The lost art of hitch-hiking: Seven writers share their wildest stories from on the road

You can spend great sums of money flying around the world ticking off world wonders, but there remains no travel experience as thrilling, as raw, as brilliantly spontaneous as standing on the side of a road, sticking out your thumb and hoping for the best.

You may be standing there a while, these days. During the glory years of the 1960s and 1970s, hitch-hiking symbolised a sense of freedom and adventure which ran alongside the post-war counterculture movement. But at some point along the road it fell out of fashion. Booming car ownership, cheaper air travel and a handful of isolated horror news stories contributed to its demise. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, hitching a lift had become a fringe activity; by the turn of the millennium it was frowned upon and feared in equal measure.

Some countries have even legislated against hitch-hiking. It is fully or partially prohibited in several states in the USA, including Nevada and New York, and is outlawed in the states of Queensland and Victoria in Australia. In some countries where it remains legal, like Italy, France and Spain, hitchers cannot approach drivers at service stations. In the UK, hitch-hiking remains legal, although these days you are as likely to see a golden eagle fly overhead as a hitch-hiker by the roadside.

Which is a great shame. When hitch-hiking, one must rely on the kindness of strangers, intuition and a bit of luck as you carve an unplanned, chaotic route from A to B. It embodies something of the essence of true adventure and is democratic in that anyone (with sufficient time and patience) can do it.

Sure, it can be a bit nerve-racking at times. But ask any of the below writers if they would do it again if they lived their lives once more, and I can guarantee the response will be a resounding thumbs up.

‘We were convinced we had been kidnapped’

Greg Dickinson

My first hitch-hiking trip, a charity fundraiser with two university friends, took me from a petrol station on the outskirts of St Albans to Morocco.

For 10 days we thumbed 26 lifts through England, France and Spain, without smartphones. We had to update the charity about our whereabouts every night, and also record the number plate whenever we got into a new car. Other than that, we were untraceable.

Greg and his university friend en route to Morocco

Some of the rides were sketchier than others. In France, a man picked us up and proceeded to complain, quite furiously, about the police. He then stopped at a police station to handle some undisclosed business. We scarpered out of the car as soon as he stormed off, out of eyeshot.

In northern Spain, a man in a lorry picked us up and agreed to take us to “Soria”, 20 miles down the road. He was quite odd, insisting we remove our shoes and at one point brandished a butcher’s knife to cut us each a slice of some quite rancid pie. He kept driving for miles, and many hours, and as night approached we were convinced we had been kidnapped. In the end he dropped us off in “Sevilla”, 500 miles south, with a smile and a wave.

‘The waiting and the travel mattered way more than the destination’

Chris Moss

Hitch-hiking was a natural stage in my late teens, part of the unshackling of self from parents and the humdrum. I had my music tribe, indie-obsessed part-time goths in the village; I had pretentious novels and a dodgy fashion sense. But travel was hitherto being driven by dad to town or Southport or Wales. Or the bus to school.

So I thought: why not stick out a thumb and go further? One morning we tramped to a main road and tried it. Lorries hurtled by. Time dragged. Drizzle and wind dampened spirits. The sky dulled. We ran out of banter and butties.

Chris Moss’s teenage journey to the Lake District inspired him to write a song about the trip - Grant Finley

Then, a perky VW Beetle pulled over. The bearded driver asked where we were heading. “The Lakes,” we said. “Hop in.” Off we went, non-stop to Windermere, with a congenial, educated, chilled lecturer-type at the wheel. We talked dreams and the Smiths and the cruel limits of adolescence. We laughed. We arrived after dark and went our separate ways.

I had a band at the time, and I wrote a song about that groundbreaking trip – Waiting for the Car; like Lou Reed’s I’m Waiting for the Man, minus the drugs, electric guitar and street mythology. The song was about movement and friendship; the waiting and the travel mattered way more than the destination.

I later hitched around Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. A free lift, like a backpack, signifies total freedom, endless joy.

‘Hitching for a drink’

Teresa Machan

It was my first summer at university and I was headed for Ocean City, New Jersey. Under the Bunac (British Universities North America Club) scheme, I’d secured a job with accommodation, applied for a J-1 visa, bought the air ticket on an overdraft and was off to work on a barrier island with a beach. It sounded exotic – I’d only been to France, by ferry – and fun, like a place from a Beach Boys song.

It was fun, but it was also dry. Ocean City was founded as a Christian seaside retreat by Methodist ministers, and no alcohol has been legally sold or drunk there since 1879. I worked in housekeeping at a B&B during the day and in a clothes and decal shop on the boardwalk in the evenings.

Our writer visited Ocean City, New Jersey, during her first summer at university - Denis Tangney Jr/iStockphoto

It was thirsty work. By Saturday night, my tongue was scaly as a beaver’s tail. Over the 9th Street Bridge, we’d go – hitching the 2.74 miles to Somers Point in twos or threes.

It was dodgy as hell, but so were the bars. I never moaned about queues at the student union bar back home again.

‘We were welcomed like lost sons returning from war on Christmas day’

Jordan Young

As the last seconds of what I believed to be my life’s final exam ticked away, I was not thinking about organic chemistry at all, but about the strategic advantages of Trowell services on the M1 North. Knowing I would make a lousy chemist, my mind was on other goals: Nottingham to the summit of Ben Nevis on charm and cunning alone, without spending a penny.

Trowell was a masterstroke – or maybe it was the big whiteboard with “LEEDS” scribbled on it. Hitching rides with a therapist, a foreman, a water cooler technician and a pair of Dutch tourists inched us closer to the Scottish border, until we got stuck at a rural Northumberland lay-by.

Reaching the summit of Ben Nevis involved a night on the floor of a pub for our writer - John Finney Photography

With dusk edging closer and the whiteboard’s power on the wane, we psyched ourselves up for a miserable night. Either a hedge or a four-hour trudge to the nearest village. But just as the last light ebbed away, our fortunes flipped: a Hail Mary in the form of a wide-grinning Scot.

Jim took us straight to a retirement party at his local on the edge of the Highlands. There, the good people of Doune welcomed two very weary young men like lost sons returning from war on Christmas day. In the pub’s glow they thrust scampi fries and pints into our hands and told stories of Nevis. Jim even brought over blankets and negotiated us a prime (non-sticky) sleeping spot on the pub floor once the stragglers had stumbled out.

Early the next morning, our whiteboard finally sealed passage to the mountain. The climb, even in seldom-witnessed Scottish sunshine, ended up being the least remarkable part of the trip.

‘We huddled like terrified penguins, clinging on for dear life’

Gemma Knight-Gilani

I was 21 and backpacking across South America with my then-boyfriend. We’d reached Bolivia and were making the four-hour journey from La Paz to the shores of Lake Titicaca aboard a Marcopolo-brand coach (then ubiquitous across Latin America). It was an elderly workhorse, its red livery (and the mural of a naked woman across its back) caked in years of mud and grime, its engine wheezing.

Gemma was 21 years old when she went backpacking across South America

It was little surprise, then, when it shuddered to a permanent, sputtering halt on a long dirt road surrounded by miles of empty plains. Young and optimistic, we assumed the bus company would send another vehicle to collect the stranded passengers.

But as hours went by, and others began to thumb lifts – from a lone passing car and then, an hour later, another – it dawned on us that there was to be no replacement bus. But then, alone on the road but for a few cows, a pick-up truck appeared on the horizon.

It slowed and stopped, and the three grizzled farmers squeezed into its cab eyed us doubtfully, then gestured to the flatbed: a row of wooden planks held together by rope; no sides, no tailgate, nothing to grip.

We climbed aboard and the truck trundled off along the bumpy road – cautiously at first, then suddenly at incredible speed, throwing its clutch of passengers into the air and almost onto the road. Yelping, we managed – just – to scramble into the middle of the truck bed where, with our huge backpacks, we huddled like terrified penguins, knuckles white, clinging on for dear life.

It was the middle of the night by the time we arrived at Lake Titicaca – tail bones throbbing, faces wind-burnt and admittedly content for this to be our first and last experience of open-air hitch-hiking.

‘We were offered lifts before we even stuck out a thumb’

Libby Ryan

Mestia, Georgia, high in the Caucasus mountains, had a chill in the air even in mid-May. My friend, fresh off a year studying in St Petersburg, and I had come to Svaneti with dreams of adventure and not much of a plan. We set off in search of a dramatic glacier, an impractical distance away from town, with dogs as big as bears roaming the streets.

Our writer Libby with one of Svaneti’s resident bear dogs

It wasn’t long until a man in a van pulled over, nodding wordlessly for us to hop in the back. Repeating the name of the glacier, we tentatively jumped in.

He dropped us at the trailhead within moments, without a single word. A perfect system; we committed to the method for the rest of the trip.

Svaneti’s resident bear dogs, secretly cuddly creatures, kept a watchful eye as we flagged down lifts. We didn’t speak Georgian and our drivers often spoke no more than a few words of English, so we finagled deals through my friend’s broken Russian and pointing emphatically at locations on our paper map of the mountains. It was rarely a chatty ride, but we were picked up on the side of highways and dirt roads alike, often offered lifts before we even stuck out a thumb.

We ran into our man with a van one night in a restaurant in Mestia just before a power cut hit, leaving us in darkness. As the staff lit candles, our new friend retrieved a jug of homemade chacha, “Georgian vodka”, from his car and invited us to join his table for another exchange that required no shared language – just the clinking of glasses.

‘An economic necessity, but also an adventure’

Anthony Peregrine

There was a time in the 1970s when, if I wanted to go anywhere beyond the range of the corporation bus service, I raised a thumb and smiled at cars.

This was an economic necessity, but not only. It also offered mild adventure. These days, car-sharing sites fill you in on the trustworthiness, chattiness and even the musical tastes of potential drivers (“Stockhausen? I’ll walk.”). Back then, you’d no idea who the pickers-up were. They were, in fact, usually good or bad – people in the middle not wanting the impoverished contaminating their passenger seats.

I lost count of the fellows (only blokes picked up long-haired louts) who bought me coffee at service stations, or lent me coats when they had to drop me in rain. They’d share surprisingly detailed intimacies – dreams unrealised, ambitions thwarted, demanding mistresses – precisely because they knew they’d never see me again. I’d reply with lies about my future as a nuclear physicist. This didn’t work with a logging trucker in Oregon who had never before encountered an English accent. He understood nothing I said and had only a vague idea where England might be. “You hitch all the way, son?”

As I’ve aged, I’ve invariably picked up hitch-hikers, paying back my debt to the world. Except there are none left. The marginals of international travel have been assumed into the mainstream. Another 21st-century blow for biodiversity.

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