Andrew Evans did it. Grant Martin picked one up. They both lived to tell their tales.
Have you stuck your thumb out? Have you picked up a weary traveler? Share your stories in the comments.
Photo from somewhere in southern Montana.
Travel Tip #94: Hitchhike
Never picked anyone up myself and I’ve never been a hitchhiker…when I was a kid, while on a vacation w/ another family…we picked up a hitchhiker and the guy ended up holding us up at gunpoint. Probably why I don’t participate in hitchhiking now. BUT – I have to say I’ve been tempted. I love the adventurous nature of it. As a single woman? I guess I flash back to the gunpoint scenario and reconsider. I can always go skydiving.
Yikes! Thanks for sharing that story, terrifying as it may be. Wow.
I’ve picked up people in the US, and hitchhiked in Togo, Benin, Indonesia and Argentina. As a 24 year-old female I’ve deliberately never done any of this alone.
In Togo two men saved my friend and I from spending three days at a border crossing when they agreed to drive us to a hotel on the way to their final destination. Another time I ended up in van full of women carrying buckets of dried fish to market, and most recently I discussed Sonata Arctica in broken Spanish while crammed into a rattling car with too many smelly hippies
In short, I recommend hitchhiking, but in groups of two or more and using keen judgment.
Jackie, thanks for the comment. Good call on utilizing the buddy system. Always be smart & put safety (and common sense) first.
Thanks for the tip/prompt for comments
It seems that hitchhiking is like many other things with traveling, there is a stigma against it when really it’s fine as long as you are safe and use common sense. Of course, there is the rare occurrence of the unexpected happening, and those are the stories that get sensationalized. In a lot of places I’ve traveled where there is very little–>no tourist infrastructure, hitchhiking is an accepted means of travel, even if it means you jump on the back of someone’s motorbike!
In the early 90s I hitchhiked around parts of Europe, doing that thing where you hold a placard with the first letter of wherever you’re going (B for Berlin, etc.) scrawled on it with marker. This seemed to be routine with hippie kids in Germany at the time, who would stand outside truck stops and such with their little signs. My favorite ride was on the way out of Munich, where I caught ride with a Wagner-loving truck driver. He spoke almost no English and I almost no German, but it was great hearing him sing along. I’d say I probably felt safest when tagging along with others, like the trio of East German punk rockers that joined me once, all of us cramming into this little car. Not sure if I’d do it today, but it was a great time.
I haven’t hitched, but I pick up hitchhikers (and old ladies with big bundles who didn’t even ask) in Mexico as much as I can–in some areas, buses aren’t all that frequent, and I feel like I should share the wealth of my car. I generally avoid single guys with machetes, but usually they’re smaller than me anyway. Best one was a little old lady who fed me some very mysterious meat. (The original post seems to have vanished from my blog, but here’s what the animal might’ve been: http://rovinggastronome.com/mainblog/2005/06/03/was-this-what-i-ate/)
Oops. That link got jacked by my insistence on closed parens. Try: http://rovinggastronome.com/mainblog/2005/06/03/was-this-what-i-ate/