In celebration of my nomination for Travel Writer of the Year of Guardian Student Media Awards (no big deal really), but more like because I have very little time to update my blog properly, I've decided to publish my two entry articles here for those who didn't get the opportunity to read them in felix. So, enjoy!
The first article is my accounts on my hitchhiking stunt - from London to Morocco - back in April.
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Sunrise was finally upon us. It was better reflected by the increasing influx of traffic heading our way rather than the morning temperature. I observed Anna from afar, now that she had returned to her spot by the junction where traffic from the lorry park livened. She was complaining to me about the cold; I don’t blame her. My palm seemed to be fixed in its thumbs-up gesture not because of my enthusiasm – it was simply frozen.Something was going terribly wrong. It didn’t matter if the roundabout had directed the traffic into different directions, one heading to Zaragoza/Madrid and another into Barcelona – there were hardly any vehicles going southwards. For those that were southbound, the merciless junction presented little room for stopping. The wait continued.
I went over to Anna and gave her a cuddle, just for the sake of salvaging our morale. She was ready to give up and more keen on using public transport. With sleep deprivation kicking in, I feared that I would soon snap myself.
How had we managed thus far? Anna and I had set off from Clapham Junction four days ago, accepted a lorry ride to Portsmouth to catch a ferry bound for Caen, blitzed through Northern France until Brive, where our luck expired. From there we inched to the south of Toulouse. Rested, we attempted a border crossing via Andorra only to find the mountain passes gridlocked with snow; several short hitches and much walker later we wound up in the Spanish Pyrenees. Our fortune returned with a ride that took us across the mountain range by nightfall. Having slept rough in a car park in the lorry park just outside of Lleida, Catalunya, we hoisted the cardboards on the fifth day hours before the sun was even in sight.
Not that me and Anna were the only ones partaking in this bizarre, if not insane, endeavour. Being the 18th of its kind, the charity Link Community Development (LCD) – it does work in African countries to improve standards of education – has hosted the Morocco Hitch every year since its creation in 1992. Apparently, hitchhiking almost penniless across the continent to the African country closest to the UK would be an effective fundraising mechanism: at least a thousand of us did buy that concept, raising over £300,000 in the process.It all started when a certain Miles Glanfield brought news of this event to the conversations of Selkirk Hall’s 3rd floor kitchen. “Challenge yourself to it” was my first reaction. Granted, this is no London Marathon, or anything remotely as physically demanding. But, as we found out soon enough, it is actually our mentality that is put to the test.
We had previously found ourselves waking to rainwater seeping through our tent; three hours of thumbing later our chances of getting a ride was slimmer than that of us dying of pneumonia on the spot. We were drenched to the bone. The invitation to travel by public bus was too hard to resist. But, staying true to our personal challenge, our endurance put up a good fight and won over the temptation.
Almost two hours had passed since sunrise. Still nothing. A little earlier I had run into trouble with the police: for treating the police like a taxi service. I was reminded just how spoilt a pair of hitchers we were to begin with – our longest wait on the first two days lasted no more than half an hour.
I can’t recall doing anything involving that much unpredictability in my life (albeit a mostly uneventful life). We could enjoy a glorious moment as we breeze through hundreds of miles, but whenever our fortunes took a detour it did send us crying for anti-depressants. But it is not without its positive outcome – it served as a reminder to us to treasure every of those ‘glorious moments’ with awe and appreciation.
It has even more to do with human interaction. When one gets an insight of the lives of one’s Samaritans, it sets this personal enlightenment from that experienced by travelling on public transport. For once, I felt privileged to be part of a stranger’s voyage, share our varying objectives and destinations yet ostensibly heading towards the same direction. In an increasingly frigid world, immersing into the everyday lives of Chris the Portuguese marine-turned trucker, Barrie the Anglo-French cook, Martine the geography teacher, Julien & Laure the nomadic hippies and Romain the crane driver was no everyday occurrence.(Special mention to the French businessman who scared us shitless by graphically depicting what would happen if the Toulouse nuclear power plant explodes – even I, with my minimum knowledge on the French language, understood what he was saying. We bore with his banter as he took us 20k across the outskirts of Toulouse.)
Speaking of frigid, I had now begun shivering in Lleida. My patience was wavering. Then my eardrums shook – it was to the awakened grinding of a lorry engine. In a seemingly vain attempt, deterred by my many failures on a similar effort, I raised my ‘Madrid’ sign so that the conductor de camión could see. His gesture in response, I swore down, must have been a hallucination.
So I approached him.
“¿Va usted a Mardid?” “Si.” (“Are you going to Madrid?” “Yeah.”)
“¿De verdad?” “De verdad, tío. Puedo tomarte a Mardid.” (“Really?” “Really, bruv. I can take you to Madrid.”)
Upon hearing the news, Anna displayed her talents as a dancer by sprinting and leaping into me in a celebratory hug – the exhilaration beats watching a similar scene from Dirty Dancing.
That exhilaration is what found throughout the trip: it gives proof that, the bitterer a situation gets, the tastier the sweetness when it bears fruit. Wetness, coldness, sleeplessness, we endured them all – the belief that our frustration would soon end, and tables would turn, kept us going. Just like the monstrous queue to a rollercoaster ride, it was all part of the suspense.Our driver, who introduced himself as Amadou, kept to his word: with his two new companions he now roamed the autopistas that led us inching towards Madrid. Only one small problem though: of Malawian ancestry, he spoke extremely little English. The same situation would have baffled many hitchers who, some of them had confessed to us, relied entirely on English to get them through the continent.
Fortunate for us, Amadou was fluent in both Spanish and French; unfortunate for me, Anna had fallen asleep at the back, leaving me to fend for myself with my patchy GCSE-standard Spanish.
Not saying I dreaded exposing my unfamiliarity with the language: they love it when they see you try, don’t they? Quite so. My enthusiasm to generate conversation with Diego, the window salesman who took us across the tunnels from Vielha to Lleida, kept my phrasebook glued to my hand. Until the awkwardness – and the dark – got the best of me, and I stayed quiet for the remainder of the ride. I managed to describe this unease to Amadou, who seemed to have sensed the novice in me anyway without saying.
One hour of endless conversing later, he remarked that I hadn’t once used my phrasebook – he was flattering me. But then, as ‘sleeping beauty’ found consciousness and tuned in with a now French-speaking Amadou, my head was able to interpret bits of the dialogues from a language I knew little of; similarly, after we had parted ways with the trucker, Anna expressed her amazement on her ability to uphold a discussion on politics and life using her meagre post- A Level French.
I then remembered what Diego had mentioned a day earlier. “A practicar/aprender (una idioma), viajar” – in order to practise/learn a language, travel. Too true.
We stopped at a petrol station en route to refuel. As we clambered back into the truck I looked through the windscreen. My heart almost stopped at the sight – a vehicle bearing the insignia of the Guardia Civil (Spanish paramilitary police) had pulled into the station. I certainly didn’t forget that carrying more than one passenger in a lorry isn’t exactly legal in Spain. As I feared, we came under their scrutiny. Unwittingly I had left my cardboard perching behind the windscreen, though upside down; a civil guard squinted to read the sign (“charity hitch”) while Amadou convinced the other that Anna and I were his friends rather than mere passengers (not entirely untrue).Eventually we had once again evaded arrest. Maybe I should stop forgetting that the continental folks tend to be more lenient on crimes petty as illegal hitchhiking on a French motorway, or pitching tent on private land, or kipping tramp-style in a car park without shelter?
A lot of people believed that hitchhiking was all about getting from point A to point B with zero expenses, save the energy and effort of raising your thumb long enough to get yourself picked up – I had been one of them. I was especially ruthless with the planning: my emphasis had been on my destination, Morocco, rather than the process of getting there. As much as I hate to admit it, I was wrong.
Should I have kept up with that attitude I would have missed so much detail in the fabric. In my urgency to reach Morocco I have made decisions that could have potentially hastened or slowed down our progress. For instance, my stubbornness prevented us from travelling towards Bordeaux from Périgueux (just west of Brive), a route that would have saved us days of misery and pointless wander; that said, both Anna and I had agreed with hindsight, it would mean sacrificing the memories of moments and encounters we now share and cherish.
Two pieces of memory we would never trade in for a faster track occurred soon after Amadou had dropped us off in the suburbs of Madrid and led us to the train station (fine, we cheated a little bit). As we waded through the streets, I couldn’t help but feel the sentiment of the tri-colours (Anna being white, me being yellow and Amadou black) striding across a country renowned for its racism – this metaphor reflected the tolerance and kindness we enjoyed. For once, my cynicism crumbled in defeat.
The other occasion took place in Valdemoro, a vibrant town south of Madrid. We had arrived at the Repsol in search for a hitch down to Algeciras ferry port, preferably from any of the many lorries lodged by the petrol station. Perhaps we didn’t have any preferences at all, since we were in no position to bargain when the entire Spain had plunged into an Easter traffic lockdown.Soon enough, after spending overnight at the station waiting and resting (hardly), the futility became clear. We devised a plan: we would stay in Valdemoro for a day before making another attempt to hitchhike. Julian, who ran a night shift behind the tapas bar, offered us a ride into Valdemoro town. Unbeknownst to us, the hotels declined any check-ins before 12pm; and so for four hours, we took pleasure in Julian’s hospitality at his flat.
Came noon, and Julian’s Romanian housemate Lorena emerged from slumber and aided our search for cheap accommodation (Julian was still asleep). The pair took it upon themselves to judge that we were too famished to continue our hitch – we devoured at their expense (including Anna’s very first chocolate con churros). When I attempted to pay, Lorena grimaced and tapped her cheek.
“This (gesture) means you’re hurting my feelings,” she explained. “You’re my guests – allow us to look after you.”
Quizas – perhaps.
