His recorded hitchhiking career started on 16 June 1980 at 07:47 and he has hitched 712,763.6 km in the following 33 countries:
Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Austria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Belgium, United Kingdom, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, San Marino, Portugal, Spain, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia and Andorra.
He has also been to the USA on two occasions, visiting Austin and New York, and a few years ago, on his way to a wedding of friends in Spain, he spent a few hours in Monaco, but he has not done any hitchhiking during those visits.
He’s fluent in Dutch and English, more than capable of speaking German and knows enough French to survive when dropped in the middle of nowhere in France.
Note that the direct link above uses geolocation and that will prevent you from watching the program from outside the Netherlands, unless you use a VPN with an endpoint inside the Netherlands. The “local” copy links to an extract of the original program, containing just the segment that features Prino. You may need to download it to play it.
At his first appearance he beat the “Most miles hitched in any twenty-four hour period” held by one Ashok Gupta by a “Beamonesque” 8.1%. (And yes, hitchhiking is a sport!), beat it again by in the 12th (1991) edition by an even more “Beamonesque” 11.0%, raising it to 1,440.6 miles (2,318.4 km), and if some stupid cnut by the name of Katie “effing” Wood hadn’t replaced it by an idiotic non-record, it might have held the crown up to and including the final (17th) edition in 1996!
Other than the two records, he also had some honorable mentions in the “Longest hitch in one vehicle” category.
For those interested, here's an annotated overview of all records in Ken Welsh’ “Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe”
Hitchhiking resources
Since creating this site, Prino has spent time and effort tracking down hitchhiking related articles and publications. Some of what’s presented was already around in one way or another, in those cases he has provided a link to the original, but some of it is unique to this site. Prino has sought permission to publish the material here, but where it was impossible to contact the original author(s), he’s decided to go ahead anyway.
He is currently “between contracts”. A CV is available on request.
The name “prino” was “given” to him in 1974 by his chemistry teacher, Eelco Hessling. Eelco had apparently, as can be seen on the image to the right, incorrectly copied Robert’s name and surname from a school provided list of pupils(?), and, when going through this list for the first time, obviously called “Robert Prins” “Robert Prino”. The name was initially taken over by one of his classmates, Tom Bosma, but more followed in due course, and four years later he was universally known as Prino, and that name has stuck ever since.
So you want to link to my website? No problem, feel free to link to this page, but…
…if you want to deep-link to any other pages, please tell me in advance, as it will allow me to set up an invariant page that immediately redirects to the page you want to link to, so that people accessing my site from your site or entering the URL from a book you might have written won’t be greeted by a dreaded 404 message!