Gerrit Argento

"I Can't Believe We're Still Alive" or Gerrit and Bill Hitchhike Around the World Gerrit Argento

Gerrit and Bill were amongst the first to drop out of college and take off looking for adventure. They spent a year hitchhiking around the world during the early 60s in search of a mystery woman they had seen in a movie. Each began with one thousand dollars in his pocket, a sleeping bag and a backpack. No hostels, no luxury hotels, given places to sleep by peasants, princes, priests and prostitutes they were nearly dumped out in the middle of the Persian Desert, used unwittingly as a cover for drug smugglers in the Kyber Pass, night club entertainers and celebrities in Calcutta, thrown out of Burma, official greeters for a brothel in Phnom Penh, thrown out of Cambodia, rode a taxi through Viet Cong territory to Saigon, locked with crates of dying monkeys in the hole of a ship crossing the South China Sea, first male models to appear in a Hong Kong fashion show, thrown out of Hong Kong, nearly killed by jellyfish before being thrown out of Borneo, hitched a ride with crocodile poachers in Australia, sailed through the heart of a typhoon in the South Pacific. Invariably, the first thing people who read this saga say is, "I can't believe you are still alive." An honest response would be, "Neither can we."