I didn't think hitching would start off so miserably and end so wonderfully.
I took some online advice and was standing on the side of the road near a bus station on what some may consider the outskirts of Istanbul, but what is still well within its suffocating sprawl.
Two hours of holding a sign and trying to explain to occasional passersby that I wasn't interested in the bus station right behind me, I nearly was ready to give up. Then some cops stopped as they drove by, and reversed toward me.
The young sidekick studied English linguistics. "Why are you hitchhiking like this?" "You can take a bus." I lied and said that I had a bet with friends. I learned from Doc in Cannery Row that people sometimes don't trust someone doing something just to do it. Everyone likes a story with a bet.
The cops were great and brought me to a smaller, quieter road on the backside of the station that they said would be better. Inside their little van/car hybrid vehicle, there were billy clubs swinging on hooks on the side, and a semi-automatic shoved on a shelf above the sun visors.
I stood there for awhile before I saw a western-European looking kid with a backpack and knew he was here to hitch out too. There could be no other reason for a traveler to be where we were. He followed standard hitching etiquette and moved further down road from me, since I was there first and would get the first ride.
Neither of us got rides after more than an hour, bringing my total waiting time up to around three and a half. We decided to get a bus out of town together. At the bus station outside of Edirne, after briefly not knowing which way was towards Bulgaria, we got a ride as we were hoofing it along the highway on-ramp.
And to clarify, when I say highway for this part of the trip, I mean roads that look like the above photo. That's Ville, the Finnish guy I spent the first day hitching with. A total of four rides took us across the Bulgarian border to the capital, Sofia. Each time we got dropped off, we waited even less time than the previous ride.
First was a Bulgarian in a small Ford who drove coaches in Turkey because the money was better. He was big and had a short, well-trimmed mustache. We picked up his wife in a small town and he changed into a track suit, showed us his motorcycle, and gave us coffee.
Second was a pair of young Bulgarian guys in a spacious station wagon. They smoked cigarettes and we listened to Bulgarian pop music.
Third was with another pair of guys in a jalopy they had to push start after they filled up with gas. I involuntarily nodded off a couple times.
Our last ride was as the dusk was falling, and we weren't sure if we'd make it to Sofia that night. After standing for five minutes on a tiny road outside of Plovdiv that led to the highway to Sofia, a long BMW sedan screeched to a halt in the dirt beside us. A young couple brought us to the outskirts of the city where we had a meal in a gas station that tasted better than any other meal I've ever had in a gas station.
Thank god I was with Ville, who had a LP for eastern Europe. That's how we found the hostel we stayed in, after ditching some sketchy Ruskophone who kept saying he wasn't going to rob or stab us. And thank god Ville was with me when we were hitching because he'd never done it before, and I had a European road atlas and he didn't . Our resources complimented each others well.
The hostel was one of the best I've stayed in. It was cheap, the rooms where clean, spacious, and mostly empty. The graffiti, design, and organization lent it a real comfortable atmosphere, and the basement bar had cheap beer, beautiful women, and live music.
I was to find that being tempted to stay in each place I passed through was to become a theme on this four day hitching jaunt.
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