Argentine family comes home after 22-year drive around the world | Hacker News Reader

Argentine family comes home after 22-year drive around the world

uk.news.yahoo.com

I'm an argentine. My dad has been a fan of this family for more than ten years! I'll share this news with him

For the last Father's Day, a gift we got for him was a video from Hernán Zapp sending regards to him. In the video he says to my dad to "keep on catching his dreams!" as my father loves to travel and have been wanting this lifestyle for his family for a long time, and he'll make it true in the following years.

This family has even met Messi, that's kinda like a dream in itself for most people in my country.

Edit: added more detail

Found this map of their route... (reuploaded to imgur to save the little website I found it on from being slashdotted).

https://imgur.com/TxrgcWb

Whoah, that's pretty hardcore. Across the length of Africa, through China and Tibet to India, etc. Even things like island hopping across Indonesia, which only occupy a few pixels on the map, are logistical nightmares.

The main one I see there is they appear to have crossed the Darien Gap between Central and South America. Last time I checked this was not easy!

I presume they took a ferry across the gap like everybody else, the actual Gap is effectively impassable for anything larger than two wheels and very dangerous to boot due to various narcos/militias operating in the area.

Is it simple for everyone else? When I was looking into going north from South America to Panama a few years ago, it seemed like there wasn't even any sort of regular ferry service, and if you wanted to move a vehicle you had to attempt to negotiate with cargo shipping companies.

Perhaps things have changed :)

Yes, that is indeed the case. My vague understanding, though, is that negotiating passage by sea on a cargo ship is not particularly difficult, it's just expensive.

> Even things like island hopping across Indonesia, which only occupy a few pixels on the map, are logistical nightmares.

I used to be so much into this kind of travelling, I already feel like I hold back so much on what kind of trips/destinations we choose to do now because of kids.

I can't even imagine myself doing such a hardcore trip with 4x kids. It looks like they timed their pregnancies to be on locations with good healthcare but still these guys really are wonderers in the most beatiful sense of the word.

I wonder when they went to Tibet, AFAIK the current law (well, before Covid closed everything down) to visit Tibet for foreigners is that they can only do so as a tour group with a guide, so, no solo trips. But when I was there, I met Westerners biking from Lhasa to Nepal, of course with a guide, so maybe their car could've been escorted along the way.

Things were much looser in the good old days, people used to explore Tibet solo and even hitchhike. But this became effectively impossible after the riots in 2008 led the PRC to crack down.

For what it's worth, even now the guide can ride along with you in your car, they don't necessarily need their own wheels.

Yea I extremely highly doubt that they drove through the Darién Gap

I like how they carefully avoid France :)

Huh… imgur flagged this pic as explicit and I couldn’t see why. Then I noticed the circles… this is funny.

How on earth did they finance it? I saw that they now have a book out, but it would take an impressive pitch and a hefty advance to last a whole 22 years so I'm guessing it's not that :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXn3mcdmpNk this says people would help them along the way, e.g. if their car broke down. I guess it really helps when you have a car from the 1930s and a cool story.

I could imagine, if they were that sort of people, they could roll up to a grocery store car park, wait for curious locals to talk to them, and then pretend not to have local currency to get groceries, and get 1 or 2 people to pay for their food.

Edit: they go into detail about how they started the book on the road: https://youtu.be/UJafN4oxSqM

Incredible! And they did it in a 1928 model Graham-Paige!

From Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham-Paige

This guy from Uruguay is biking from Uruguay to Alaska. He’s in my city at the moment in northern Mexico.

https://www.instagram.com/tabarealonso/?hl=en

I didn't personally meet them, but I've followed in their footsteps in many places around the world. Quite a few places I visited in Africa spoke fondly of them and their visit. Amazing family!

You'd think that they'd at least show an image or map with the path they took and the cities they visited.

I feel like way too much old world journalism doesn't value or prioritize the visualization of data.

They waste paragraphs of words describing things that would be infinitely better communicated in a second as some kind of visual.

Maybe this is just a holdover from the pre-computer days when making visualizations was hard?

Word-count = SEO, basically as simple as that.

https://imgur.com/TxrgcWb

Unrelated to the news but related to the site- this is the worst cookie management UI I’ve seen so far. Took me a while to scroll through all on mobile. I feel like I saw more settings there than in an OS settings app.

Tangential, but what does "ls/nn/rsr/dw/bbk" at the end of the article mean? Considering the author is Liliana Samuel, I’m thinking that’s what ls stands for, but then who are the others? Co-authors, editors?

Yes. Initials of authors and contributors.

<nerd-joke>they missed a space, they wanted to list the /nn/rsr/dw/bbk folder...</nerd-joke>

I'm from Argentina and it's the first time I hear about them. Crazy story!

Wow, and I thought my 26000km road trip zig-zagging through Canada and the US was extreme… This is a whole other level!

Getting a vehicle larger than a bicycle between India and China is a serious bureaucratic achievement.

There's a movie with a similar theme, Captain Fantastic. Great flick if you like indie films.

I've heard there's a gene that's associated with higher desire to explore new places. And the highest frequency of that gene is among native South American population. They apparently went farther than anyone from Africa.

Your comment is a tiny bit racist?

Unsubstantiated and probably misguided, yes. Racist, probably not. Insensitive - probably.

I just answered above.

What? Where?

The least I could think of myself as a racist.

UPDATE: I think I see your point. We have many interesting genes, myself included, none of them defines us as a person. I think it's irrelevant.

But in my comment I expressed a connection between a population statistical gene expression and a particular family. That is a tiny bit racist, agree. :(

Anyone know how they managed finances? 22 years on the road is amazing given the fact they gave birth and raised two kids along the way!

>Anyone know how they managed finances

the article does

"And some buy a copy of the book the Zapps have written about their adventure, entitled "Catching a Dream." They have sold about 100,000 copies and say this is their main source of revenue for all this traveling."

How the hell did they find the time to make 4 kids while traveling in a car? The first few I guess it’s easy to slip away, but the rest?

"Making" a kid is probably the easiest and quickest part of having kids, lol.

Can anyone link their book? I couldn't find it on amazon or goodreads.

That’s because this is some prime reporting and the book is actually called “Spark your Dream”: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1965649

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