Ultimate Dirtbag Trip



Actually I'm not sure that this is the ultimate dirtbag trip. For those of you who don't know, I decided to go to Argentina to climb for the winter. This isn't that exceptional, except that I am hitchhiking the whole trip. Right now my friend Dan Petty and I have crossed the Darian Gap in Panama and have just arrived in Columbia. When I was planning this trip this summer, it felt like it might be the finish to my time on the road, but at the moment I feel like it is only the start to crazier and crazier things in my life to come.

Dan and I on a Beach in El Salvador

 We've seen almost too much crazy shit to write about now, plus one day people will be fighting for the book rights to this stuff. So I've just made a list of crazy things I've seen or done so far, enjoy.

Crazy List!

We bivyed on top of a building in Mexico that turned out to be the town jail.

An American Mother/Son combo that picked us up tried to cook with our camp fuel, and she ended up lighting her son on fire.

In Panama pretty girls would drive by as we were hitching and blow us kisses.

The richest man in El Salvador picked us up and drove us quite a ways, while buying us expensive dinners and alcohol he explained his belief that cancer was caused by shell fish and the US government had the cure.

In Panama I got fined 10 dollars for taking a crap on an Island that the natives consider sacred, the island was covered in garbage and crap already.

Nicaragua, known for it's violent civil war, is the safest country in Latin America. We saw small children walking the streets alone at 10 pm.

We went through Nicaragua at the cost of 1 US dollar.

We saw a small village below an active smoking volcano.

I thought that I had an iron gut, but we watched a man taking swig after swig of water from a city fountain filled with garbage.

Finally I have our quote of the week, it comes from a drunk Czech who was traveling with us for a little while. After getting  very intoxicated he said, "I am a hippy/pirate! I am lost in the Caribean! Respect me!" Oh we do my friend, we do.