The Last Hitch

Naturally, the skies turned gray and rain began to fall the closer I got to England. That wasn't so bad though, because at the start of the day I wasn't even sure I'd be able to get close to England at all.

After a couple of hours on public transport to get to the northern fringe of Paris, I approached a gas station to see 6 people already trying to hitch north. There were two British girls heading to London just like me, and a cluster of four Polish guys who'd been waiting overnight.

The girls were gone when I got out of the toilet in the gas station, minutes after I arrived. They'd been waiting only an hour. I wasn't surprised the Polish guys had spent all night at the gas station. They were lazy and slobby and tried to get lifts by waving obnoxiously and calling out. Not the way to get a lift, and being a group of four doesn't ever help. I ran into a group of four Polish girls outside of Madrid who also spent the night at a gas station. If four fine-looking polite girls have a hard time getting a ride, four indolent guys might as well give up.

I wasn't so sure about the whole attempt to get to London anyway. Somehow I'd have to get across on the ferry which seemed like it might've been hard, especially after looking at this forum post which eventually devolves into inanities, misinformation, and pathetic moral posturing.

But there I was, in a truck cab approaching the port. It was my fifth ride, and I had to walk a fair amount to get to decent hitching spots after two well-intentioned lifts had earlier dropped me in very unhelpful places. If I had known better, I might've shaved a couple hours of the 14-hour day between leaving one flat in Paris in the morning, and arriving at my friends flat in London that evening.

At just past 4PM a French truck driver dropped me off by the exit ramp that veered away from the two lanes going toward the Calais port. Lucky for me, a car stopped about two minutes later on the rainy shoulder, before I could even get to the ticket booth and run into any problems getting through customs.

A Brit named Gerard was going back to England with his young son. He brought me through customs - the officer asking stern questions like why was I going to England, how long was I staying, how was I leaving, what boat, and so on - and past the ticket window. Either the girl didn't care that he was registered for two people and had three in the car, or she didn't notice the little boy in the back, caught up in drawings of dinosaurs and dragons.

Gerard wasn't going to London, but the cars soon lined up behind us, and I was able to find a couple heading there quite easily. They told me to meet them once on the boat. Don't believe that terrible forum post above, once through the customs and ticket booths, cars queue up in a huge lot and wait around for awhile, making it possibly the easiest place to find a ride ever.



I won't drag this out. I had some good chats with Gerard, a retired teacher from a hard part of England and we had a couple of pints. I charmed the elderly couple who was to bring me to the edge of London, and I took photos of the white cliffs of Dover sandwiched between the matching gray of the sea and the sky. Bob and Amy regaled me of tales of all the other hitchers they brought to and from the ferry - they had even picked up the same guy on two separate occasions, years apart. The sunset burning deep pink in the sky was stunning as we crested a hill on the M25.

I was left at a suburban train station, found an ATM, caught the train, got change at a fried chicken shack by Seven Sisters, picked up an Oyster Card, and got to Jamie's flat, and we tucked into the wine I had picked up that morning in Paris. The hard part was over, and my trip itself was nearly over.

Coming To This

Another column of mine has been published in the Exeter News-Letter.

Click here to give it a read, or you can always find it on the list on the right-hand side.

Thanks for stopping by, don't forget to floss.

An Average Day of Hitching

Getting out of large cities is the hardest part of hitchhiking, followed closely by getting into them. The first time I ever tried hitchhiking I was 20 years old and was standing on a street in the middle of Auckland, New Zealand holding a sign and looking like an idiot. You can't hitchhike out of the middle of a city.

Fortunately, there are sites like hitchwiki.org that have tips for taking public transport out of cities to good hitching spots - ideally gas stations or rest stops along highways. I made it out of downtown Barcelona by walking from my friends apartment to the metro at 9AM, taking a train to Catalunya station where I changed to the commuter rail and a painfully slow train out of the city. Between those two trains and the one mile walk across a bridge and down a road to the gas station it took me two hours to start really hitching.

I stood by the exit onto the highway with a sign saying Madrid. Signs are really only necessary when the road splits toward different directions and routes like it does outside Barcelona. After about 30 minutes a firefighter picked me up in his beat up car. He was in his mid-thirties, wore shades and some scruff. I had to practice my extremely rusty Spanish since he spoke no English, but I think we had a good conversation about the Coen brothers, Javier Bardem, the forest fires along the Barcelona-Madrid railway, his friends' craft-brewed beer, and Catalonian pop music.

He dropped me off after about 85 kilometers outside of the town he lived in. It was 12:35PM. In another 15 minutes, a couple in a small BMW coupe pulled up. I started to explain I was headed toward Madrid in ugly Spanish, but the dude just replied in very good English, "Where are you going?" They were an Argentinian couple from Chile in Spain on holiday. They'd just done a loop from Madrid via Lisbon, small cities in Spain, and Barcelona and were heading back to Madrid after a night in Zaragoza. They left me at a gas station outside of Zaragoza.

It wasn't a great place to hitch, though all the elements were there. It had a gas station, restaurant and store. It had lots of traffic, but it was not a good set-up. Usually, once you get onto a highway, it's easy to get rides from rest stop to rest stop, if not a ride directly to where you want to go. This place wasn't a pull-off/pull-on style rest stop like most places along a highway, it was along an exit, so cars coming off and going back on after a break had to drive further away from the highway before turning around and zooming back onto the road. By the time they were heading toward the highway, they were driving at full speed. This is not a good situation to try to catch a ride in.

It took me a bit to decide where to stand and wait, and eventually stood around across the street from where cars exited the highway for an hour as trucks and cars zoomed past me to get back on. Some cops stopped a truck and were inspecting it when I decided to go into the restaurant for some food to not push my luck. I haven't had any problems with cops since I've been hitching and I don't want to start.

I waited for another hour after lunch. First, one car stopped and the guy said he was only going into Zaragoza which didn't do me any good. I took the fact that he at least stopped as a good sign, and it was. Ten minutes later a large Audi stopped. There were four guys around my age in it, not leaving a lot of room for me. I wouldnt've stopped in their situation to be honest, but I wasn't about to complain about sitting bitch in the backseat.

They were cousins, three from Germany, one from Austria. The driver and eldest cousin, named Ken, drove like a fucking madman, making rapid use of all six gears in the Audi. To his constant frustration, there was construction along the road, limiting the length of stretches on which he could push the car up to 120 MPH. I talked mostly with Mal, the Austrian who was interested in politics and economics, and I really didn't have much to say to him on those topics, though I tried my hardest.

They were your typical party tourists: generally speaking, assholes that made jokes even I considered immature. One of the cousins got so drunk that he passed out on a beach on Ibiza and got everything stolen off of him and had to get a new passport. They were sincerely nice to me though, perhaps their German-ness making them empathize with a hitchhiker. After a rest stop where I snapped the above picture of an idyllic and colorful countryside, they insisted I sit up in the front seat and gave me ice cream and pretzel sticks.

A couple hours later, we were in the heart of Madrid. Ken was off to see his daughter, and they parked right near the Puerto del Sol, where I had coincidentally planned on staying anyway. But before we got there, he managed to sexually harass three women before we even got out of the car: first, a primped-up chick in a convertible he called "silicona" in order to get directions from her (to be fair, she was completely ignoring his polite and clearly audible 'hola's and 'perdon's. Second, a woman was filming something for the news on a grassy median as we were stopped in traffic. Ken shouted out "show me your ass!" in Spanish as we drove past, and later on when we were winding through small streets in the heart of town, we overheard a tourist saying in English, "...I don't know where he went..." and he blurted out, "To suck a cocks!" before speeding off again.



I was checking into a hostel around 8PM, leaving me time to clean up, walk through el Retiro to check out the badass statue of Satan as he falls from heaven, and then get a bus ticket for the next day, for a change of pace. That makes for 11 total hours of travel, including 2 to get out of Barcelona, about 3 for waiting for rides. That leaves 6 hours on the road, just about dead on with GoogleMaps' estimate for the 624 kilometer trip. I was lucky to get brought straight into the city. Usually, I wind up taking public transport in from some outer point, but I guess this time I just lucked out.

Southern France

A Parisian girl in Berlin told me that southern France was somewhere everyone has to go. "It's not as good as Paris, of course, and people there are a little conservative and backwards, a little racist, but you must visit."

My introduction to southern France was getting picked up by a French woman who brought me to her holiday villa on the top of a hill in the middle of the countryside, close only to a village of about 2,000 people. Her mother had dinner waiting on the patio next to the pool when I arrived. We sang karaoke in the village, drank local wine, and I lounged through the next day by the pool, eating freshly cooked food before Audrey brought me to Avignon.

Turns out that in Avignon, there was a massive performance arts festival happening. For three weeks every year, the city gets mobbed by dancers, jugglers, musicians, puppeteers, bands, breakdancers, magicians, actors, etc. etc. There are street performers everywhere you turn, in the main square, on the avenues, down the side streets and in the alleys. It's almost enough to distract you from the main events, which are performances in various venues throughout the city. It was quite a stunning atmosphere to blindly wander into. The place doesn't quiet down for three weeks, the intensity is stunning. I stayed two days in Avignon before moving out to the countryside to crash with my buddy who was working in the area guiding bicycle tours.



Stephane lives in a house in the countryside with his sister and brother-in-law. It was a full house, with cousins and their kids visiting, but they let me crash on the couch. Luckily, Stephane had the whole week off of work, his first since starting to guide rich tourists through the wine country and boutique, 300 Euro a night hotels. Day one, he brought me on a bike ride towards the world's largest standing aqueduct, but we turned back after about 10 miles because it was windy as hell with le mistral in full effect, and I was seriously out of shape and struggling. It's a 40 mile round trip.



We did the ride the next day in the afternoon. I was slow, but made it. The pont du gard is built over a beautiful river. There were a bunch of tourists, but not as many as I would've though. Then again, we did arrive at like six PM on a weekday. We drank a celebratory halfway beer and spent a couple hours lounging by the water, diving, and reading. It was like hanging out in a postcard. The aqueduct functioned for about 900 years and was built without mortar.




The rest of my time in southern France was spent relaxing in the shade, drinking pastis and playing petanque, eating elaborate meals, and drinking wine. It made me not want to leave. My last night, I went to meet some of the guides and people that Stephane works with. In a nearby town, his company has a house built right in front of a stony hill for their guides to stay in when they're in the area. The place is sheltered from the street and focused on overgrown terraced gardens that climb up the hill, with a patio made for dining and wide open doors that basically make the whole first floor open air. We dined with two other Americans guides, an English guide, and a gorgeous Italian woman who ran the office. The sun set over the villa roofs in Orange, the town we were in, and from up on the hillside, climbing through the overgrown vines, the view was stunning.

On one hand, the Parisian girl knew what she was talking about: southern France must be visited. On the other hand, I don't see how Paris could be any better of a place to live, though I suppose at some point paradise gets boring, just ask Adam and Eve. And speaking of that story and eating fruit, southern France had some amazing fruit growing all over the place too, and if a tree grows over the fence line of a property, it automatically becomes fair game for public picking. Mmmm, fresh fruit...

CouchSurfing

That's Mihai making me breakfast before I set off for Milan from Munich. I stayed over at his place even though we just met the night before via the Internet. Shit, this sounds like it could be an irresponsible homosexual tryst, but it's just an average CouchSurfing story and completely platonic.

I've mentioned CouchSurfing at least a few times on this blog, but don't think I've gone into too much detail about it. It's a simple principle: a website that unites travelers. You stay with people on their couches/floors/spare beds for free and you can host people on your couch/floor/spare bed. I won't get into it much more, it might be boring.

When I recently hitchhiked from Germany to France, I stayed with a couple CS hosts along the way. It's kinda a hassle to organize this when you're hitchhiking without a phone since you don't know when you're going to get into a city you don't know, and you don't know where you will wind up after your last ride, but I made it work twice on really short notice.

This attests more to the great hospitality of the hosts I stayed with more than my resourcefulness. I was lazy and had only about a day to organize myself to stay in both Munich and Milan. I don't think I'd have the patience and endurance to couchsurf and hitchhike all the time like the good man of letters Jamie Maslin, who has done so from one end of the earth to the other.

Anyway, on a windy day in Germany I was sitting in Mihai's temporary apartment thinking about CouchSurfing and it (re-)dawned on me how fantastic the site and community are. There I was in Munich, sitting on a couch with a Romanian kid who just started a new job in a new country, chatting away about traveling and learning a bit about Romanian linguistic history.

I'd really taken CouchSurfing for granted, thinking that it should only be natural that I can meet people who are interested in my travels and would like to help me out with a place to stay and recommendations for things to do around town. That's what I would want to do for travelers, so that's what I expected.

The next night, the Polish truck driver that brought me to a gas station just outside of Milan insisted, without speaking any English at all, that he call up the host that had agreed to let me crash at her place at the last minute, and get her to pick me up so I didn't have to find my own way into town.

Antonella drove up and ferried me away, and brought me directly to one of the best meals of my trip at restaurant and indoor bocce hall that was tucked back off the street in the shade and bordered by train tracks. There was no menu and the meal was just freshly made pasta with a creamy sauce and the meat of some wild bird that was beyond her translation abilities.

It was the sort of place no one would ever find on their own, and it was cheap, atmospheric, and so goddamed tasty. And it was all enjoyed with a chat with someone who lived in the area, who had more to say to me than just how to get to the nearest metro stop, or where the supermarket was, or what time the museum closes.

CouchSurfing is great for saving money alone, but as I see more and more clueless backpacker tourists on the beaten path doing the same mundane shit in the same oblivious state around the "must-see" sites and cities of Europe, I've ceased to simply be appreciative of the hospitality and advice I receive from CS hosts, and am now truly grateful. It's natural to go somewhere and want to meet people who live there - surprisingly hard to do as a tourist - and very fortunate that there is such a website to make it happen.

Thanks to all the people who've hosted me and kept me off the streets, out of hotels, and brought me to places more interesting than museums and souvenir shops.

Hitchhiking: Germany to France

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It took me longer to get out of Berlin than I thought. Getting out of cities is hands down the most difficult part of hitchhiking. Fortunately, there is a site called HitchWiki that provides good advice.

Getting out of Berlin was actually easy, it just took awhile to catch the right train to the right spot. It was an easy walk from the train station to a highway rest stop where I got a ride after about five minutes with a slobby-looking guy named Stefan who spoke no English and incongruously drove a sleek, brand new VW.

At the next rasthof, I waited for about 30 minutes before I got my second and final ride. I think it only took so long because two hitchers were already there before me. They said they'd waited 90 hours at the last place they were at, probably because they looked like homeless ravers: random pieces of hair shaved, other pieces in dreads, random colors, baggy camo pants, piercings. I support people who want to look like cyber-clowns, but it's not conducive to easy hitchhiking. Having moved further down from their spot as is customary when arriving after other hitchers are already waiting, I got picked up five minutes after they hopped on a huge empty bus and passed them on the road ten minutes later.

An Italian guy named Moreno gave me a lift to northeast Munich. He ran some restaurants in Berlin, and was looking to open more. Avril Lavigne ate at one of his places the previous night, and was coming in tonight as well. He was a slight little guy and liked to talk with gesticulations. He had lived in America and loved the country, dreamed of going back there, and had thrown out US-bashing Germans from his restaurant. I got a train into the city and stayed with a Romanian CouchSurfer who just moved into town for a job.

The next day was kind of a bitch in terms of hitching. The road from Berlin to Munich was straight and direct and fast. No such luck getting from Munich to Milan. I had to go through two countries to get to Italy, and use several roads which meant several changes of rides. On the bright side, this is the sort of scenery I was dealing with:



That's looking into Austria from just over the Swiss border. Switzerland has the most stunning mountain scenery, and all I got to see was vistas through a window on the highways. If one is to actually go hiking through Switzerland, or hang out in some rural villages, I believe one may never want to leave.

All in all, it took me all day and nine rides to get to Milan. At one point I was dropped off at a Heidiland rest stop. They had an anamatronic Heidi show in a small tower, and a pen of bleating goats:




I was never fully convinced I'd get to Milan that day, but with crisp beautiful weather and Alpen mountains to look at, I wasn't too worried. It did start to rain while I was waiting near the Italian border. I went inside the rest area to wait out the worst of it and found that a last-minute host on CouchSurfing had said I could stay with her in Milan. Knowing I had a place to stay that night, I went out and stood in the rain until a Polish-Italian trucker who spoke no English gave me a lift. His kindness was overbearing, insisting to call the girl I was supposed to stay with, and arranging for her to come pick me up at a gas station outside the city. I didn't want to push her limits of hospitality, but after he got a hold of her number from me, there was no going back.

Fortunately, she was happy to pick me up in her beat up Panda, and after one of the most amazing pasta meals of my life at a neighborhood bocciofila club, I was happy to sleep after the long day of standing around surrounded by beautiful mountains.



My final day of hitchhiking involved figuring out how to get to gas station on the highway outside of Milan since there wasn't much good advice on HitchWiki. A quick ride with an orthopedic doctor brought me to the next big station where a couple picked me up and brought me down the coast past Genova. Turned out that the woman was into John Irving and was quite tickled to learn I was from the same town, and my father went to school with him. They were super nice and I offered her a tour of Exeter as known through Irving's books if she ever came around to the Boston area.

A young couple in a Jeep gave me a lift further on into France, past Cannes. At that point it really hit me that I had no idea where exactly to go in France other than Provence, which is a big region. Stephane wasn't answering his phone and I had no Internet access. So I sat around for a few hours, trying to call on payphones, and eventually just deciding to hitch further on, anywhere, since sleeping in the bushes at a highway rest stop didn't appeal much to me.

This is where my luck really changed. After a few minutes a French girl driving alone stopped. I learned later that Audrey was thinking, "You're driving alone. Why the hell are you stopping to pick up a hitchhiker?" Well it turned out that she was very interested in my travels and invited me to stay at her family's holiday villa in the countryside with her and her mother when she learned I had nowhere to sleep that night.

That's a story in itself: the place was one of the nicest houses I've been in, and I was served amazing food, and completely made at home with Audrey and her mother. After a day of lounging, good food, swimming, and strolls around the tiny old village nearby, I finally figured out where exactly to meet Stephane, and got driven into Avignon with Audrey. She wanted to see the festival that was going on. Turns out that was more good luck. We met up with Stephane together, and in the main plaza in Avignon, hoisting an enormous mug of beer, surrounded by happy crowds and street performers and musicians, I finally made it to a place that I didn't quite know I was headed to.

Laziness in Berlin

After my family left Europe, I had nothing to do. There I was, in Berlin, having made it from Korea to western Europe by land, my original goal completed.

Instead of basking in the culmination of my achievement and making concrete plans to move on or head home, I moved into an open room at a friend's place and was thoroughly lazy. I tried hunting down some boats on the Internet that would take me across the Atlantic, but that wasn't very successful.

Eventually I had to move out, and I spent three days in a hostel wondering what to do with myself. I went to a fashion trade show with an Australian CouchSurfer I'd previously met, lounged in parks, and accompanied a Swedish kid while he bought weed from some shifty Africans that kept their stash hidden in plain sight in trash among the bushes in Gorlitzer Park.

I had some friends I considered visiting elsewhere, but hadn't made any plans with them. I hadn't heard back from a friend of mine in southern France via email so I finally got the novel idea of calling him up. Stephane answered, and was in the hospital because one of his tourists hurt himself since he wasn't used to being clipped into bikes.

It was Wednesday evening, and he said he had all next week off. That was perfect since it would take me at least three days to hitchhike from northern Germany to southern France. All of a sudden I had another goal, and just like that, felt excited to be in Europe again.

The only thing was, I should've asked Stephane what town he lived in before I left Berlin the next morning.

Photos!

I've uploaded more photos! I added an album of the few photos I took while I was hitchhiking. Mostly it's just boring photos of random roads, but there's a few of some crazy drunken Finnish wood-engineering students I met in Hannover.

That photo above is my final destination on the hitchhiking trip, Sean and Helen's place in The Hague. I made it, after a ridiculous series of local train mix-ups, but that's another story, and not a very interesting one.




I also added an album when I was in and around Prague. There I got to hang out with my good homeys Maggie from NH and Paul from Korea. He's not really from Korea, that's just where I know him from.

As always, the link will go on the right-hand sidebar. I'm not bothering to put one for the hitchhiking on the side, because most of the pictures are dull, and it would ruin my list of countries visited.

Too Easy To Enjoy?

I guess it's just the masochist in me.

I planned this trip overland to make things a little more interesting, to get a real sense of the size of this planet, and to challenge myself a bit. After all, backpacking isn't the hardest thing to do. You just need a bit of apathy and a bit of adventure directed correctly.

The original plan was to make it to western Europe via land. Check.

But when I was leaving Turkey and decided to hitchhike, it was partly out of frugality, and partly out of adventure. I did make it entirely across Asia by bus, train, and boat. Why bother making myself do the same through Europe?

It'd probably be like hiking the Appalachian trail north to south. You get the hard part out of the way immediately, so you just coast through the rest.

So I decided to hitchhike. That's harder than taking trains. And now I'm thinking about cycling through France and Spain to Morocco. That's harder than hitchhiking. And after that, maybe finding a boat across the Atlantic back to the States. At this point, taking a plane for any reason just seems too easy. That's probably harder than hitchhiking, finding a boat that will take me on as crew.

Too easy to enjoy? I doubt it, but a little extra challenge never hurt anyone.

What all this has to do with a baby mannequin in a stroller with a laptop? Well, I don't think I need to state the obvious.

Hitching Complete!

All in all, it took only six days to hitchhike through eight countries across the entire European continent, from Turkey to the Netherlands. It went much faster than I thought it would.

Everyone that picked me up was super nice. The Polish truck driver that brought me most of the way to the Netherlands yesterday even insisted I try some Polish beer as we were driving, since I casually mentioned that I'd heard good things about it. He also bought me a salad and a lemon-yogurt drink.

Road hospitality is a great thing.

Hitchhiking has a bad reputation, but after this trip, I'm convinced it's only those super rare stories of rape, murder, and general mayhem that sully its reputation. Case in point: I wasn't murdered even a single time.

Hitching Istanbul to Prague: Day 4

I was only a few hours from Prague in Brno, and took my time getting out. A questionably gay Syrian man served me a kebap for breakfast, and I took the tram to a bus to get out of the city.

I got way lost finding the highway from the last bus stop. I thought I was in the wrong place. Turns out I was just disoriented and spent an hour looking in the wrong direction before I had to push my way through a bunch of bushes and wet grass on the side of the highway for twenty minutes, in between the road and the industrial businesses, to get to a roadside gas station.

A woman and her little boy stopped to give me a lift. She had just come back from some new age philosophical retreat in Arizona. Some weird Flower of Life thing. Anyway, she got me to a larger gas station with a McDonald's, ensuring more cars. A young abdominal surgeon picked me up and we drove off through the countryside to pick up his wife before setting off toward Prague.

The countryside alone was worth the four days of hitching. It was a bit rainy, so the rolling fields were extra green, and we curved past airy pine woods and rain-slick hamlets.

They dropped me right off at a metro station, and were a super nice couple. We'd talked a lot about traveling, their bike trips through eastern Europe, and beer. Someone's a good photographer too.

I met Paul at a cafe near his apartment, the waiter called us little girls for only having one beer, and that's where all the fun began.

Hitching Istanbul to Prague: Day 3

I was up even earlier than I thought since I hadn't factored the time change into my clocks. I don't know where exactly the time changed, but I was up, out of town on the metro and buses, and standing on the side of the highway, something I did because it was small and there was a huge pull-off area, but don't normally recommend, at 7:30AM.

One sure advantage of overland travel is the absence of jet lag.

I was hoping to make it to Budapest, but made it way farther. In about 12 hours, I made it 700KM to Brno, Czech Republic.

I got a ride past Novi Sad instantly when I stepped onto the highway outside of Belgrade. After about 45 minutes of waiting, a kid about my age named Dusan picked me up and brought me all the way to a rest stop just before Budapest. He spoke great English, and we talked about motorcycles, American gas prices, local history. I briefly thought he was lulling me into a sense of comfort just to take off with all my stuff when he took a suspiciously long time in the bathroom at a gas station, and I was waiting inside at a table, but that was unfounded. We continued on our way towards Budapest.

After he dropped me off outside the city, before the roads split into ring roads and through roads, I waited for about 15 minutes until a Romanian trucker picked me up. His name was Dieman, and he understood more English than he spoke. He did speak Spanish well though, and after I tried to use my poor, rusty Spanish skills, he told me just to speak in English, and he'd speak in Spanish. We managed to understand each other. He gave me an energy drink, but I still managed to nod off a bit.

He dropped me off at another rest area, still in Hungary, and after 10 minutes a Turkish trucker picked me up and brought me across the border. He did some paperwork, and I played my guitar on the curb at the border. I was a bit confused since there were no passport checks, but just went with it. Welcome to Europe, I suppose. It's a drastic change from the harrowing visa processes and waiting times in parts of central and eastern Asia.

It was a little past five when I got dropped at another rest stop outside Bratislava. I thought I'd try to get into the Czech Republic, though I knew I could get a bed and relax in the city. Another Romanian driver picked me up. He wasn't sure if he could get me to Prague, due to distance and time regulations on truck drivers, but Brno was a likely place for me.

His name was Daniel and he spoke great English, and drove a brand new tractor without a trailer. He delivered chemicals all over Europe, and was on his way to Germany to pick up yet another truck. I played my guitar again as he dealt with border paperwork, and we talked about driving. He liked his job, and it seemed to me that driving down roads, with plenty of time to think and listen to music might be a nice job. I saw myself driving through the Outback, or south-western America, philosophizing and enjoying the open spaces.

"Everything is nice until you have to do it every day," he reminded me. Very true. I'll hold off on the trucking career for now.

I scampered off the highway, walking on the safe side of the guard rail up the exit ramp and into some suburbs of Brno. It was early evening, and kids with souped up cars overran a parking lot. Someone was doing doughnuts in a shitty compact car, screeching around in a circle, sending foul smelling rubber smoke into the air. Others were standing around their cars, generally loitering and socializing.

It was a hassle to find an ATM and get cash, but there was a tram going right into the city center, and I found a hostel online while I ate dinner. The place was a goth dream: faded red carpets, pale-skinned staff with stringy black hair and heavy boots, dim antique hallways and polished stone stairs and tiled walls. I had a room to myself, drank beer down in the bar, and did some serious Internetting for the first time in three or four days.

I relaxed, knowing that Prague was only a few hours away. I watched GoldenEye in my bed and reminisced about playing Nintendo 64 before fading off to sleep with my ears plugged against the life outside the big open windows.

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.

Hitchhiking!

I'm still alive! I'm on schedule, if you can call whatever I'm working with a schedule. Me and a Finnish guy made it from Turkey to Sofia yesterday, and I made it alone to Belgrade today. I should be in Prague on Friday night, just in time to guzzle beer and raise hell.

I'm too lazy to properly post anything beyond this. I could spend what little free time I have (that is, free time not sweating in the sun by the side of a road) eating, showering, or sleeping, so that's what I'll do while I'm hitching.

If you want to be sure I'm still alive, just check my twitter feed on the right-hand side. I'll update that instead of writing here.

Cappadocia

I felt another case of The Dread coming on as I found myself traveling towards Cappadocia. I really knew nothing about the place except that I had been told I absolutely must go there by Laura in Urumqi, Jamie in Kazakhstan, Phil in an overpriced expat pub in Aktau, and every other traveler I'd met who'd been to or knew anything about Turkey.

And why not feel The Dread? Every other "must see" place had been overhyped and overcrowded and overcharged. The Dread was strong as I got off the bus in Goreme. It was a town built for tourists, with it's streets lined with tour shops, restaurants, souvenir stands and boutique hotels built into the volcanic rock cones that the region is famed for, known commonly as "fairy chimneys".

But The Dread soon receded! Cappadocia turned out to be one of the most stunning places I've been on this trip, and Goreme even turned out to be quaint and pleasant. And furthermore, I got my slacks sewn back up in five places after wearing them daily for almost three months for a mere seven dollars.

The best part about the whole region - and Cappadocia is a massive region and not just a canyon or town for those as ignorant as I was when I arrived - is that you can walk out of the most touristy town for 30 minutes and be completely alone out of eye and earshot of anyone else, away from the coachloads of tourists the place unsurprisingly attracts.

The region is a result of a shitload of volcanic ash that compressed itself into layers of rock of varying hardnesses, and was subsequently eroded into canyons walled by smooth fingers of crumbling rock cleaved and divided by dry water sluices, sheltering fields of dick-shaped stone pillars. And nearly everything was carved out by a number of ancient peoples, many of whom were early Christians that fled here to escape persecution, that built well-organized cave homes with pigeon roosts, windows, shelves, staircases, and light and air shafts. And that's not to mention the churches with disintegrating murals or underground cities built for protection.



I spent one day hiking without much aim through a number of canyons, climbing up and down the walls at will, hiking over the spongy ground to the next canyon to slide and scrape down, seeing only one other couple hiking around. The canyon floors were covered in long grass cut only by well-trodden foot paths, small trees were blooming with what looked like white and pink cherry blossoms. The natural beauty, the mysterious history behind the abandoned dwellings, and the absolute silence and solitude had me in awe at every turn.

I spent another day hitch-hiking a 50 miles or so in a loop that brought me from Goreme through the city of Nevsehir to an expansive underground city that housed several thousands of people during times of strife, to crumbling canyon with a pristine river running along the flat grassy bottom below vertical walls spotted with empty carved windows and doors, and back through Aksaray to Goreme.



I spent another day exploring a short network of canyons so riddled with multi-floor houses and churches that the entrance was walled off and you had to pay to get into the "open-air museum".

Cappdocia is touristy as hell, and the natural beauty is undeniable. But the real beauty is that despite the busloads of mononational group tourists, you don't have to see anyone else if you don't want to. The Dread has no place here.

Hitching to India: The Hunt, Days 5, 6, ...whatever.

I've given up on trying to find a boat to India. After spending three days talking to people at marinas, the only thing I've heard is that everyone left during the first couple weeks of January.

I guess my timing is just off. Valuable lesson learned though: when trying to hitchhike onto a yacht, spend more time on sailing forums to make sure people will actually be going to where you want to go when you want to go. Don't rely entirely on this very general chart.

I spent my days hanging around Phuket, driving on cheap motorbikes from beach to city and city to beach. I spent two days and one night on and around the Similan Islands, snorkeling, and camping below bat-infested trees. The fucking animals plopped their shit on the tent and squawked and screeched at all hours of the night. Not that I can really complain about spending any time in such a beautiful place.

So what to do now? It would be very easy to give up my land-only goal and fly to Colombo, visit Sri Lanka and then move on to India, but instead, against all common sense, I'm probably going back to China to spend time with a girl I met here in Phuket.

From Beijing, I'll travel west through China, like I had intended before I got sidetracked into southeast Asia for the last couple months. And as much as I want to go to India, I might just skip it so I don't have to deal with the expense and paperwork of going through Tibet both on my way there and my way back, and so I can visit India some other time and give it the proper time and attention I'm sure it deserves.

But naturally, I really don't know what I'm going to do, and probably won't know until I'm doing it.

Hitching to India: The Hunt, Day 2

Today I scootered over to Chalong Bay for breakfast. I had some foolish idea I'd catch a bunch of boat owners in the cafes or on the pier, but the place was just packed with tourists milling about in life jackets and cramming themselves onto day charter boats.

Chalong Bay might be a good place to find a boat going towards Sri Lanka or India, but it's just a bay with a shitload of boats floating around. There are no docks to loiter on and try to talk to people, though there is a super long pier and an immigration office.

I had breakfast and waited for Viktar to come meet me, reading "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found" for a bit of research for a country it looks like I'll never get to by boat. Viktar is the CouchSurfer I'm staying with, a Belarussian who's been working for a fly-by-night time share company that has started scamming its employees, not just the customers.

We went to Boat Lagoon, and I talked to a couple people there. They told me the same thing, I'm late by 2-4 weeks. Awesome news. I also began to theorize that the middle of the day is not the best time to hang around docks hoping to talk to people. That's probably when they're inside away from the blistering sun, or out doing fun shit.

Viktar went back home to sleep off a hangover before he spends tomorrow calling up the clients his company is planning to screw - pending payments - so he can screw the company since he was fired without getting paid. He thinks the company might send someone after him, so he's bailing from his apartment to stay somewhere else, but he's giving me permission to stay there, and possibly absorb the brunt of hired thugs who don't care who I am. I picture the opening scene in the Big Lebowski.

I went to the Royal Phuket Marina and found a middle-aged Aussie guy, shirtless with a sloppy barrel of a torso, lightly furred, deeply tanned minus the armpits, hosing down a rug. He's heading out to the Andamans, then Sri Lanka and India, but he doesn't want to take on crew.

"Need anyone to cook or clean or do the grunt work?"

"Nah, I've got a wife for that."

The silver lining is that there is at least one boat still heading west. He mentioned some friends going that way too, but also that they don't likely want to take on crew either.

I followed signs to a pier, but it was all local junk fishing boats, and all the roads and alleys leading to the various docks smelled like absolute shit and the water was full of trash. Not the place to catch a ride across a sea, that's for sure.

I drove to Kata beach and laid in the sun among whale-like Russian couples - I actually think I saw the fattest woman ever to wear a bikini - and topless beauties. Submersing myself in the warm Andaman Sea was like heaven closing around my body. The water is clear and warm and shallow and clean, and the sand is white and pure and visible beneath the water for hundreds of meters.

I realized I hadn't been on a beach for ages. I'm spending tomorrow on Patong Beach, apparently Phuket's version of Hampton Beach, because it's the closest to where I'm staying and I returned my scooter today.

Oh also, what I said in the last post about Phuket not being as bad as I thought: well I take that back after spending the evening on Bangla Road last night. It was like a riot in the bad neighborhood of hell. Entertaining for sure, but the sort of place that makes you glad humans invented nuclear weapons.

Hitching to India: The Hunt, Day 1

I figured, what better place to leave than Phuket? I had a terrible impression of this place for years before I even go here, and I arrived to find out that it's bad, but not as bad as I thought it would be. It's full of Russians and resort hotels and scooters and hookers and cheap food and beer. You win some, you lose some, right?

Anyway, this is the place to hitch my way onto a boat, if I'm going to do it at all. It's a super developed island in terms of tourism and big money options. It has at least four marinas for all sorts of boats: sailing yachts captained by retired couples from San Francisco, super yachts owned by anonymous millionaires with crew that look like models, and yachts run by dirtbag travelers who've matured enough to have a boat.

Plenty of opportunities.

Or so I thought. When I made it to Yacht Haven, my last stop of the day, I finally got to talking to a bunch of people who told me that I was about 2 weeks too late. Everyone they knew left towards Sri Lanka early in January. Favorable winds and weather and whatnot.

Well I hadn't spent all day writing notes to post on bulletin boards and zipping around the island's hell-born traffic and road system to give up. Some other people told me that I just need to ask and I'll find something eventually, and I choose to believe them.

After all, if I fail to get a boat, what am I gonna do? Stay in Thailand? Go south through Malaysia? Or get on a plane, god forbid? Fuck that, all three of them. I want to go to India, and I want to go there on a boat.

I posted 8 notes at four marinas. The notes went something like this:

to INDIA and/or SRI LANKA

crew available

Hi, I'm a 27 year old male, American, hoping to travel to Sri Lanka or India.
I'm trying to circle the globe by land and sea only. I've made it this far from
South Korea.

I'm willing to cook, clean, share costs, play mediocre guitar, do general
maintenance, etc. I can leave anytime and have my visa to India already.

Please contact Ethan at:

cyphecks[at]yahoo.com

or

08-8869-5434 (text only though - the microphone on my phone is broken)

Thanks!

I hope it works. I'm going to go back to Chalong Bay, The Boat Lagoon, and the Royal Phuket Marina tomorrow to talk to more people. I'm not going to Yacht Haven again since I spent the most time there today, and more importantly, it's like 45 kilometers on crowded roads through a low atmosphere of smog.