Hitching Istanbul to Prague: Day 2

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.

Hitching Istanbul to Prague: Day 1

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.