If you have just clicked from this morning’s article in The New York Times Magazine, welcome to the blog! Juan and I are delighted at the possibility of bringing our message of trust and hospitality to such a wide audience.
We both write our blogs in Spanish, but we have a surprise for you. Juan’s fist book “Hitchhiking in the Axis of Evil – by thumb in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan” has been translated to English. Below you will find much more insights into it.
It is thanks to the sales of our book that we can continue to travel the world, documenting its unsung hospitality and defying media stereotypes. Thanks for taking a minute to learn more about our project.
SUMMARY:
On May 1st, 2005 Juan Villarino, Argentinean writer, hitches a ride in a sailboat from Belfast harbour to Scotland, on the first leg of a journey to the Middle East. Borrowing the strategy of the snail, he carries all he needs in a backpack, and sticks out his thumb along both dusty roads and highways. He possesses no credit card nor bullet proof jacket. His goal is to cross the heart of the Islamic World, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, solely by hitchhiking, in an attempt to prove that hospitality abounds in a region portrayed as terrorist by the establishment media.
As he moves across the vast globe Juan lives deliciously absurd events. He enters Iraq at night like a homeless person, but ends up teaching hitchhiking lessons in the Kurdish Parliament. In Teheran he sojourns with the intellectual resistance against Iran’s Ayatollah’s regime. He crosses Afghanistan village by village, having tea in a minefield, becoming a postman for a day, and dropping by a NATO base to fill up his backpack with foodstuff. While he travels, his pen describes those ordinary people who sweat and work under any flag but never ever grab the headlines. The outcome is the book you hold in your hands: an ode to movement and a precise chronicle about one of the least travelled zones on Earth. Today, Juan keeps hitchhiking the world and writing books by the roadside.
Love for the road and on the road
Just sharing a few of the brillant pictures taken by New York Times Magazine photographer Brent Stirton, who followed the Namibian leg of our cross-Africa journey. More to come in my Instagram.
Love your story! Thank you.
I would love to follow your adventures if you can possibly translate into English. I wish I could read other languages but my education was lacking.
Rita
Hi Rita! Juan is goino to NYC next week and he will meet some publishers! Hopefully one of them will find our adventures interesting and will translate our book. So fingers crossed!
Hola, my wife and I are both teachers in CA, USA. We are taking 1/2 a year off [at least 😉 ] to learn Spanish through Maximo Nivel in Guatemala, Peru and finally Costa Rica; from August 3 to December 13.
At some point, we will be fluent enough to have a good conversation and would love to meet you two. Just wondering if you will be anywhere near those locations so we could share a meal?
Hi Paul! We don’t have any plans at the moment to visit those countries BUT, you never know. Even if you are still not fluent, we would love to meet you! 🙂 Follow us on instagram @losviajesdenena for updates of our location. Peru is not that far away so who knows!