Back to where I came from

As a child growing up in England, I was told on more than one occasion that I should go back to where I came from. Being a born optimist, I knew that the obvious intention of the people who said this, was to encourage me to get to know my roots. Many years later after much soul-searching about questions of identity, as a British Indian,  I decided to do just that - when I was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime.

 My parents had moved to Hyderabad, due to my father being employed as a consultant for the construction of the new airport. I wanted to spend time with them as well as to experience the country I had originated from. Altogether, I spent at least a year living in Hyderabad that had been a real education for me, both mentally and spiritually. I went to India with an open mind, not wanting to be prejudiced by all the stereotypes that even I had previously held of India and Indians. I discovered to my delight that I am proud of belonging to such an amazing country with such a rich and diverse culture that is often misunderstood when seen through a Western filter. I had visited many times before, on holiday, but for too short a duration to have any real understanding of what I saw and more importantly, the cultural context it exists in. In the time I had in India I made a pledge to myself to try and observe and interact using my imagination and intuition as a guide rather than what I thought I knew.

Hyderabad has a long and interesting history. I will not even attempt go into detail about that as it would require a book or a number of books to do it any justice. Since I am referring more to the culture of the city, I will start by saying that it does have a distinct culture that is recognized throughout India. Through its various rulers from medieval times to the present, the culture of Hyderabad was always in a state of flux. North and South Indian traditions mingled here when it was an independent princely state with its own flag, army and currency.

 It had a unique culture that resisted invasions and change from outside due partly to its geographical position on the Deccan plateau. Hyderabad was a cosmopolitan city with rulers and influences from Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Hindi and even English, reflected in its clothes and food, clothing, arts and architecture. You can still see remnants of these today as well as the Hyderabadi Tehzeeb of respect, hospitality, openness and tolerance to all faiths, something that Hyderabad was known for, and that had allowed its multiculturalism to flourish.

 

When I first arrived in Hyderabad the first thing that struck me was that it was very crowded compared to the almost empty streets of Vancouver. This was a huge difference in my spatial awareness since the thought of so many living beings being in close proximity was stressful on a level I hadn’t even previously thought about. I did get used to this eventually, as like all things, the initial change in perception is a challenge but gradually becomes normal. The pollution irritated me as I had been used to the clean fresh mountain air of British Columbia and had even forgotten what pollution was. 

The other big difference I noticed, as I spent a good deal of time walking around and taking auto-rickshaws, was the number of crazy drivers who have no regard for laws, but did seem to have eyes in the back of their heads. People driving in India were hyper-aware of their surroundings, evidenced by the high number of near-misses I very anxiously witnessed.

Actually, it was my first impression was that they were near-misses, but then I realized that there was a method in the madness. Indian drivers were like dolphins, not that they looked like them or had big wide-smiling faces (though some of them did), but they were using sound to navigate, a bit like sonar! Incredible as it might sound it is true. One of the first things you would notice if you travelled to an Indian city with a high volume of drivers is a cacophonic orchestra of car, motorbike and scooter horns. To the uninitiated traveler who has just arrived from a country where horns are used only in an emergency or out of anger it seems as if the Indian driver just likes to toot their horn a lot. In fact the horn is used in a highly sophisticated manner, just like the clicking sounds a dolphin makes and for a similar purpose. Dolphins make sounds for echolocation to build up an acoustic picture of their surroundings. Drivers in India use their car horns to give information about their location in relation to other vehicles, and the other vehicles do the same, allowing them to build a similar acoustic picture, hence the sounds serve to regulate traffic flow and prevent accidents.  There are also different types of sounds that are produced based on the duration of the horn and the frequency it is pressed with. For example there is a rapid “bip bip bip” which alerts other drivers that there is a car in the near vicinity that may be in the blind spot of the driver in front. Another beep indicates overtaking and yet another when someone is changing lanes or trying to get behind another vehicle. A long beep with the hand jammed down hard on the horn is used when a cow enters your lane without using it’s indicators. 

There were many things like this that I never understood on my many previous visits to India, I didn’t see the relationship between the different aspects of culture and why people did things the way they did.  After all culture is essentially any learned behavior over a period of time. And like any behavior that exists, there are always reasons why it evolved. In this case, the cow is a sacred animal and is therefore allowed to roam just about anywhere. They do seem to keep their calm in rush hour traffic and bring a sense of serenity to an otherwise chaotic scene. Cultural practices that make no sense in one context may make total sense in another. Only by observation and questioning people who are articulate and educated about those cultural practices can help to elucidate these reasons for people like myself. 

My parents were excellent in trying to explain cultural practices as my brother and I were growing up in London and then the leafy, affluent green-belt of Surrey in England. The area we grew up in was middle-class and predominantly white. When we moved there, there were only 2 other families of any ethnic background in the area. Even with my parents ensuring that we had contact with other South-Asian families and culture we were still heavily influenced by the British view of Indian culture. Therefore in all honesty, there were so many things about Indian culture we really did not fully understand. This contributed toward my decision for leaving behind my cushy (“Cushy” is from Sanskrit origin incidentally) job and venturing to live in India for a year with my parents.

It was great to live with my folks after having lived away for so many years. I found that it was more like hanging out with old friends. After reacquainting myself with family and friends, I spent some time finding my way around the old city (getting lost deliberately) just to see where I would end up. This was a most excellent adventure and I saw and spoke to many people, even improving my level of Urdu and Hindi to the point where local people could actually understand what I was saying! I tried to talk to people from all walks of life so I could get a more objective understanding of the city than just from my parents friends and relatives. I had many conversations with rickshaw drivers, shop-keepers, beggars, Nariel panee walas (coconut water vendors) and anyone who had time to talk, which incidentally, was quite a lot of people. I think a universal truth I experienced, which was brought home to me in India, is that if you have the will to communicate with others, people generally respond favorably if they can sense it is genuine and without expectations. People also happen to be interested in people who show interest in them. I spent so much time talking with people I encountered, that sometimes I wondered how they had the time to talk. I mean, didn’t they have more important things to do? Wasn’t their time valuable?

Time is another culturally determined concept . I discovered this much to my chagrin at first, but then when I embraced it, it changed the way I will understand it forever. I never truly understood the concept of Indian time until after spending a significant amount of it getting frustrated that people didn’t seem to have too much regard for it in India. I thought that I was a little tardy compared to my fellow English citizens, but not usually by more than about 15 minutes for social occasions and a maximum of a couple of minutes for business. For business I was usually quite punctual. When I first arrived in India, and was helping my father set-up a computer network, I would make appointments with various contractors and they would never be on time. Even after agreeing a certain time, they would still turn up late and look surprised when I showed my disdain at this. They would of course apologize profusely, but then be late again the next time. “Five minutes” seemed to be a favorite quantity often promised but seldom delivered. It could mean anything at all from a literal five minutes to even a day or two later. I then finally understood that the god of the old testament must have been Indian. It all made sense. He created the earth in six days - of Indian time!

In Britain, the concept of time is very precise, ‘The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.’ To put it more simply, a second is the duration of the half-life of cesium. This is the standard by which it is measured and an incredibly precise atomic clock runs on this principle. You cannot get more materialistic about time than matter determining time itself.

Compare this to the Sanskrit inspired “ab” meaning now, which also in Vedic Sanskrit means water. The concept of “now” itself is therefore a fluid one, the right time for something to happen is in the moment when it actually happens, which makes perfect sense in a timeless world that was invented before the industrial revolution! It does sound much more spiritual and romantic, but does not necessarily work in the practical world. The problem is that the same concept of time exists even now in India, but as a wise auto rickshaw driver once told me, “it’s only a problem if you make it a problem.” I asked him what he meant by that and he replied, “expectation is the mother of all frustration. If you expect something to happen at a certain time and it does not, you will be frustrated. If you don’t have expectations, you will be happy!” I smiled at his wisdom, and gave him an extra tip for the lesson, even though by then I had arrived late for my appointment. 

My parents lived on road no.3 in Banjara hills, nice short name for a road, no complicated spelling when writing that address down for someone. The area of Banjara hills where we stayed was fairly affluent but just a mile down the road, the picture was very different. Past the park and the eye hospital lead to an area called Punjagutta, a shopping district with some residential buildings and lower income housing where a flyover had collapsed killing more than 20 people just a few months before I arrived. Many of them were laborers, who routinely work in unsafe conditions. I observed many laborers working on buildings with scaffolding made from bamboo and no safety harnesses. I also saw women who were often accompanied by minors, working in construction including breaking up concrete, something I was unaccustomed to in the West. 

The level of disparity between rich and poor shocked me at first, I saw such extremes of wealth and living conditions that it had the effect of re-calibrating my thinking.  For example, there is no social welfare system as we know in the West and people who are poor have to create their own work , beg or die. The choices one has in life are as brutal as they are simple and influences the conservative mentality that so many Indians have.

One day I observed a beggar for several hours who sat on the street with his bowl and beseeching passers-by for assistance telling them tales of the woe he had encountered on life’s journey. He approached two laborers who seemed to be a little better off than he was and interestingly, they chatted with him for a while and reciprocated with their own similar stories of woe. 

After a while a peanut vendor happened to pass him who he also started a similar conversation with. Rather than ignore him as so many others had, he stopped and talked to him for a good twenty minutes and at the end handed him a small parcel of freshly roasted peanuts. It was heart-warming to see and in my short observation, I noted that the people who had the most time to give the beggar were themselves not that far removed, economically at least, from his position. 

Another day, I saw a dead man lying in the street. It was an odd feeling to be going out for a walk and just encountering a body lying there on the ground without any warning. I assume he had just passed away from some unknown malady and lay were he had collapsed. I felt that I should do something but having not been in that situation ever before I had no idea what to do. Should I call an ambulance? Or the police?  I stood around and watched as other local people naturally gravitated to sorting out the situation- as much as death can be sorted out. He was obviously poor and did not have any family to bury or cremate him. It became apparent to me that he was at least known to some of the shopkeepers on the road. Within the space of an hour since I had encountered him, the local people covered him in a shroud and placed garlands of flowers on his corpse. Someone place a basket near his feet and passers-by gave money for his cremation. I talked to them for a while and they explained to me that we all will go one day, death is the great equalizer, so we all have to do something, right?

It was incredible to see that even though there was no welfare system for him, the society around naturally performed its civic responsibilities. In such a sad situation, It felt good that people were in tune with a natural level of responsibility beyond any imposed one. I felt saddened by many things I saw as well as elated and inspired and I then realized why Bollywood films are characterized by this emotional roller-coaster ride and heightened sense of melodrama. Particularly for the masses, they serve a function that people who live in this reality can relate to. It’s a tough life in India for most of the people who live there, over 300 million live in poverty, at least 11% of the 1.3 billion population live on less than a dollar a day. I was inspired by people I saw who could make a business out of the most simple of things just to survive and did so with a smile on their face. 

People smiled easily, I would just need a hint of a smile on my face to activate theirs, so ready were people to share pleasant feelings and emotions.

In stark contrast to the poverty, there was also opulence and extravagance from the latest models of Mercedes, porches and BMW's driving alongside carts pulled by bullocks or even by people. The buildings in the “Hi-Tech” city of Hyderabad look like they belong in a modern Western metropolis with fingerprint  scanners at the entrances and their carefully manicured gardens. These areas were direct evidence of the economic boom India has experienced along with the growing number of gated communities and security guards to protect their wealthy denizens. There are so many visual incongruities, such as these expensive hi-tech buildings right next to shanty settlements of homes made with tarpaulin and sticks. It’s hard not to muse on the yin and yang of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, and leads one to think about life’s meaning when the material world presents both its beauty and ugliness simultaneously.

I was fascinated by the fact that in India you can get virtually any kind of material goods from silk sarees to designer jeans. Textiles are in abundance you just need a guide to know where to go and buy it. There are so many markets and bazaars, you can get completely lost amongst the myriad artifacts. The cuisine in Hyderabad is so diverse, you can get any kind of food you want, including Chinese, Mexican, Thai and even Canadian sweet corn!

 

I ate mostly South-Indian dosas, idli and Hyderabadi biryani - the local specialty. I also saw many buildings and monuments that were testament to the riches the city once possessed. The Nizam of Hyderabad was once the richest man in the world. He is there on the Time magazine cover of 1937, proclaimed as such. Not that I think this is the pinnacle of achievement, rather that it is a reflection of how great civilizations come and go. We visited one of his palaces and witnessed its opulence and splendor, remnants of a bygone era.

There were always some kind of sounds or music on the streets virtually all the time. Somewhere you could hear the beating of a drum or an azhan or a musical festival. The architecture of the city was festooned with the signs of every culture and religion that had existed in India. I saw Mosques, Churches, temples of every variety and hue. I met people of every background there and the amazing thing is that despite their different philosophies of life and their own personal religious convictions, they all seemed to get along. Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Bhuddist faiths were all represented. 

Even the archaic monuments built centuries ago had places of worship for all, direct evidence of India's multi-religious past. Religion and spirituality are a big theme in India, The material life is put into perspective here as it seems small and two-dimensional in contrast to the multitude of other experiences the mind is constantly subjected to. I can completely understand the attraction India has for many who want to experience something different, beyond the usual humdrum aspects of living in the West. India is a real masala mix of old and new, rich and poor, the banal and the awe-inspiring.

From a personal perspective there is another dimension to all this. I always yearned for some deeper meaning to life and I knew that travelling would help to satisfy this proclivity. By going ‘back to where I came from’, I was also reconciling myself with a part of my identity. My family origins are Persian and Afghani as well as Indian, but that is the culture that the last few generations of my family had lived in. If I viewed India and its people negatively or positively, whether I took the trouble to understand them, It would be reflected in my own self-perception. 

If life is a journey, you can’t know where you are going if you don’t know
where you came from.

 

A hitch in the plan

The first time I hitch-hiked was when I was twenty-two years old. Before this, I had watched too many horror movies involving hitchikers as both victims and perpetrators that had put me off the idea of "thumbing a lift". The conventional wisdom was that it was a dangerous at worst, and an inconvenient at best, way of travelling. Apart from this, it was unheard of in the South Asian community that I was from. No-one I ever knew had hitch-hiked and it was certainly looked down upon in the middle-class English town I lived. When we saw hitchikers on the side of the road, they were usually disheveled travellers of nefarious means and I never actually saw anyone stop for them, reinforcing in my mind that it was a fruitless endeavor.

I probably would never have even attempted it had it not been for the convergence of circumstances that provided the opportunity that set me on the path, so to speak. I had just moved to Liverpool in the Northwest of England to start my masters degree in behavioural ecology, a branch of psychology. I have always been passionate about understanding people and their motivations; why people do the things they do and how our life experiences shape us. At the time I was also a poor student living off a bursary. The biggest motivator for me was that I was a sociable chap and all my family and friends were all down south about 250 miles away in London. This was at the least a good five to six hours by coach and train and at that time about the equivalent of my weekly living costs. This meant I could only afford to visit once every few months, unless there was another way that didn't involve money.

It was after a friend John had come up from London to visit me, that I first tried it. He was heading home by hitchiking and suggested I come with him. I suggested he was "having a laugh" as I would not even seriously consider it. I felt so far removed from the world of people like Jack Kerouac.  I had read "On the road" a few years before and felt i was just fine living vicariously through his travels, i did not feel the need to be part of the beatnik generation. John didn't give up though, appealing to my sense of adventure, he outlined a plan of action, and convinced me that I should at least give it a try.

So off we set for Edge lane, the road in Liverpool that lead to the motorway. We had our backpacks with us, with a few clothes and provisions but that was all. There was a bus stop located close to the motorway entrance so we figured that this was a good place for cars to pull in should they want to stop for us. We waited there with our thumbs up and arms out, in classic hitchhiker pose, laughing and joking about the crazy situation we had gotten ourselves into. We took turns holding out our arms thinking there was no point in us both getting tired, so we tried lots of different combinations of stances, smiling and facial expressions but still no lift. No one had stopped for us, though lots of people would stare at us with a poker face and drive by.  After about half an hour of this I was ready to go back home. John said he was going to wait it out, as he had to get back that weekend, and maybe it would be easier if there was just one person anyway. I was just about to leave and it began to rain!  I felt bad about leaving him in the rain and the same feeling of sympathy came across a driver at that same moment who pulled into the bus stop for us. After we told him where we were heading, he said he would drop us off on the m6 motorway  service station which was perfect. He told us he had stopped for us because it was raining, and normally he would not have stopped for two people but was fine picking up a lone hitchiker. He told us he was a sales executive and regularly picked up hitchikers as a way to pass the time during the long journeys between his sales calls. His car was new, It was in pristine condition apart from some empty crisp packets on the floor. For the next few hours we heard his whole life story, which was not really that interesting, but John and I listened intently anyway appreciative of the fact he was giving us a ride.

The rest of the way to London was easy. Once we were dropped at service stations the waiting time was short. We had a captive audience of people who had stopped for a break on the motorway and had more time to think about giving a lift which was invariably in our favour. The people who stopped for us liked to talk, they enjoyed our company and we all had a good time getting to our destination. It's amazing what personal details of their lives complete strangers will tell you. It's a bit like being in a therapy session, they get to open up to a stranger they will probably never see again and talk about things they admitted they have never told anyone else. It's a strange phenomenon that I was lucky enough to witness personally. I don't know if it's triggered by the mindset of travelling, but I have a hunch that it's associated with that.

After the first time hitchhiking with John, I decided to try it again on my own, applying some basic rules and techniques to make my journeys easier and safer. I would always start my journey on a road that lead directly onto the motorway and close to an area where a car could stop safely without impeding other traffic such as a bus stop or by a petrol station. I applied some science to this process, measuring the average time that I had to wait in different spots so I could get an idea of where the ideal places were to start. I discovered that having a piece of cardboard with the name of the motorway or destination I was trying to reach helped tremendously. People were more likely to stop if you stated your goals, telling them where you wanted to go to. I always added a please at the end as there's no price on the value of good manners! If my journey was much longer than the person giving me a lift, I would always request that I was dropped off at a service station before their exit to the motorway or major road. This way I reduced my chances of being stuck miles from anywhere without a lift, though this did happen a few times! Generally, most of the time I got a lift within thirty minutes of starting and my journey averaged about five hoursthat  from Liverpool to London. I treated each trip as a separate adventure and would also filter some of the lifts I was offered by asking where they were heading to and getting a gauge of the safety level of the person going by their body language and responses. I would not get into a vehicle with more than one person, I felt I could handle myself in most situations though to be honest I think I was also very lucky that I never encountered any dangerous situations.  At least not in the sense of danger directly from the person intending to do harm. There was an incident in which I was hitchhiking with a friend where we had to get out of the car in the middle of nowhere because of the driver's extremely bad behaviour which I shall elaborate later.

Over the years that I was living in Liverpool I hitchhiked regularly to London almost every two weeks.I had it down to a such a fine art that I could leave Liverpool by Friday morning and reach London by the evening in time to meet up with friends for dinner. I would stay with different friends each time and then leave by Sunday morning or Monday if I didn't have classes that day. I had so many adventures meeting lots of interesting people who would often engage me in topics ranging from politics to personal details about their lives. I once got a lift from a priest who tried to convert me for the duration of the trip, which was an exercise in diplomacy and tact. In the end we both left with a better knowledge of each others world views and a healthy respect for the philosophical differences that people can have whilst still remaining amiable.

Often people would volunteer reasons why they had stopped for me. Quite a significant number told me that they had never seen someone of South Asian background hitchhiking and had stopped specifically for this reason. They thought that it would not be easy for me to get a lift. Ironically I got a lot of lifts this way. I wondered if I would have been as fortunate getting a lift If I had not been a British Indian. Judging from the many fellow hitchikers I met on route who told stories of waiting for hours there is some evidence of this. My ethnicity had worked in my favour in a way I didn't think possible, I questioned this idea further with a few people who had engaged me in conversation about hitchhiking and discovered that many would not normally pick up a hitchhiker but due to my appearance and ethnicity decided to stop for me. I thought that this was a rather interesting side of British culture that I had not seen but now that I have experienced it, it definitely changed the way I saw people, in a much more positive light.

I discovered that I could travel the length and breadth of Britain through hitchhiking. As my confidence grew the more I travelled I would go on longer and more elaborate journeys. I once travelled up to Scotland with a long distance lorry driver, unfortunately I could only understand about a third of what he was saying due to his broad Scottish accent and the fact that I hadn't had much sleep. I was only supposed to go as far as Manchester, but ended up close to Fife as I fell asleep and missed my stop. Before I finished my time at Liverpool, I attempted my first trip from Liverpool to Paris.

My good friend and fellow adventurer Arnaud had promised a trip underneath the city of Paris through the catacombs used throughout history as a secret escape route during the French Revolution and then by the fighters of the French resistance during world war 2. More recently it was used by drug smugglers and most entrances and exits to it had been blocked off except a few. The one we were planning to enter started in a disused railway line in the middle of a tunnel!
I took my friend Andrew from Hong Kong on this trip as he was keen to have a different experience of Europe than the usual touristy things. As I put it at the time, "instead of visiting the Eiffel Tower and climbing up like most people do, wouldn't you like to go under it instead and see  the caves under its foundations?"
Andy had never hitchhiked before and we were both on a small budget to get to and from Paris, once we were there Arnaud looked after us with a place to stay and transport etc. Andy was a little nervous about the whole thing and I had to keep reassuring him that everything was going to be alright.

I was fairly confident about all the journey from Liverpool to Dover, I knew all the motorway service stations on route by then and had a plan to get a ride with someone across on the ferry as people paid for their ferry tickets by car, not passengers at this time. Andy and I started off well from Liverpool with a chatty sales rep who had just come from Birmingham and was going back there. Andy being quite nervous about getting in a vehicle with a stranger was very quiet. I did all the talking and the guy really opened up when I told him of our plan to see the catacombs, he ended up going out of his way to drop us off on the start of the next stretch of motorway.

Birmingham was not so good, we waited for almost an hour by the exit from a petrol station when a big chap with a green anorak and a huge beard and a bit of an odd swagger saw our sign for Paris and said he'd take us to Dover. Andy was getting nervous again but we decided to go with him. He was a very friendly guy, he kept on saying "have you got any jokes?", before proceeding telling us his own bawdy jokes which he laughed out loud every time he came to the punch line. We also felt obliged to laugh though not as loudly since after all he was doing us a favour. Andy was not really into this guys sense of humor as he glanced at me with a scowl when the guy started with another joke. When we were close to Dover, Keith our driver asked us if we could pull in for a drink at a pub. Andy said to me "we should just leave now, this guy is weird!" The pub turned out to be in the middle of nowhere with hardly any traffic coming through so our plan to ditch Keith the clown was done. We watched Keith drink 2 pints of beer while we sipped water and Andy was having kittens by this stage. I felt bad having gotten him into this situation though right now we didn't have a lot of options. As we returned to Keith's car, the bad jokes continued with an added dimension of doom as Keith swerved his way along country roads. The final straw was when Keith announced that he thought we were lost and proceeded to splay his fold-out atlas of Britain over the steering wheel whilst continuing to negotiate the windy road we where on in a now borderline intoxicated state. I said that he could drop us off right there and we would be fine. He seemed a little disappointed that we were not willing to continue the journey with him, but we were too relieved to care about that.

The rest of the journey to Paris was relatively uneventful, we got a ride with a couple crossing the channel who dropped us in Arras on the way to Paris. Unfortunately the French part of the journey was not as easy as communicating to some of the French drivers with my broken Franglais made it more difficult to secure a lift. It was also 10pm by now so Andy's anxiety levels were through the roof. I really didn't know if my sign 'Paris - s'il vous plait' was not clear enough or if it was too vague but we waited about an hour till a white van pulled up by us and an American teacher who lived near the Sacre Coeur kindly offered to take us to our final destination. We arrived in Paris at 2 am and I phoned Arnaud who came to meet us at the Gar du Nord. The next evening after relaxing at Arnaud's house we found ourselves underneath the Eiffel Tower and other famous landmarks of Paris.

Arriving in Paris at night

 

In the catacombs underneath Paris

After having successfully managed a cross-continental hike, I did this same journey from London to Paris on two more occasions with other friends. I felt that there was no limit to where I could go with one of the most ancient modes of travelling. Back in the day many a traveller relied on the good will of their fellow beings to traverse all over the world and it was good to know that we still lived in an age where this was still possible. I once rode on the back of a tractor in India on a remote coastal road to the beach as well as my last hitch-hike, in the back of a pick-up truck with my friend Angus, from Vancouver to Keremeos in the Okanagan. We camped at the Ashnola campground for a week on the Similkameen Indian reserve.

 

On the Road to Keremeos

I haven't had the occasion to use my once familiar mode of transport in many years mainly due to the fact that I was able to pay for my own transport. However I kept the Karma rolling around its eternal cycle by returning the favor and aiding many a weary traveller to reach their destination. I don't know if the years of hitching a lift were necessarily a wise undertaking, mainly for reasons of safety. Maybe I was just lucky, but I never really had a bad experience that made me regret it. I was also younger and more prone to taking risks in those days, but I'm glad I did since it was a transformative experience for me.

 It gave me a stronger sense of connection with other people, regardless of class or race. I sense that below the mask that most people wear, there is a part of their humanity that also seeks connection with others and even has an altruistic component. It could be an inherent aspect of the human psyche to be more receptive to others when triggered by the mindset of travelling, or travellers, I don't know. What I do know is that I met hundreds of complete strangers who were willing to help me on my journey, sometimes well out of their way. Something I would never have expected had I not experienced it for myself.  I believe I learnt more about human nature through these experiences than I ever did through my formal 'education'.