Admittedly - before I arrived in South America, I myself had some concerns when I thought more carefully about the idea of sleeping a lot in nature. Hardly any person I met before the beginning of my journey had anything good to say about South America - no matter which country. It appears to be a great need for many people to warn of possible dangers in the countries one is travelling to. That the dicey situations, which are shared with you without asking for it, did not usually happen to the narrator, but to the friend of an acquaintance, doesn't matter. It's hard to not pay too much attention to those drawn pictures. I admit that I don't always succeed in this, but in order to be dissuaded from a project, it takes more than the widespread fear of the unknown, which seems to live in many people.

Long before our departure it was clear that sooner or later we wanted to buy a car to travel to South America. We both already owned cars for other long-term journeys and fell in love with the freedom one gets by owning ones own four wheels. But when we arrived in South America, we had to realize that buying a car here is not as easy as in New Zealand and the information you can find on the Internet mostly refers to Chile, which seems to be the country to go to if one wants to buy a car. However, as we were in Ecuador and wanted to head north, a detour to Chile was out of the question. So we started digging ourselves through the Colombian car purchase process with a lot of help from lovely people. Here comes a How-To Car Buying Guide for Colombia.