QUINDIO, COLOMBIA
In the end I couldn’t get a motorcycle. I actually had one in front of me – a Honda Splendor 100 with a big dent in the gas tank, sturdy as it was purple – to be all mine for only three hundred fifty USD. Exciting, yeah, until they gave me an inch-thick stack of paperwork in Spanish legalese that would take a week to process. So fuck that.

I went hitchhiking around the Quindío department instead. It’s not as easy as you’d think, actually, given how great Colombians are and the free-form nature of South American traffic. All the buses in this country are privately owned (even the city buses), which means that they come every five minutes and shuffle you on without stopping. This also means that anybody who’d hitchhike must be wrong in the head.

Hitchhiking isn’t a practical way of getting anywhere in Colombia, but if you can find a small road (you don’t have to try hard) it’s a lot of fun. There are plenty of jeeps and flatbed trucks that are willing to let you hop in the back and if you ever get stuck on a main road the buses will take you to the next town for almost nothing.

The best was standing on the back bumper of a jeep for an hour; the only one I turned down was a truck with eight cows. The dogs from the hostel followed me for the first two miles until I caught a ride.