As some of you may have heard from me or seen via my facebook status last week, on November 5, 2010, I had planned to participate in an ESN (Erasmus Student Network)-organized hitchhiking contest to Berlin. It seemed like a really good idea in September. A bunch of my friends had responded "Attending" on Facebook which, as we all know, is a foolproof method of gauging who will actually be physically present at an event, it was all going to be organized for us, and it would be a fun adventurous way to get to Berlin!
Friends Josh, Ross and Ally were also into the idea, so much so that we decided to extend the trip to include a day in Hamburg to see Frightened Rabbit perform on November 7th. A few weeks ago, ESN sent out an email with the details of the hitch, stating it would cost 90 Euro to enroll but that that included accommodation at a hostel, free entrance and drinks on a pubcrawl and a bus home on the 7th. Since we had all already booked our Frightened Rabbit tickets we decided it would be a bit silly to pay the 90 as that was mostly for the bus home, so we instead booked our own hostel in Berlin and busses from Berlin to Hamburg and Hamburg back to Amsterdam.
As the hitchhike day grew closer the four of us all started getting a bit apprehensive. Without enrolling with ESN it did feel a lot more like we were all just hitchhiking. To Berlin. And when one of us finally bothered to actually look up where Berlin is we realized it wasn't close. On the map it looked slightly closer than Munich, which dedicated blog-readers will recall took my friends and I over 15 hours each way, basically without stopping, let alone standing in the rain and hoping some kindly German will take you in his van when you hassle him at a gas station.
But the day arrived, we had everything booked except a way to get to Berlin, so we all had to bite the bullet and try to hitch. My friends Ally and Ross, the troopers, decided it was a good plan to not sleep the night before and just power through until 6am when we were all meeting, so needless to say we were a chipper, happy crew (well, I actually was, which I think might have annoyed the others).
We had looked up tips online for how to travel from Amsterdam to Berlin by hitchhiking, and the website suggested beginning at the designated "Liftplaats" near Amstel station where it's legal for drivers to pull over and pick you up. Excellent, except this was where the ESN hitchhikers were all meeting. At the exact same time. So there were about 50 people, standing on a small stretch of road in the pouring rain sticking their thumbs out at rush-hour traffic. When someone did take pity on the large group of wet, cold, misguided 20-somethings and decided to pull over, it was basically luck of the draw/a mad dash for the car where as many people as possible piled in and those who didn't make it were left shaking their fists and moving a couple feet down the road hoping that would change their luck.
After a few hours, shit was looking dire. My friends and I hadn't been picked up or seen anyone picked up in a long time, we'd been scolded by a cop when we moved off of the liftplaats and tried our luck at a gas station, and the rain was absolutely pouring down. About 4 hours in, Ross and Ally got picked up and the number of teams left by the side of the road was dwindling. By this point it was about 11am, we'd been outside (mostly) for 4 hours, and while people in cars where good at waving, giving us the "thumbs-up" or occasionally pretending to pull over or fingering us (jerks), there was no sign we were getting picked up any time soon. Beyond that, even if we did get picked up, there was no way a driver would be going to Berlin, and wherever we got dumped next we'd have to go through the motions all over again. Getting to Berlin before dark was now impossible and getting there before the next morning or at all seemed super unlikely.
So, I threw in the towel. Cracked. Hitchhiking was over for me before it had begun and I booked a lovely, leisurely train ride that got me to Berlin in 7 hours. Josh took the night bus and joined me the next morning. As for Ally and Ross, they somehow ended up in Nuremburg around midnight and took a series of trains the next day to meet us in Berlin around 3pm. For those of you who aren't familiar with geography, on the map below Amsterdam is represented by the red pin, Berlin by the blue pin, and Nuremburg, i.e. Ally and Ross, are represented by the little man:
Still not quite sure how it happened. That being said, they did manage to hitchhike successfully for a very long distance, so I think in many ways they win.
The trip ended up being a ton of fun despite the hitchhiking fail, and I've uploaded pictures:
I'm not sure if my ego could take the rejection inherent in hitchhiking again, but if I were to give it another shot, talking with Ally, Ross and others has made it clear that it would be best:
- having no destination in mind. Ally and Ross made it all the way to Nurenburg in a day without it costing a penny. Deciding on a general direction to travel then not giving a shit where you actually end up could make it really fun.
- booking nothing in advance. I shelled out for the train because we had a hostel booked in Berlin that night. None of us could throw in the towel completely because of our Frightened Rabbit tickets and pre-paid bus back home from Hamburg. Hitchhiking is definitely better-suited for the kind of travelling with no itinerary or plans whatsoever.
- going in the summer. If it had been a beautiful, warm, day I could have stuck it out much longer. The freezing rain and 9 hours of daylight in November are really not the best hitchhiking, as your chances of dying alone in the dark on the side of the road from exposure increase greatly.
- not standing with 50 other people trying to hitch to the exact same place as you. Doing it alone might make you appear a bit sketchier to potential drivers, but the mad-scramble method for car allocation didn't really work out so well. I'm not cutthroat enough.
So now I'm back in Amsterdam desperately (OK, not too desperately since I've been uploading pictures and blogging all morning) trying to make a dent in the 7 papers I have due by the end of term. I'm leaving for Spain & Portugal on Saturday until November 22nd, and then it will be less than a month until I'm home. Craziness! Two months ago I was just arriving in Amsterdam, getting used to the squalor of living in the "Guesthouse" and wrapping my head around Chipkaarts and cycling. Two months from now I will be crashing with my parents/on couches in Vancouver trying not to spend a penny waiting for PLTC to begin while all my friends are hard at work at their grown-up jobs. Life's weird right now but I love it, and I'm going to try to make the absolute most of my last month and a bit here even if it means living off catfood, rice wine and the charity of my more successful friends and relatives when I get back to Vancouver.
Until next time!
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