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badly to avoid going along with the crowd, walking the well-worn path: from kindergarten to grade school, from high school to the army, and then on to university, work, marriage, a child . . . Stop! Yes, I was lucky to have escaped all that after my military service.

There were hordes of mochileros like me in South America. The mochila (backpack) is what characterises them. These packs are all they have. In them you'll usually find a pair of patched and faded jeans, a sweater, a raincoat, a Coleman burner, The South American Handbook, which the mochileros call their bible, a sleeping bag, a few toilet articles, and a small first-aid kit. That's it. They keep their money in a money belt inside their pants. Some, like Marcus, even more cautious, cut a slit across the inside hem of their pants leg and stick rolled bills inside.

The idea is to carry everything on your back, forget your troubles, and let tomorrow take care of itself. You learn from the natives to live for the moment, not to hurry. You travel to breathtaking places – the kinds of places tourists dream of seeing – but you're not a tourist. You're a mochileros, a drifter, and there's a big difference. You're in one place today, someplace else tomorrow. You may stay for a day or a month. You make your own plans, every day full of surprises.

You meet a lot of drifters like yourself. You usually find them in the cheapest hotels in town or in restaurants that could pass for soup kitchens.