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Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
Demoralized by goals and guidebooks, our correspondent tackles Lithuania and Poland on a thumb and a prayer.
Dec 14, 1999 | By my second day of thumbing rides through Lithuania, I finally feel like I've hit a hitchhiking rhythm, even though my progress (less than 100 miles) hasn't been particularly impressive. Standing at the edge of a town called Marijampole, thumb aloft, I keep my patience -- despite the fact that I'm in my third hour of waiting for a ride. The Polish border, my goal for the day, is still a tantalizing 20 miles away.
Regardless of where you are in the world, hitchhiking comes with its own set of basic procedures: choosing a safe roadside hitching spot where traffic is slow enough to stop; refusing to accept rides from drunk or suspicious or crazy people; staying wary, bringing a map, using common sense. Patience, that mossy old virtue, is central to all of this. With the proper amount of patience, hitching can be a safe and interesting way to see Europe and -- most importantly -- it can allow you to interact with the kind of people you'd never see on the tourist routes.
The inspiration to hitch first struck me two nights ago, while I was researching my Poland guidebook in a McDonald's near the Vilnius bus station. I'd heard great things about Poland from other travelers, but the more I read about places like Gdansk and Poznan and Czestochowa, the more demoralized I became. From a planning perspective, Poland was just too big and interesting. To tackle the Tatras Mountains in the south might mean missing the Bialowieza Forest in the north; to tour the Renaissance village of Zamosc in the east might mean missing the avante-garde university town of Wroclaw in the west; to experience the cosmopolitan culture of Warsaw or Krakow might mean missing the folk culture of the countryside.
Sometimes, choice presents itself as a glossy act of destruction -- of eliminating possibilities in the name of decisiveness. This is why -- halfway through a Lithuanian Big Mac -- I decided to give Poland up to chance instead of choice: I decided to simply find a highway, stick out my thumb and let fate take me for a ride. Thus, by turning my travels into a kind of road roulette, I could experience each moment of Poland without having to worry about where I stood in relation to point A or B.
Each new ride and random stop-off, I'd hoped, would reveal Poland not as a mere destination -- but as a continuously unfolding mystery.
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The most immediate challenge upon starting my hitchhiking adventure yesterday came in trying to get out of Vilnius, my starting point. The problem with Vilnius isn't that Lithuanians don't stop for hitchers -- the problem is that hitching rides in Lithuania seems to be a wildly popular pastime. On a warm Sunday afternoon in Vilnius, the competition for rides can be daunting. When I arrived at the A1 highway ramp at noon, I was greeted by an outright crowd of Lithuanian hitchhikers strung out down the road. Keeping true to etiquette, I took a place 20 meters beyond the last person, stuck out my thumb and waited.
And waited.
When competing with other hitchers on a balmy Lithuanian day, being male, solo and 6-foot-3 is hardly the best marketing formula. After two hours of wagging my thumb at traffic, my arm was sore and my feet were tired. Over a dozen hitchers ahead and behind me had already been picked up, almost all of them females. Male hitchers (myself included) stood forlornly at the front of the queue while female hitchers got whisked off within minutes of arriving.
This ongoing phenomenon was about to drive me into pessimism and despair when a Lithuanian girl stepped off a local bus one block down and walked right up to where I was standing.
"Do you mind if I hitch with you?" she asked. "I have this habit of not hitching by myself."
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