I was standing at a junction where a paved road met a gravel one, and the bus I had been told about had not come. It was two in the afternoon, hot, and I had already worked out that walking was somewhere between five and seven hours depending on whose estimate I believed. A pickup slowed without me signalling anything. The driver leaned across, said a place name with a question mark on the end, and waited.
I stood there long enough that it got awkward. Then I got in.
The first ride, and how little I thought about it
My first time was not a decision. It was a shrug at the end of a chain of small failures, which is how most of mine have started. I had not researched it, I had no rules, and I got extremely lucky with a couple who fed me fruit from a bag on the dashboard and dropped me exactly where I needed to be.
What worries me looking back is not the risk. It is that I had no framework at all, so I could not tell a good situation from a bad one. I just happened to walk into a good one and then told myself the story that I had judged it well. I had not judged anything. I had been tired and it had worked out.
Almost everything I do differently now came from noticing that gap.
The rules I made after a ride I did not like
Nothing dramatic happened. That is the part I want to be clear about, because I am not telling a cautionary story with a bad ending. A man picked me up, drove faster than I was comfortable with, asked where I was staying twice in a way that did not feel like small talk, and offered to take me further than I had asked. I said the name of a place I was not going, got out, and walked back.
Afterwards I could not point to a single thing he had done wrong. That is exactly why it bothered me. I had spent forty minutes running risk calculations instead of looking out of the window, and I had no procedure for ending it early.
So I made some. Nothing clever. I sit where I can open a door. I say where I am going before I get in, not after, and I say a public place, never a room. I send someone the plate. If I feel wrong about it, I get out at the next inhabited thing and say I have someone to meet. I have used that twice. Both times the driver was probably completely fine and I do not regret either.
A lift and a hitchhike are not the same thing
This is the distinction that has done the most work for me.
A hitchhike is me standing on a road putting my need in front of whoever happens to pass. A lift is someone in a place I am already in, who knows I am stuck, offering to solve it. The person from the guesthouse driving to the market anyway. The shopkeeper’s brother going the same direction this afternoon. The other four people at the stop who have collectively decided to split a car because the bus is not coming.
The second kind has a social context around it. Someone knows who they are. Someone will ask about it tomorrow. That is not a guarantee of anything, but it is a completely different structure from a vehicle I flagged down on an empty road, and I treat them differently. I take lifts readily. I hitchhike when the alternative is walking into the dark.
What I do not do anymore
I do not start after about three in the afternoon in a place I do not know, because a ride that ends badly at four ends with me walking, and a ride that ends badly at seven ends with me stuck.
I do not accept a ride that changes destination halfway. If the plan shifts, I get out at the shift. This has cost me twice and I would do it again both times.
I do not do it with a bag I cannot carry at speed. If my luggage means I am committed to whatever vehicle it is in, I have removed my own exit, and the exit is the whole point.
And I do not do it to save money. I have met people who hitch as a budget strategy, and I understand it, but a stranger’s fuel and time is not a free resource I am entitled to draw on because I would rather not pay for a seat. If a seat exists, I buy the seat.
When I offer money, and when it is the wrong move
In some places offering to pay is normal and expected, and the vehicle that stopped is functionally a shared taxi with no sign on it. In others, offering cash converts a small act of hospitality into a transaction and slightly insults the person who did it.
I read the room badly for a long time. What I do now is offer something that is not money first. Fuel at the next station. Whatever I have in my bag. Buying the coffee if we stop. If that is refused and it clearly was a favour, I let it be a favour and say thank you properly, which means learning enough of the language to say it properly.
If it turns out it was a paid ride all along, the price is usually obvious from what the other passengers hand over, and I hand over the same.
The unglamorous part
Most of hitchhiking is standing still. Sixty minutes at a junction with nothing happening, adjusting my position because I have decided the previous spot was the problem, when the actual problem is that four vehicles have passed in an hour and three were full.
It has never once felt free or romantic while it was happening. It has felt like being a slightly awkward object at the side of a road, hoping to be useful enough to someone that they stop. Afterwards it makes a good story, and I try to remember that the story is a distortion, and that the version I am selling myself is not the version I actually lived through.
I still do it. Less than I used to, in a narrower set of situations, with a plan for getting out. That is not caution ruining the adventure. It is the thing that lets me keep doing it at all.