Estefan - The Man of the Andes, Peru

Home's everywhere. It's wherever I am. I bring home with me.

Right or wrong, alcohol is one of the finest social lubricants there is, and beer is the best of all. In Peru you buy it in litre and a half bottles, and something you can more or less count on as a lonesome traveller up in the mountains is that if you drink a glass outside a bar, then by the time you get to your second you'll have company. Of course you have to take things as they come. I once had to talk a drunken old man out of slitting my throat and I've bolted after a pickpocket or two, but if you decide to walk your road solo then your allies are going to be those you meet along your way. Dreadlocked barefoot hippy hostellers, gentle Quechuans who you mistrust but really shouldn't, and grimy barfly wanderers with tattoos and big smiles are just going to be life. And you'll love them.

Estefan gave me the same answer he gave everyone.

I'm from my mother.'

I know it sounds like your average smart response to a question we all get tired of, but in his case it was about as specific as he could get. His father was French, his mother was from the Congo , and he was born in Switzerland . Siblings had appeared in Germany , North Africa , France and Ireland , and he'd been schooled in systems the world over, ending up in America . From there he'd lived as he'd grown up. South America , the Middle East , Indo, Europe and the U.S drifted in and out of his stories seamlessly - for him they were all part of one long blur that made up a life of wandering.

Estefan was a big, stubble-bearded, red-haired guy with that continental habit of gesticulating a lot. Wide crazy eyes not quite scary, just unsettling, like you never knew quite what was coming next. He flicked from one subject to another without warning, always listening attentively when anyone else spoke, but forgetting it as soon as he opened his mouth again. The kind of person who gets lost in their own conversation.

That's not to say he didn't have his conformities. As with many so-called men of the world, Estefan was vehemently anti-American. He believed that George Bush himself had orchestrated the attack on the World Trade Centre, and that what the U.S. stood for essentially was society. He had all sorts of views on society: how it had advanced too far, how the world was becoming impersonal as wealth and safety increased. The more contrived communities became, the more they matured from community into society, and the more fragile they became in the long term. Hunter-gatherers moved on when they ran out of food. Imagine what would happen if Washington ran out of food.

Capitalism Estefan rejected entirely. He had that ant hill' view of the system. Millions of people all working in their own daily drudge, ignorant of everything outside their own little sphere of experience, relying on the news for any knowledge of what lay beyond. It goes without saying that Estefan was deeply suspicious of the media. In fact, his motto, and one which did make a lot of sense, was to question everything . Not original, true, but when you think about it, how can you be sure of the existence of anything you haven't seen with your own eyes? I've never been to half the places I've read about yet I assume what I read is true.

It's an old debate power and the press but rather than just talking about it, Estefan, with his roaming lifestyle, had formulated his own personal globalisation. He wandered the world from end to end, existing mostly through the hospitality of friends along the way and selling various exotic objects when he passed through America now and again. He would rummage in the bum bag he always carried and produce tiny bottles of oils he'd bartered off merchants in North Africa , or rare red rocks from Canada that he'd engraved with intricate Islamic designs using dental tools. Estefan used any methods at his disposal to get to far flung countries and see peoples and places with no need to rely on others to tell him what to think. He wasn't a great fan of thinking anyway. As he told us sagely,

Try not to think. Just be . Babies don't think do they? They just are .

Read this far and you've probably got the same basic idea of Estefan as I did after a few hours. You admire his spirit, and I'd even go further and say I envied him. Having been accustomed to being settled, I don't think I could cope with his way of life. Even in one night of talking to him he became a kind of storybook character, yet for all that, the reasoning behind his lifestyle was so flawed that he seemed somehow tragic too.

To live your life on a personal level is all very well, but the difficulty lies in a whole life philosophy based on distrust . Question everything . Estefan didn't make himself out to be an adventurer, but rather a kind of crusader against the system, like he'd risen above it and could look down on it from his pedestal. Except that he hadn't had he? He sold all his crazy goods to American consumers. When he did occasionally work it was in places where transient labour was built into the system and most of the time he lived off the generosity of people who were every inch part of it. Just because he didn't subscribe to society didn't mean he wasn't living through it.

Estefan didn't seem to realise any of this. He spent so much time thinking about the world and society, but misjudged his own position in it all. Without the society he hated so much, and the media he distrusted so entirely, there would be no Estefans.

I was asked if he had many plans for the future. He had no idea where he would go next. He'd always liked the Chileans, but a girlfriend with one of his children he hadn't seen for a few years was in the US, so he thought he might go and see them for a couple of months before he set off back East.

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