Hitchhiking Journey to Poland

Hitchhiking is a fascinating social experiment that teaches us about ourselves in many ways: appearances, first impressions, natural fears, subconscious decision making process, etc. It gets you to meet people from wide variety of backgrounds: from the trucker to the wealthy businessman, from the young nose-pierced anarchist to the mustached father of two.

I started hitchhiking only recently, in a cross-Canada tour I did in the summer of 2010. And I find it fascinating to look at the social patterns that it bears. For example, in the 40 or so rides I’ve hitched lifetime, only 2 of them were women stopping to pick me up. The vast majority were men alone in their cars, most of them over the age of 35, most of them ex-hitchhikiers themselves. Couples won’t stop, but they’ll take you in every now and then if you ask them at gas stations. And cars with children won’t even look at you, understandably so I guess…

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Mette and myself met two years ago in Cuba. There, we did a bit of travelling together and we stayed in touch since. This July, I was up at her place in Copenhagen where she teaches and my plan was to hitch down to Berlin and settle there for a while.

“Wanna join?”, I ask her.

Us upper-middle-class-kids, we don’t do hitchhiking. We stick to cars and public transport. We buy our rides, we don’t ask for them. We don’t talk to strangers and we stay away from the big dangers of the real world. We do stuff like logistics and planning. Travelling and seeing friends abroad often times means saying: “I’ll go and see you on this date, let’s call him and do that whem I’m there.”

So I was only kidding, of course, when I invited Mette to join. I was only doing small talk, daring her to to do something I figured she we would never do. I guess should have known better…

“I’m in! Wanna go through Sweden and Eastern Europe? How about we leave tomorrow?”

And there it was… As simple as that.

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So Mette and myself spent 7 days on the road asking for rides, meeting people, carrying water, eating apples and crackers, lacking sleep, looking at maps, waiting to get a gps fix, agreeing, disagreeing, sharing next to everything, and improvising solutions to every situation that came up.

Our daily routine was established early on: we would sit down with laptops, wifi access and coffee. We would look at distances and hitchhiking forums on the net. We would figure ways to get to the outskirts of town by public tranportation. We would identify good hitching spots, traps and hosting options. We would look at weather forecasts and at probable intermediate destinations. We would pre-load maps on our iPhones and would agree on how to share the entertainment load in between the 2 of us for the day.

Before leaving Montreal, I asked mom to sew a big canadian flag on the back of my backpack. Hey, the red mapleleaf has an awesome reputation all around the globe. Opportunism or patriotism? A little bit of both, maybe… So on the road, while waiting for a ride, the strategy was very clear. First, the flag and the backpack. Then, the blond girl with the blue eyes. And finally, myself in the back. In that very precise order. And guess what. We never had to wait for more than 20 minutes… Hey, I didn’t invent the rules. I’m just trying to use them to my advantage.

We opted to travel light and not to bring a tent along. At first Mette was a bit worried about not knowing where we would spend the next night. And sharing with her my theory about how life holds good things for those who listen to its signs did not reassure her whatsoever. But we ended up finding a hostel at 1am in Stockholm, sharing a cabin on the ferry to Riga, and being hosted in Vilnius by the guy who picked us earlier in the day. It all worked out fine.

I had my reserves myself about hitching for a week with a girl with no experience whose backpack weighed probably more than she did. But she proved to be an awesome partner, doing the long walks at a good pace without ever complaining, using her killer smile to come up to strangers and landing her fair share of rides all by herself. She even handled the “entertainment load” like a pro during the long rides… I feared having twice the workload I would have doing it solo, but she really made things easier, on top of being awesome company.

As it happens on every hitchhiking adventure, we had a bunch of unusual encounters. Like the arab taxi driver who spoke no english and who couldn’t hide his disappointment after realizing he had not picked up the wealthy foreign clients that he initially thought we were. And seeing that he didn’t really have any other option anyway as we had already covered more than half the distance, he figured he would be a nice guy on that day and said: “Ok! Graaatis! Today, graaaaatis!”

We were told our share of crazy travel stories as well. Like the lithuanian guy who picked us up telling us about how he was questioned by police as he was trying to hitch home after gambling and losing all his money on the ferry casino. He spent his first night in a expensive suite at the expense of his embassy after telling them he had been robbed during the trip, and his second in jail after they found out that he had invented the story. hehe

Oh, and the truck drivers… They have got to be the friendliest species on Earth. A bunch of them picked us up, often time saying that technically it was illegal for them to pick up 2 people because there was only one extra seat, but that they would make an exception because we looked like nice people (meaning that they found Mette to be pretty hot.) And I have no reason to think I would not have done the same.

The week we spent together was very rainy. There were showers pretty much everyday, but overall we were pretty lucky. We always managed to find shelter, whether in a car during a ride or in a convenience store waiting for the sun to come again. But we definitely did catch a break during an 8 kilometer walk that we did after being dropped off in a bad spot in Lithuania close to the polish border. It rained almost constantly that day except during the very 2.5 hours it took to cover the distance. And during the walk, we had confortable temperature, sunshine, and a even a nice little breeze. She never got to admit it, but I think that night, Mette gave some thought to my theory and figured that maybe, just maybe, this had not been 100% pure coincidence… 😉

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And there we were, in Warsaw, the point on the map that we initially had agreed upon as being the final destination of our little hitchhiking journey. I would hitch solo to Berlin the next day and settle there for some time, and she would fly back home and get ready for another school year. This was time to say goodbye.

Our tour around the Baltic Sea was complete; the timestamp on our second little travel adventure together had expired. Just like that, with no warning, the same way it had started a week earlier. The time spent together had been about adventure and about the adrenaline rush you get everytime you see a car pull over. It had been about random encounters you make on the road and about re-discovering how good and generous human kind is. It had been about that feeling of freedom you have when you decide to pack up and leave spontaneously. It had been about living your youth, whatever age you’re at. It had been about two people exploring the boundaries of their friendship; about two friends finding out, as they were about to part ways, that for them, the destination they wanted to get to all along was the journey in itself…