Hitchhiker's Guide to Hitchhiking

It feels like winter has passed, yet London is still crying every day. We've had very little sun this January, and many of my friends were feeling quite off, myself included. In such moments, when not much is happening day to day, I come back in my mind to the great adventures that hitchhiking brought me.

Because yes, dear reader, I used to be an adventurer, before I took that damn arrow in the knee and started living a more civilised life like everyone else. I'd like to show you why I have so many fond memories of my hitchhiking trips, and maybe even convince you to set off on a random journey of your own, even for a day.

I think we must have been about 17 then. Me and my best friend loved watching YouTubers who travelled extensively with basically no money, slept at petrol stations and always found themselves in some crazy adventures - each one of them being epic material for a dad lore. In fact, I thought of writing this post because one of those YouTubers has just been captured in Iraq, allegedly for "spying for Israel", which is probably fake news. Woah.

We set off to a music festival, PolAndRock, at that time called Woodstock, which perfectly described its hippy vibes. We set off from our hometown and made it to the motorway before the night. To have a comfortable night, we decided we needed to get into a forest, the fence was not a problem.

After we set up our tents, we tried to fall asleep, but maybe 20 minutes later my friend called me, scared, because he heard something moving in the bushes. We got out of our tents on 1, 2, 3 with our knives and torches out. Surprise - nothing was there, but we were scared enough to come back to the motorway. We spent the rest of the night in half-sleep, with only sleeping bags, woken up every now and then by truck drivers smoking cigarettes, curiously investigating what's up with the two homeless-looking teenagers. We made it to the festival the next day.

I loved it so much that I travelled like that pretty much every holiday for another couple of years. I would even bet with a friend on who could make it faster to the coast (500 km) - me hitchhiking, or his train.

Even the experience of standing on the road, raising your thumb, and expecting a stranger to give you a lift is weird. It's "putting yourself out there" on steroids. Not because of the danger, but because of the rejection. People look at you like you've gone crazy - some of them even signal that - but you learn to smile and have a good time, even if you're standing there for hours.

Once, me and my other great friend spent 24 hours waiting for a car to pick us up from Novi Sad, in Serbia. Three days before, I got terribly food poisoned (don't drink the water locals do) and I basically spent 3 days on a toilet. At that petrol station, I still could not go for more than an hour without going to the toilet: 35°C, very sunny, no shade. We were trying to catch a ride from 9 AM to 10 PM, and not a single car wanted to give us a lift. Yet, we were far from discouraged, playing songs on harmonica and coming up with random reasons why someone didn't stop.

What's the worst case scenario? We were just going to wait longer and stay at a petrol station. That's not bad! Actually, petrol stations are the best places to sleep at. Usually people don't mind tents, you have access to food and even free toilets. Luxury. If you are okay with the worst case scenario, the weight of the problem goes away.

There are downs, but there are ups too. That trip, we basically got in a single car from the Czech Republic to Croatia (±13h), slept on beaches every day with the moon so bright it was sometimes hard to sleep. We even watched a fireworks show by the beach, from a yacht close by - surely a better view than from the shore itself!

The best part is always the people stopping to give you a lift. It's often either ex-hitchhikers, solo drivers, or people curious enough about what these people are doing by the road to stop. The fun part? You are nobody to them. Just a random person they will never ever meet again. They have a long way to go and are trying hard not to fall asleep, so you talk - honestly, without a filter.

I once got into a Porsche with a Chinese businessman, then a teacher who cycled through the Himalayas, a 70-year-old Puerto Rican art curator driving solo from Patagonia to Manaus (6,000 km) to meet his 25-year-old girlfriend, a national boxing coach who helped me catch a car in Argentina while watching his students do interval training. In Croatia, as we were passing by stunning landscapes, our driver was telling us stories of the Yugoslav wars, pointing directly to places where his friends had died.

These people and stories stay with you for a long time and help you gain perspective on the bubble you're living in. I now know that for a young person - broke, with a bit too much free time - there isn't a better way of spending holidays than bumming around in someone else's car.

You see fewer and fewer hitchhikers around. We have become more closed off to other people, and cheap flights sure sound more tempting than sleeping in a tent at a petrol station.

Maybe you feel like this isn't for you, maybe you feel like you're too old. Well, I hope that the next time you see a homeless-looking bum by the road, you'll give them a ride, simply to come into their life for two hours and take a look around. Maybe it will be me.