“I ended up becoming friends with some sort of dodgy real estate gangster who worked next door. It’s a long story, but basically this guy took me 400 km to the next city, gave me a tour of all the sights, put me up in a luxury hotel…”
I’ve only been in Serbia two hours and I’ve been threatened with arrest for having a conversation. I know I have a talent for getting myself into trouble but this is ridiculous…
“It was called Hungarian salami, but… Australian salami is not so good. We have all kinds of different ones but they all taste kind of the same.”
Pasti frowns and nods. “You must try some real Hungarian sausage…”
Sometimes I notice the membrane that wraps me. The way people look around me and past me. I don’t exist. It’s like nothing ever happened…
“A man is arrested and taken to the police station. They tie him to a chair and blindfold him. Then the sargent gets a jug and begins to pour water into the man’s shoes…”
There was a really cute couple doing their wedding photos. I congratulated them and slapped beers in their hands. I think they thought I was some sort of nut but I managed to explain I am Australian, and that seemed to resolve the matter for them…
He’s an old guy. What am I going to do? I think about going ahead of him, but it seems childish, and I can picture us trying to one up each other for hours, going further and further up the road…
“I see” Mohammed says, thoughtfully. “So you are not worried about hitchhiking… What is it that you worry about?” “Oh, you know, just the usual stuff. Existential dread. Dieing alone. Cancer. Boredom. Compared to stuff like that hitchhiking is a breeze…”
The most popular style of American beer came into fruition because of some thirsty Brits in India…
The first thing I observe about Calais is that it is raining hard.
The second thing I notice is the miserable looking refugee camps that stretch for miles along the shore, surrounded by barbed wire fences…
“That’s about 10,000 kms of hitchhiking you’re proposing. This would involve crossing about three continents, freezing cold mountains, blisteringly hot deserts, and a large number of border posts, attended by humorless civil servants…”
‘You’re a hitchhiker’ they tell me. ‘We’ve read your blog and you seem to enjoy doing odd things. How would you like to be our hitchhiking delivery guy..?