Backpacker Confessions: Girl vs Latin America

'On my way to meet him I saw Andrew and I told him that I was going to lie to Steph. He told me not to do it but at this point, it was already too late'

In 2008 Jennifer successfully persuaded her friend Steph to come to South America with her, starting in Chile. They experienced the epic highs and awful lows that every traveller will know: hunger, boredom, fear, and euphoria. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to last and they split in Ecuador.

Jennifer continued alone, covering 4,776 miles without flying in eleven months on an overland journey that took her from Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego to Nicaragua’s city of Leуn.

She drank too much, had unsuccessful relationships with men, nearly drowned on Ipanema beach, was vomited on by a man on a bus and had a monkey look her dead in the eye while it masturbated. This is not to mention the night at the strip club, getting naked with a stranger in a shaman’s shed and watching grown men give mouth-to-mouth to poultry at a cockfight.

Excerpt:

It seems that every backpacker wants to see the awful cocaine spewing hellhole that is San Pedro prison. The entry fee was about and you go armed with cigarettes for prison workers and sweets for the armies of kids are brought up calling the jail their home. Luckily for us, the South African women who worked as the unofficial tourist receptionist had melted her brain with narcotics years earlier and completely forgot to charge us for the privilege of the San Pedro experience.

Later on, we trailed around various bars in La Paz until we got to the infamous cocaine den of the capital, which I will not name but suffice to say that it was full of coked up tourists. We were thrown out for bringing our own cocaine and not buying their product from the bar, which was lovingly served to you on a CD case with a straw.