A man who's currently hitchhiking from South Korea to South Africa has detailed the best country he's ever visited and it's all down to the 'wonderful people' he met.
Timo de Jong, a 26-year-old seasoned traveler from Steenwijk in the Netherlands, has previously hitchhiked from the UK to South Africa - but his crazy challenges didn't stop there.
At the time of writing, the content creator is currently in Kandahar, Afghanistan, some 185 days into his mammoth challenge from South Korea to South Korea.
And despite literally being in the middle of nowhere, Timo found time to speak with us at UNILAD about his journey so far, where he admitted Afghanistan is a must-visit, but only for a certain type of traveler.
Advert
Afghanistan is current in the middle of severe political and economic unrest, which has only worsened in the past year as the Taliban cracks down on human rights, particularly against women and girls.
"I wouldn't advise everyone to come to Afghanistan unless you kind of know what you're doing," Timo explained. "I wouldn't just tell anybody to go on your first trip overseas, come to Afghanistan, because it's quite intense here.
"But if you know what you're doing it's lovely and the people are wonderful."
Timo continued: "You can just walk on the street here and someone will see you, and someone will be like, 'Hey, nice to meet you'. 'Do you want to come to my house for tea or food or whatever?'
"Imagine if you tried to do that at home, like you see a foreigner walking on the streets, and you just invite them into your house for tea, that just wouldn't happen."
While Timo has a love for the locals of Afghanistan, he says Japan is the best country he's ever visited.
He told UNILAD: "In Japan I decided to hitchhike everywhere. I spent five weeks hitchhiking across the country, couch-surfing and sleeping in my tent. It was amazing. And I had the best five weeks ever. I've pretty much been hitchhiking ever since."
When asked what it was about Japan that made him fall in love with it, Timo said: "How incredibly friendly the people were. After that I realized maybe it wasn't just Japan, that's what opened my eyes to so many nice people in the world."
Timo went on to discuss how sometimes, going off the beaten track and avoiding tourist hotspots may be the way to go.
"When you hitchhike, you end up in all these random little towns where they not necessarily see a lot of tourists. Whereas, if you go to Southeast Asia or Australia, you just go to the main tourist destination, and you just take a bus from one place to the other.
"You get to all these towns where they're kind of sick of foreigners, but then you get to all these random little towns, and people are just so friendly and genuinely curious about what you're doing there."
One of the reasons why Timo fell in love with Japan was because of one particular man that made the hitchhiking process a lot easier for the content creator.
"This guy in his 70s pulls over on the side of the road two minutes after I started hitchhiking, and he gestures to me to get in his car, [so] I get in," Timo explained.
"The sign I have, I don't remember what place it said, but he pointed at it, and he was like, 'Let's go. Let's go'. He was driving me to that town, and the whole time I'm trying to figure out why he was going there. I was talking to him with Google Translate, but he couldn't reply because he was driving."
So, many hours went by with Timo none the wiser, and it's only when he got to his final destination, the vlogger realized the kindhearted nature of the man.
"By the time I finally got there, he started actually typing on Google Translate. And it turned out he was like five minutes away from his home when he saw me, and he was on his way home from his weekly grocery shop or something," Timo explained.
"But he saw me and he just wanted to help out, so he drove two hours to drop me off, and then two hours back home, just because he wanted to be nice."
A true gent!
Topics: Travel, World News, Social Media
Callum Jones