Hitchhiking in the axis of evil

On May 1^st 2005, Juan Villarino, an Argentinean hitch-hiker, 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 motorways. He possesses no credit card nor bullet proof jacket. His goal is to cross the heart of the Islamic world: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, solely by hitch-hiking, 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 hitch-hiking lessons in the Kurdish Parliament. In Teheran he spends time 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 food stuff. 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 hitch-hiking the world and writing books by the roadside.