A Hitchhiker! #8HT

Here I was in the highway again, using my techniques to catch the attention of the drivers. When I'm hitchhiking I believe that if 100 drivers passed by me, 10 of them look my face and see that I was there asking a ride, the other 90 people don't even notice that I was there. In fact part of them knew that I was there, but they just ignored me. In my first rides I had the fear to be in the highway, kind of begging for a ride and sometimes I had the feeling in their look that I was someone that was begging for money or something like that. The thing is that new experiences make me uncomfortable sometimes. However after the first rides I started to feel more relaxed and seeing how cool was the interaction with the drivers. It's something like that I was trusting them to be in their car in the same way that they were trusting me to be in their car. We didn't know each other before and both sides just allowed this interaction, making this meet to be possible. I also have to say that in this 10 people that looked at me, half of them smile or show some "sorry" face, sometimes even make fun of you (in a good way).

I could feel closer of people than any trip that I had before. The Couchsurfing was important to be as local and meet hosts and friends of my hosts and interact with them. This is great, but I've done it before. This few minutes that I used to spend with the driver that was making everything more special. It's like Couchsurfing but in a shorter period of time. When we meet travelers we use to spend some hours or a day together with them and then I have a really small chance to see this person again. Just a small percent of the travelers that I met I’ll see more than once in my life. By hitchhiking, you are going to spend minutes and not couple hours or days, but the feeling is the same, you're sharing your life with someone that you're hardly going to meet again. Most of the drivers are friendly and once they picked you up, they want to know more about you, they are curious to understand why someone is traveling by hitchhiking, the destinations where I was before and where I'm going. When the language skills fit, probably the interaction good!

Well, in this time the language skills didn't really worked. I wish I could speak German. Easily I got a ride from Karlsruhe to Stuttgart. They are two Turkish guys that just speak Turkish and German, none English. Once they saw the name Stuttgart they just stopped for me and said some German words that I couldn't understand and I replied with "Ja, Ja". The thing was one girl from Stuttgart wrote me saying that she maybe could host me, but I wasn't really excited to go there. I planned to arrive in Bavaria in this day. The trip was just one hour, but surprisingly in the way I was accepted to stay in one place in ULM and another in Augsburg. My way to Bavaria was becoming real. The thing was that I couldn't say to them that I would like to go to another city and not Stuttgart, I knew for what he said that they were going to "Bayer" Bavaria, but it was kind of complicated to explain them what I want to say. I barely could pronounce the name of cities well. Then they just dropped me in the highway of Stuttgart. Yes, in the highway, the place that is "kind of dangerous" and illegal to stop a car or do hitchhiking. Well, I just walked in the highway for 10min until arrive in an exit of the city, peculiar walk. Wow, the spot was really bad. In this place that were several exists that I could choose almost all of them to go to Bavaria, but after wait few minutes trying in one of them I just moved to another one. The thing was that none of them were working and again I was tired and hungry :(

I had these 2 hosts that I hadn't decide yet where to go. I wanted to go to Augsburg but I didn't know if I could reach the city and ULM would be easier once it was few km before. Once I was tired and hungry I just checked my phone looking for some blablacars and I found a cheap one from Stuttgart to Augsburg. Damn, I was really happy, because I didn't have more energy to hitchhike 150km. Well, I said before that was going to try 100km - 150km per day, but this time the whole trip was 230km.

After few minutes and communication problems the driver just picked me up and I was relaxed to know that I would arrive in my final destination. This time I didn't feel that I failed, my feeling was good in the ride, the driver was really cool and I had the same feeling when I'm hitchhiking, I just need to help the gas paying. Also that I could figure it out a solution quickly and smartly, again respecting the my body limits.

Next chapter: Augsburg