I got a bit of a late start since I was waiting around for the free breakfast at the Art Hostel, but made it out to a good hitching spot on the outskirts of the city by 11am.
I was standing by a gas station, just across an intersection with a stoplight, right in front of a long wide shoulder. This means that cars were filling up for significant distances, traffic was slow, and there was plenty of room to pull over. Still, it took me about an hour to get picked up.
A guy in a small sedan who worked for a trucking company and spoke no English dropped me off on the road just past Slivnitsa, right by a cop that was just standing in the middle of the road - a country road in America, a highway in Bulgaria - and stopping cars randomly by holding up his palm.
My ride said that the cop was no problem when I mimed a question about the legality of hitching in Bulgaria. I walked past the cop and asked if "avtostop" was okay. Definitely not.
I had to walk a half-mile down the road to get out of his sight to hitch. I stood across from a small gas station that got zero business as I stood there. I had my monocular handy to scope out cars as they came down the road from where the cop was. I was afraid of having my thumb out as the same cop drove by. One can only imagine how much fun he'd have busting a tourist for hitchhiking after he just told me I can't hitchhike.
I watched a three-car passenger train rumble past behind the gas station and kind of wished I was on it. It took me another hour to get a ride in a tiny yellow bucket of a Fiat. The top of the passenger seat was bent backwards, and in the backseat there was a small pile of clothes and fifths of booze of various levels of emptiness. The woman was friendly and sober though, and the first solo woman to pick me up.
She dropped me off a couple kilometers from the Serbian border. I hoofed it down the side of the road, the passenger train passing me once again as we'd overtaken it in the yellow Fiat.
I arrived at the border sweaty and walked up to the toll-style checkpoint. A Bulgarian guard wanted to know what was in my travel guitar case. All the border guards want to know whats inside my travel guitar case; it could definitely be a gun.
"Are you a songer?"
"No, I'm bad. I just play for fun."
"Can you play it?" Which wasn't as much of a question as one might think. I played a few bars. It was well out of tune.
"You're not a good songer."
"I know."
He let me go, and I walked over to the Serbian side, where I was spared the indignity of embarrassing myself with my guitar again. I walked about a hundred yards before I realized I saw no Serbian stamp in my passport. After the scare in Kazakhstan, I thought this might be a problem and walked back and asked a guard if the ghostly outline I had just seen was in fact the Serbian stamp. It was, and apparently the mostly non-existent stamp was good enough for government work.
I walked a bit, and waited a bit for the next couple kilometers. There was very little traffic, and no one was stopping. I was eating chewy gummy worms and sweating my balls off, and told myself that if I got to Dimitrovgrad without a ride, I'd just take a train. That's the perpetual fear when hitchhiking: after a certain amount of time, you convince yourself that a ride will never materialize, despite your odds of getting picked up after one car passing are exactly the same as after a hundred cars passing.
It's very easy to convince yourself of the hopelessness of the situation, and even easier to forget all despondency as soon as a car stops, and one almost always does.
The train passed me once again.
On narrow part of road just before Dimitrovgrad, a cargo van with an empty trailer clattered to a stop. It was about 3:00PM, and the driver, Drago, said he could take me all the way to Belgrade.
I had trouble staying awake, but caught some great songs on the radio during my lucid moments. The Dire Straits, a retro-80s hit, FatBoy Slim. Drago stopped for a bit to sleep as well.
At 8PM, Drago dropped me off on the side of the road near an ramp leading to the city center. I had brochures from the hostel last night that directed me to another amazing hostel after another hour, perhaps, of hauling my bags around town.
The place was like a cool attic hangout, and the only people there were two cute British girls, fresh out of high school, who cooked me food and fed me grapes as I lounged on the sprawling bean bag chairs like a Roman. It might've just been the London accents, but they further impressed me by being able to hold a more intelligent conversation than most women my own age.
An Australian guy showed up eventually. He had been on the train from Sofia that I had passed and been passed by several times throughout the day. It turns out hitchhiking isn't as inefficient as some may think.
With the sore shoulders, full belly, and few drinks in me, I had to hit the hay early since I knew I'd have a long day of hitching in the morning. A bunch of American cyclists showed up and I just didn't have the energy to meet any more new people.
Again, I wanted to stay and explore Belgrade, but as least passing through is better than flying over.
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