content and find dozens of well-produced videos. A place that would have generated a million views five years ago for simply showing up now requires an actual angle. An interesting story, a unique format, a perspective nobody has offered before. Showing up somewhere difficult is no longer enough. It has been done.

Perfect Competition

You are competing for attention in the most contested market that has ever existed. There are no barriers to entry. No capital requirements, no credentials, no geography. You are up against your mom posting a picture of spaghetti, a 13 year old prodigy with a phone, and businesses with million dollar production budgets, all simultaneously. Economists talk about the stock market as the closest thing to a perfectly efficient market. Attention makes it look exclusive. You are not just competing with other travel creators. You are competing with Netflix, professional sport, and a phone call from grandma... everything. Every second of someone’s day is already spoken for. You are asking them to give some of it to you instead.

Survivorship Bias

Every time you open your feed, it looks like everyone is travelling the globe and thriving. The reality is that you are only seeing the top fraction of a percent. You will never see the creator grinding away at 100 views a video, or the ones who quietly gave up six months in. The people who stopped posting disappear from your feed entirely. The ones still posting are, by definition, the ones still standing. It creates a distorted picture of how common success actually is.

So Why Bother

All of this points toward considerable pressure on any individual creator’s share of industry revenue, trending toward zero. The top creators will not even let you get a dime. If you are looking for a reliable way to make money quickly, content creation is not the game to play.

But if you love the game enough you would do it for free. And in most cases you have to. Somebody has to be in that top echelon. So I would say go for it. Just build in more reliable revenue streams alongside it. Something that does not depend entirely on an algorithm deciding you deserve to eat this month. Speaking of which, if you made it this far and want to support the work, my paid Substack is a good place to start.

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Article

The Numbers

Kyrgyzstan recorded nearly 21 million foreign arrivals in 2025, representing close to a 19% increase compared to the previous year (Daryo, 2025). To put that in context, France, the world’s most visited country, welcomed 102 million tourists in 2024, while Morocco recorded 17.4 million arrivals that same year. Kyrgyzstan’s figures sit above Morocco and are closing in on France. It is worth noting that Kyrgyzstan counts all border crossings rather than overnight tourists exclusively, so the comparison is imperfect. The trajectory is the point. WP TravelMaroc.ma

The Social Media Effect

Much of Kyrgyzstan’s tourism boom is almost certainly driven by organic social media content. This is anecdotal and not formally tracked. In 2023 and 2024 my Instagram feed was filled with videos of people on horseback crossing open steppe, sleeping in yurts, and hiking turquoise alpine lakes. Travelers I met in Kyrgyzstan told me the same thing independently: they watched a video, decided they wanted to go, and booked a flight.

This is the same mechanism behind the Ocean Spray moment. In 2020 a man went viral on TikTok for skateboarding while drinking cranberry juice. Within days Ocean Spray sold out of product across the country. One organic video achieved what no paid campaign in the company’s history had managed. The same effect is almost certainly at work in Kyrgyzstan. Not a government tourism campaign, not a travel agency push, but ordinary people posting genuinely spectacular content that compels other people to go. Kyrgyzstan is a beautiful country. It was only a matter of time before the rest of the world found out.

The Internet Has Democratized Travel

The travel agent is dead. My parents’ generation would have walked into a travel agency, flipped through a brochure, and come home with an all-inclusive package to somewhere predictable. The agency took a cut, inflated the price, and handed you an itinerary you did not design. That model is gone. I plan an entire trip from my phone. I pick the cheapest flights on Google Flights, accommodation on Booking or through Hostelword (and increasingly I just show up without a booking), navigation on Google Maps, transport through a ride-share app. A few apps and some research replace what used to cost thousands of dollars in middleman fees. The result is that destinations like Kyrgyzstan, which were previously obscure and logistically daunting, are now straightforward to visit independently. The friction is gone.

Escapism

It is no secret that young people are under pressure. The news cycle is relentless, cost of living is high, and the traditional milestones of adulthood feel increasingly out of reach. Against that backdrop, the image of riding a horse across open steppe with no phone signal carries obvious appeal. Kyrgyzstan offers something increasingly rare — genuine remoteness. Nomadic culture, subsistence living, landscapes with no infrastructure for miles. You do not have to worry about the news when there is no signal to receive it. There is a growing appetite among younger travellers for experiences that feel genuinely disconnected from the world they are trying to escape, and Kyrgyzstan delivers that more authentically than almost anywhere else.

It Is Simply Beautiful

This one requires no analysis. The country has alpine lakes the color of glacial melt, steppe that stretches to the horizon, mountain ranges that dwarf anything in Western Europe, and yurt culture that is still genuinely practiced rather than performed for tourists. At some point the volume of stunning imagery reaches a tipping point and the destination sells itself.

Paris Disappointment Syndrome

Travelers are recalibrating expectations around famous destinations. Paris is expensive, crowded, and occasionally underwhelming relative to what years of cultural mythology have promised. The same is true of Rome, Barcelona, and most of the well-worn European circuit. Kyrgyzstan offers the inverse experience. A place that almost nobody has talked up, which consistently exceeds expectations. You are not arriving with inflated anticipation. You are arriving with almost none, and leaving having seen something genuinely extraordinary. The value equation is also incomparable. A horse trek, a yurt stay, and a week of alpine hiking in Kyrgyzstan costs a fraction of a week in Western Europe.

Infrastructure Is Beginning to Meet Demand

When I visited, Chinese construction crews were visible throughout the country. This is not incidental. Kyrgyzstan has positioned China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a cornerstone of its infrastructure strategy, and the investment is tangible on the ground. Kyrgyzstan has invested approximately $1.35 billion in road projects, with China’s Export-Import Bank funding $390 million of that figure. The Chinese-built highway from Bishkek to Naryn cut what was once an eight-hour journey to roughly four. Better roads mean more of the country becomes accessible to travellers who are not willing to endure extreme conditions to get there. Infrastructure is the unglamorous prerequisite for tourism growth, and Kyrgyzstan is getting it, largely funded from Beijing.

Visa Policy

In July 2012, Kyrgyzstan introduced a visa-free regime for citizens of 44 nations, making it the most open country in Central Asia for tourists. That list has since expanded significantly. Citizens of over 60 countries including the US, UK, EU nations, Canada, and Australia can currently enter Kyrgyzstan visa-free, with no forms or fees required. For anyone not covered, an e-visa can be obtained entirely online in under 20 minutes, with approval typically within three to five business days.

Visa anxiety is a real barrier for first-time international travelers. Knowing you can simply show up with a passport removes an entire layer of uncertainty. No embassy appointments, no waiting on approvals, no risk of a denied entry costing you non-refundable flights. Kyrgyzstan eliminated that barrier early, and it has paid off.

Before You Go

If you are serious about visiting Kyrgyzstan, I put together the most comprehensive independent travel guide available. Not a listicle pulled from other websites. A ground-level guide built from months of firsthand experience traveling the country by hitchhiking, marshrutka, shared taxi, and horseback.

It covers everything: the apps you need before landing, the best flight routes from North America and Europe, which SIM card actually works in the mountains, a full packing list built for Kyrgyzstan’s unpredictable weather, how to get around on a budget as low as $20 a day, where to stay in every major town from Bishkek to Sary-Mogul, a scams section based on things that actually happened to me, wild camping laws, a day-by-day breakdown of the Ala-Kul trek including what to expect at the pass, horse trekking logistics with real prices I personally negotiated, the food you must eat, water and health advice including why Imodium belongs in every bag, and both a one-week and two-week itinerary to get you started without over-planning your trip.

This is the guide I wish existed before I went. The kind of information that usually only comes from someone who has already made the mistakes. Most travel guides are either too vague to be useful or generated entirely by AI for a quick cash grab. This is neither. If you are going to spend the money on flights and the time on the ground, I’d buy the guide to make the most of your trip. The advice will pay for itself.

This guide is also just the beginning. My goal is to publish in-depth country guides across Central Asia and beyond. A $10 subscription gets you every guide I publish, every update I make, and everything that comes after. For the cost of a coffee you get a travel library that grows every time I move somewhere new.

[Read the full Kyrgyzstan Travel Guide here.]

Daryo. (2025, January 27). Kyrgyzstan sees foreign arrivals jump nearly 20% in 2025. https://daryo.uz/en/2026/01/27/kyrgyzstan-sees-foreign-arrivals-jump-nearly-20-in-2025/

After catching a public bus out of Huancayo to the edge of the city, we dropped our bags on the gravel and stuck out our thumbs. By this point, I had accepted a hard truth about Peru: hitchhiking here was genuinely more difficult than anywhere else I had tried it. It is not a common practice. Two westerners standing on the side of a highway with their thumbs out was an unusual sight. You could see drivers processing it as they passed. Why would anyone travel this way? Why not take the bus? Why not fly and save yourself the inconvenience?

The first man to stop did not offer us a ride. He rolled down his window to tell us it was impossible. Dark-haired, middle-aged, and less weathered than most people we had encountered on the road. He drove a clean, modern car. The kind that signals a certain stability. A bag of fruits and vegetables sat on the back seat. He was a school teacher, he told us. His advice was to walk back to town and take a taxi to our destination. I thanked him and watched him drive off.

No matter how many Peruvians suggested I take the bus, I was not going to budge. I was there for the experience, not the efficiency.

Then something unexpected happened. Thirty minutes later, the same man came back. He pulled over and offered us a lift to a junction about an hour up the road. In his mind, nobody else was going to stop for us, and that thought had apparently bothered him enough to turn around. It was almost an anti-self-fulfilling prophecy — his certainty that we would be stranded became the very reason we were not.

The conversation in the car sat somewhere between kind and uncomfortable. He felt sorry for us; that much was clear. At some point he mentioned his brother, who had spent years drifting with no fixed destination. The way he talked about his brother was with a quiet disappointment. The kind you carry when your rich friends at a dinner party ask you what your brother is up to. When I told him I was taking a year off to travel, he remained neutral. Clearly we lived by two different definitions of a life well spent.

Maybe I was projecting. I spend enough time questioning whether I am contributing anything to the world that I sometimes see that judgment in people who are not offering it. Maybe he was simply a generous man who had turned his car around for two strangers and filled the silence with conversation. I am still not entirely sure which version is true. Probably both. We arrived at the junction and he offered us some bread. We accepted and thanked him.

We were now in proper remote Peru. The village had one restaurant that served Trucha. A whole fried trout with rice and potatoes. We were surrounded by rolling grassy hills. The village also had small convenience stores. The kind where you stand outside and peer in through a window. Usually a family home with a shelf of goods. We picked up water and crackers, then set up on the main road. Past the village the pavement ended.

An elderly Peruvian couple offered us a ride to the next town. The road was sketchy by any measure. Single lane, carved into the hillside, no barriers. Not a cloud in the sky. The sun was dry and relentless. The car ahead of us kicked up a thick wall of dust that made it nearly impossible to see. Then a truck would appear from the other direction and our driver would have to reverse, the rear wheels inches from the edge.

On the roadside, people were working the landslides. Poor Peruvians with shovels, clearing rocks that had tumbled onto the road, then standing in front of passing cars and demanding payment for the service. It was an arrangement I had never seen before. Informal, ungoverned, and entirely logical. The kind of thing you would never encounter had you just taken the flight.

As it turned out, my lack of concern was justified. He had dropped us off in a small town with a bustling square. The surrounding area hosted a mixture of mom and pop convenience stores and mechanic shops. The sidewalks outside the mechanic shops were stained black from years of oil buildup. As we paraded around the square nobody bothered us, let alone talked to us. We walked out of the town to get another ride. This time it was not so easy. We waited hours before our next ride. Car after car passed by. As you stand there your mind wanders, almost a form of meditation. Nobody owes you a ride, you have put yourself in this situation. Eventually a van rolled up and offered us a lift. We arrived in the small quaint town of San Mateo before dark.

I am not sure what the perfect makeup of a hitchhiker is, but a tolerance for adversity and a general disregard for personal safety are probably up there.

San Mateo was the type of place you would never visit unless you were hitchhiking. It is barely visible on a map. This is where you truly get to experience a culture. No performative spectacles for tourists. Just normal hardworking Peruvians going about their daily lives. The town itself was very beautiful, nestled in the Peruvian foothills. We were able to find a homestay that likely sees few guests a year. Our evening activity involved climbing the mountain that overlooked the town to a statue of Jesus Christ, a staple in South America. Perhaps not as impressive as the one in Rio, but given we were the only people there it was pretty spectacular. As we watched the sunset I came to the realization of how great hitchhiking was as a mode of transport. No other travelers would have had this experience had they booked a flight or tourist bus.

The following day hitchhiking became even harder. Many cars passed. Some gave a wave, others flashed their lights, but nobody stopped. My brain probably enjoys hitchhiking for the same reason people pull slot machine levers. The reward is random, unpredictable, and just frequent enough to keep you standing there with your thumb out. You never know which car will stop, so you never have a good reason to quit. Eventually you get conditioned just like one of Pavlov's dogs. A car slowing down, even slightly, is enough to spike your heart rate. You have been trained to respond to the possibility of a ride before it ever materializes. The highway becomes a giant experiment in behavioural conditioning. You are the subject, standing in the dust with your thumb out, waiting for the next variable reward.

Three hours elapsed before we finally got a ride. Two construction workers heading to a job site, only 30 minutes up the road. Progress is progress. My lack of Spanish made for a quiet ride, which suited everyone well enough. Above Lima the Andes opened up around us. The roads were well maintained but wound through the mountains in long switchbacks. Peruvian drivers have no patience for anything slower than themselves. They will pass on a blind corner without a second thought. We were dropped in a small town and waited again. Then jackpot. A driver heading four hours north to Huancayo, the next major city on the route. We threw our bags in and climbed in after them. All that was left to do was watch the mountains scroll past the window and hope the driver shared the same casual attitude toward blind corners as everyone else on the road.

He began telling us his life story and I was immediately drawn in. It mirrored my own in ways I did not expect. He was born into a well-off Peruvian family, studied engineering at a prestigious university, and landed a job most Peruvians could only dream of. High salary, status, the respect of his family and friends. From the outside, he had everything. Inside, he felt empty.

Then one day he received a call from a monastery he had never heard of. The pastor on the other end asked for him by name, telling him God had said to reach out. He was asked to come and stay for a few days. When he arrived, he felt full for the first time in his life. The pastor told him he should become a priest. He already knew it was what he wanted. The trepidation was not about the calling. It was about everyone else.

He went home and told his parents. His father was furious. He had funded his son’s education, watched him build a life that 99% of Peruvians could never imagine, and now he wanted to give it up for a monastery. His mother, also religious, was slightly more understanding but still uneasy.

He left for the Bolivian rainforest alone to think. Two days of solitude. One night he made a deal with God. “If you want me to do this, make it rain”. It poured. As he told us this, rain hammered the windshield so hard he could barely see the road. He continued. He asked for the rain to stop. The jungle went silent. Then he said, if you make it rain again, I will become a priest. It poured immediately. He had his answer.

He went back to work and handed in his resignation. His boss assumed he had been headhunted.” Tell me who it is, I will double their offer”. He explained it had nothing to do with money. His boss could not process it. Walking away from that salary, that status, for a monastery was simply outside the bounds of what a rational person would do. He left anyway. The congregation welcomed him back. He described it as the first time in his life he felt he was on the right path. He has been there ever since.

It takes a certain kind of courage to abandon a path you have already invested years building. The sunk cost pulls hard. So does the weight of other people’s expectations.

I have little patience for the idea that status should factor into how you spend your life. Do what you want, whether that is the traditional path, becoming a tradesman, or a priest in the Andes. The excuse I find hardest to respect is the one dressed up as humility. Claiming privilege as the obstacle when really it is fear. Yes, a kid growing up in genuine poverty has real constraints. But most people in Western society do not. I have more respect for that priest walking away from everything than for someone who stayed in the wrong life because leaving felt embarrassing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

One day I’ll be too old for this. My face dried up like a prune, marked by years of sun exposure. My legs will be frail and energy low. My cheerful and youthful face gone. Partly due to aging, but also because I’ll have seen too much of the world. The plight of humanity will be somehow broadcast from my face like a permanent scar. Nobody sane would offer me a lift. But today is not that day; today I ride.

I am on a flight to Peru, with a rather simple yet audacious plan. I will hitchhike from Peru to the south of Chile. I have no tours or accommodation booked. Just relying on my thumb and the kindness of strangers. I have no trepidations for the journey ahead. I’ve hitchhiked before and am no stranger to uncomfortable situations.

Lima, Peru, February 24, 2026

Getting public transit in a foreign country always causes anxiety. It feels like everyone is staring as you fumble for directions with the driver. I needed to get out of Lima and reach the northern highway to start hitchhiking. Hitchhiking out of a dense city is nearly impossible. The routes are endless, and no driver heading half a kilometre to work or the store is going to help. Lima is especially bad; it is a grid city of over ten million people. Hitchhiking is not a common practice here either. You would be bombarded with questions about why you are not taking the five dollar bus. You would likely be dropped off at the nearest bus terminal if someone were kind enough to offer a ride. A generous gesture, but a hitchhiker's nightmare.

A Spanish music mix played through the half-full bus. The seats were made of faded red plastic, and the exterior resembled a 90s American school bus. The lady beside me tried to spark up a conversation, but my Spanish was only good enough to nod along. Eventually, I grasped that she was telling me I needed a different bus to the city center. Sometimes I wonder why people are so nice. Am I that considerate? Would I notice if a confused foreigner needed help, let alone offer it?

After a bus change, I reached the northern outskirts of Lima. Glass condos had quietly become red brick shacks. As I stepped off the bus, I noticed that the sidewalk had become jagged. Fewer suits, more tattered workers' clothing. My kind of people. Unfortunately, I am just as much an outsider. I carried a large 55L backpack, sported a clean shirt, and sleek sunglasses. My outfit probably equated to a month’s wage here. Ahead, my route was clear: a dusty highway bustling with cars headed out of Lima. With a bit of luck and persistence, I would hitch a ride out of this metropolis.

Once the doors had closed, the smell of liquor permeated the car. To this day, I am unsure whether the driver was drinking or not. The passenger was visibly drunk and began offering us booze. Meanwhile, the driver began ranting about how much he loved his ex-girlfriend. She had blocked him, and they were on a seven-hour journey to win back her heart. 

We offered our condolences and tried not to antagonize the driver. Frankly, anyone willing to drive seven hours (likely drunk) was not the best person to rile up. Especially because the situation erred on the side of creepy rather than romantic.

Sikkim is a remote state in India with few people. We were willing to accept any ride because refusing one would likely mean hours of waiting. The road wound atop the jungled hills. So when the driver turned to speak of his problems, he would nudge the car into the oncoming lane. The idea of barreling off the road was almost an afterthought; I was more focused on hearing about the driver's grievances.

We made it to our town. Luckily, Romeo and his sloshed wingman still had hours ahead of them. Unbeknownst to his ex-girlfriend, they were heading her way. We thanked them, climbed out, and watched them speed off.

Inside the bus station wasn’t much better. I was ushered into a waiting room reminiscent of a rundown doctor’s office. Fluorescent lights, bright white walls, and black mold oozing from the ceiling. And there I sat waiting for the bus. Hours went by and finally the bus began to board. When I went outside the bus driver looked intensely over a clipboard. His finger traced down the page. I stood awkwardly as he pondered the list. He then informed me that my passport had needed to be scanned and sent to the Honduran border. The bus would need to cross through Honduras to arrive in El Salvador. A procedure nobody explained to me when I arrived. I would not be able to board.

I then watched in sorrow as everyone else boarded the bus and left. The bus station was now empty and all the workers had gone home. It was 1:00am. The only remaining face was a security guard. He informed me over Google Translate that I wouldn’t be able to leave or I would likely be robbed. Luckily there was a hotel attached to the bus station.

I followed the security guard down a dark hallway. The only light came through the windows which had metal bars and no glass. We arrived at the front desk and the guard called out. The hotel was empty and dark. No staff in sight. All you could hear was the faint crackle of static and Spanish drifting from a television in one of the patron’s rooms. The guard went around the desk to look for keys. I could start to see anxiety draping down his face. As if he had more concern for my safety than I had for my own. He shuffled through drawers filled with papers but did not find any keys.

With a shrug he gestured for me to follow. We walked to the second floor and he began trying doors. One after the other each being locked. Then he tried the last door at the end of the hallway. Locked. He then looked at me and grinned. He then turned to the door and kicked it open. Buenas noches he exclaimed and walked away. I couldn’t even thank him before he disappeared into the dark corridor.

The next morning when I awoke the hotel staff were baffled by my presence. I went downstairs to the front desk where I was interrogated. How did you get in here? Did you break in? You need to pay.

I informed them of last night’s circumstances but the ladies at the reception remained unamused. I quickly handed them the money for the cost of the room and left.

I booked a flight to El Salvador that day.

I began walking when I heard a voice cry out. “Hey, they are going to rob you!” I spun around to see a mid-sized, skinny, local man making his way towards me. “If you don’t want to get robbed, I’ll escort you through the slum… for a fee”, he explained. I hesitated but agreed and handed him 150 Nicaraguan Cordobas ($3 USD) for his services. With a nod, he took the lead, weaving us through a maze of crumbling shacks. As we walked, I occasionally caught glimpses of people watching from behind broken windows or half-closed doorways. “This is it,” he said with a slight nod. We arrived at the main plaza, alive with people bustling about after a night of heavy drinking. I thanked him, the weight of gratitude mixed with exhaustion in my voice. He simply gave a quick smile, nodded, and then melted back into the shadows of the slum, disappearing as swiftly as he had appeared.