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.
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'.
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'.
