Budapest trip

I did find my passport in the end. I had to tidy my entire room to find it and after searching the obvious places like on the floor under piles of clothes, under the bed, or under piles of post, i moved on to less likely places - in shoes, inside clothes and finally moved on to sifting through the couple of bags of rubbish waiting to be thrown out. Where, of course, I found it in the middle of a newspaper - the obvious place for me to have put it??? It was quite the relief to find it after all the increasingly worried searching and finding it in such a stupid place amused me too.

So my trip to Budapest could go ahead. I was going to Budapest for a weekend away with friends. One of the friends and I decided we would try and get there in an interesting way than flying and so we came up with hitch hiking from Brussels to Budapest and then fly back on the Monday. We gave ourselves 3 days to do it and the plan was to try and get to Munich the first night, Vienna the second and then ideally getting a ride on a boat (hopefully stowing away - how could stowing away not end in excitement? But most likely chipping in a few Euros to the crew of a boat or something.) on the Danube to Budapest. Before we left all sounded pretty doable with a lot of potential for adventure on the way.

We caught the Eurostar over to Brussels on Tuesday night and had an enjoyable evening there. A little too enjoyable though, meaning we set off more hungover and later than planned on Wednesday morning. We had looked up some hitching advice on the web before we set off (Hitchwiki is a useful site, which, somehow, we didn't find before we went.) but had no advice for best places to hitch out of Brussels. The Eurostar ticket allows you to travel anywhere in Belgium after Brussels so we decided to head to the Belgian border to a smaller town where finding the right road out of town would probably be easier. We decided on Liege. We arrived in town and went to the tourist information office at the station to see if we could get a map and advice on the best road for getting out of town. The bored looking woman gave us a map and suggested we walked across town to near the entrance to a motorway going Northeast. It would involve walking along by the river and according to the map, Liege is the premier tourist destination in Wallonia. It all sounded pretty pleasant. But if that is the best city in Wallonia, then Wallonia must be fucking shit. It is an ugly, concrete city. The river front is one eyesore after another. The only nice old building we saw was abandoned and graffiti covered and about to be turned in to a carpark, if i understood the sign on it correctly.

We got to our recommended hitching point and stuck the thumbs out. Almost immediately a guy pulled over, but it turned out it was just to tell us we shouldn't try hitching there, we should try back over the other side of town by the station. It had been about a half an hour walk across town and it was already getting on so we waited for him to go and then carried on hitching where we were. It took a while, but eventually Vincent, a business man heading back to his office, pulled over and said he would give us a lift to the next service station on the motorway, where it should be easier to get a lift. It wasn't. We stood for about an hour getting nothing so started asking the truckers if we could get a lift with them. Apparently, they are only allowed 2 people in the cab so we would have had to split up if we wanted to go with truck drivers. So back to thumb out at the services. Finally a car pulled over. It was a couple of Liege University students heading back to Luxembourg, where they lived. It wasn't really the right way but it was at least South and nobody else had been stopping so we got in. Gilles and Duarte were cool guys and spoke good English so we were able to have a decent conversation. They very kindly dropped us at the HI youth hostel in Luxembourg before heading on home. Luxembourg city is great. I knew nothing about it and was very pleasantly surprised. Set amongst steep sided hills with good looking old buildings at the top and bottom and rivers winding through the town it is a very good looking place. We went out for a few beers and looked up places to hitch out of town before an early night.

The next day was equally unsuccessful in terms of hitching. The recommended spot in town didn't have anywhere for the cars to stop so we took the other advice on hitchwiki and caught a train to the Luxembourg German border and walked over the border to a German motorway services. Where we stuck the thumbs out and had little luck again. One guy pulled over but he was only going to a town not to much further East and we wanted to go further if possible so turned him down. Next, Kirsten, a very attractive young woman driving on her own pulled over. Our German wasn't very good so we started with "Parlez-vous Francais?" She said no so we followed with "Do you speak English?" Again she didn't. "Sprechen sie Deutsche?" Which she did, what with it being Germany and all. And after realising how stupid our question was we had to sheepishly reply "Oh, we don't really." A combination of our bad German and her, much better than she first admitted, English allowed us to find out she wasn't even going as far as the guy before but we were unlikely ever to be offered a lift by somebody so attractive again so we got in. After an all too brief journey she dropped us in a small town, where we found it impossible to hitch out of. So we caught a bus to the town the guy who offered us a lift earlier was going to. Again no hitching joy so we caught a train to Saarbrucken. Which did have an autobahn going through it but the on ramps were poorly situated for hitching and again got no lifts. So by this point it was Thursday evening. We were supposed to be meeting our friends in Budapest on Friday and we were still on the border between Germany and France. It wasn't looking good so we started looking in to trains, planes and buses, but they were all pretty expensive or already booked up so we needed a great days hitching the next day if we had any chance of spending some time in Budapest. One piece of advice we found on the internet was just to go up to people as they were filling up with petrol and ask them for a lift then so we planned to head out to a autobahn services early the next day and see how that worked.

We got out to the services by about 9 the next morning and were initially unsuccessful. The services were right by the border and not many cars were stopping. It took about 2 hours but we did get a lift with Mark, another business man returning home from business in Paris, who drove us very quickly down the autobahn in his fancy German car to the next services near Homborg, where we had been informed it would be much easier to get a lift. And indeed it was. There were a lot more cars pulling in. We were taking it in turns to ask the cars as they pulled in for lifts and it is definitely the best way to do it. They get to see you are not weird and there was quite a lot of "we would help but..." Some were just "No" straight away, but the majority were pleasant about it. We also picked up the German (and French - autostop) word for hitch hiking. I am not sure of the spelling but it is basically tramping. (Wir trampen nach Budapest - if you are ever in Germany hitch hiking to Budapest.) This was the start of our hattrick of hitches where we asked 3 people in a row and got 3 lifts. I approached a guy (who I hope was a used car salesman. He certainly looked like one) as he started filling up and he spoke no English and after i said we were hitchhiking he pointed in the car and i noticed it was full of people so no room for us anyway. I went back to stand with my friend. But as the guy came out after paying for his petrol he came over and motioned for us to follow him. He opened the boot of his estate car and pointed in to the boot, which had 4 tyres in it for some reason. We bundled in to the boot and had a cramped ride over to near Mannheim.

My friend got us our next lift from Bavarian mountain man Markus, who was returning from a course in Bonn to his mountain home. He had a load of junk in the back of his car we had to move before we got in, which included one of those Bavarian hats that have the feathers in and used shooting targets from his hunting practice. It was a shame he wasn't wearing Lederhosen, but when the car started up and the CD player started up he was listening to German accordian based oompahpah music, which was very pleasing. He didn't really seem to know where he was going and at one point when he had to choose between 2 different autobahns he asked me to get his map out. I did and while merging with traffic he leaned over to have a look, taking his eyes off the traffic and driving oblviously quickly towards the back of the breaking car in front. Fortunately my friend in the back noticed and was quick witted enough to warn Markus in German. "Acthung Markus! Actung!" got his attention and we narrowly avoided an accident. He drove us a good distance and dropped us at another services past Stuttgart.

That was 2 people asked and 2 lifts in a row, so we were going to be a little selective about who we asked for our hattrick hitch. And almost as if heaven sent, what looked like a priest pulled in to fill up. He's a man of God so he surely can't say no was our thinking. Father Josef turned out to be a Benedictine Monk with very little English, but he agreed to take us nearly to Munich. He also turned out to be the most agressive driver i have ever been in a car with. It was pissing down with rain at this point yet he insisted on tailgating the car in front until they pulled over. He did have 2 crosses in the car and clearly had God on his side so we felt safe. Unfortunately because of the language barrier we didn't find out much about his monkly duties but did find out he was allowed to climb to the top of Ulm cathedral, which normal people weren't.

We were trying to stick to the really big rest stops but Father Josef dropped us off one stop too early unfortunately, but it was still pretty busy. We saw the only other hitch hikers we met on our travels here. It was 2 women, 1 of whom was very attractive and wearing short shorts and a tight top. They were using the thumb out method of hitching and almost every car going by was stopping and offering them lifts. Much more successful than our attempts. So if you are hitching in the future my advice would be - try and be an attractive woman rather than a slightly dishevelled man and you will get a lot more lifts. We were still asking people and got a lift with Andreas to the next big services along. He turned out to be a jet powered remote controlled plane salesman. They cost at least 15000 Euros each. We asked him what sort of people buy them and he said they are toys for the stupidly rich.

By this point we were at a services to the south west of Munich and wanted to get in to Munich and out again going South East towards Austria. We were getting offers of lifts in to Munich and up through to the North of Munich but not the direction we wanted. My friend went up to one guy as he was getting out of his car and getting ready to fill up. They had a bit of a chat while he filled up and then as they finished talking he looked down and looked annoyed. He then spent the next 20 minutes walking around on the phone and it wasn't until the towtruck came to tow his car away that we realised he had been distracted while filling up and put diesel in instead of petrol. Very embarrassing but not so bad as by the time we realised, we had decided to head in to Munich and catch a train to Salzburg and were just about to get in to Martin's (a watch salesman from Holland working in Munich.) car who drove us to the train station in Munich.

As we were trying to buy our tickets to Salzburg a Mongolian lawyer, whose name escapes me at the moment, came up and had a group ticket to Salzburg, which she kindly invited us in on meaning our journey was pretty cheap. We got in to Salzburg at about midnight and went straight to bed. 520 km hitched and some interesting people picking us up. It was a good day!

We were hoping to arrive in Budapest by Saturday night and that the good hitching form would continue in Austria. We headed out early again and got to a gas station near the entrance to the autobahn by about 9.30. Apparently gas stations in Austria also double as pubs and the one in the gas station we stopped at was impressively busy for 9.30 on a Saturday morning. One of us was asking the patrons for lifts while the other stood with a sign trying to catch a lift from the passing traffic. The Germans were a lovely friendly lot but the Austrians were a bunch of bastards and we didn't even get a sniff of a lift. We admitted defeat after a couple of hours of fruitless attempts and ended up catching the train to Budapest and getting there early Saturday evening...