On Hitchhiking
On a cold morning in the middle of August, Marta and I stood on the shoulder of the only road through town, a two-lane straight-shot that ran past the one gas station, three restaurants, and six places of accommodation that constituted the Tongariro National Park Settlement.
It wasn’t the best place to get a ride—not a popular route, smack in the middle of a national park—but it’s where we were, and Marta and I had vowed to hitchhike as our main mode of transportation, both for the experience and for the fact that other New Zealand transport was off-puttingly expensive (and we were more interested in spending our limited budget on veggie burgers than on bus rides).
So Marta held our cardboard sign, asking in neatly-blocked Sharpie “toward Wellington, please,” and I stuck out my thumb at the cars that zoomed past us, one every three minutes or so, each one sending a new wave of dust to settle over the bags piled at our feet.
I fretted over what would happen if we didn’t get a ride. I answered my own worry; we’d already secured a backup plan—a bus to Wellington left at 1:30 and there were plenty of seats left; we could buy two (extremely expensive) tickets if we struck out on the side of the road.
I focused on the cars again, only briefly breaking my concentration to wonder who first christened the side of the road, that extra curve of asphalt sloping into gravel, the shoulder. It’s a relatively gorgeous image, isn’t it? The highway as the main planes of the body, the unbroken line of muscle and bone and sinew from skull to ankle; the extra space on the side, where you might rest a tired head, the shoulder.
Standing there out there, stamping my feet to stay warm, I felt like a Christmas window display. I imagined each driver looking us over with scrutiny and finding a different reason to not pick us up—“they won’t have good music taste,” or “they’ll need to make lots of bathroom stops”; “they look like they’ll have a difficult-to-understand accent,” “that one clearly hasn’t washed her hair recently and will smell up the car.” I smiled, trying to radiate American friendliness and warmth (I’d purposefully written toward and not towards, the British and thus New Zealand spelling, in attempt to demarcate us as outsiders and garner hospitality, in case our big backpacks hadn’t done the job).
Eight minutes later, a squat white van—the kind your elementary school teachers warn you not to follow strange men into—pulled over on the shoulder ahead of us. I walked over to the passenger seat window (on the lefthand side of the car, which I never could get used to) and peered in.
A beaming, balding head greeted me. “Hi girls! Headed south? I’m headed to Wellington, bringing a load of computer equipment back down to one of our offices there, and I’ve plenty of space. Fancy a lift?” asked a thick-accented Kiwi man in his late 50s.
Marta and I looked at each other, communicated non-verbally that he looked non-threatening, and nodded in unison. “Sure!”
“I’m Adrian,” our ride offered as he rearranged boxes to make room for our backpacks. We introduced ourselves, chucked our bags in, and claimed seats: me, in the front next to Adrian, with plenty of legroom but also saddled with the responsibility of making small talk for the next four hours; Marta, seated behind me with boxes nestled around her, separated from the front by a safety grate and as a result absolved from having to participate in the conversation.
We spent an hour or so sharing life stories. Adrian told us how he rode his motorcycle across Australia, then shipped it to India and explored the length of that country, then rode it through continental Europe, shipped it again to the U.K., and finished his trip in the northern tip of Scotland, some nine months after he’d begun. He regaled us with tales of friendly Iranian villagers taking him in and feeding him, refusing to accept payment, of being so hot in Sri Lanka that he couldn’t bear to touch the metal body of his bike. It was why he was so happy to pick up hitchhikes whenever he saw them, he explained—he wanted to repay some of the kindness that strangers had showed him.
Marta and I told him about our trip, about Michigan, about the dynamics that led to Trump’s elections. We listened to Adrian’s road-trip jams—a 50-minute mix CD featuring Creedence Clearwater Revival and Steve Miller Band that we cycled through three times—as he narrated the backstory of every little tiny nowhere town we passed through: “This town has the only fish and chip spot for 100 kilometers”; “See the giant cheese sculpture in that park? They’re known for their creameries here.” We drove through rolling green hills, each featuring a little cluster of stout-legged sheep traversing impossibly narrow paths worn into the hillside to get to fresh clover. An ewe with a big, round face and a brand-new lamb suckling at her teat was stopped close to the road, just on the other side of a fence, and as we passed her, a cloud broke above us, dousing the little family in a bright light whiter than her fur.
It was a lovely ride, and when we got to Wellington, we unloaded our bags, wrapped up the leftover falafel we’d stopped for three hours in, and said a grateful goodbye to Adrian.
And then he went on his merry way, and we ours, and that was that. No exchange of numbers or last names, no future plans; we’ll probably never see him again. And that’s some of the beauty of hitchhiking—you make real but temporary connections with people from all walks of life, you share their car and their life for the span of a few breaths or hours, and you walk away having gotten and hopefully having given something much appreciated.
Marta and I didn’t pay for a single ride in New Zealand except for our Ubers around Auckland and our first bus out of the city. (Oh, and one cab ride when the guy we were couchsurfing with forgot to come pick us up, but that’s it). The rest of the time, we either met other travelers and grabbed rides with them—like when Frenchwoman Emma rescued us from the farm—or tried our luck at the side of the road, never having to wait more than 15 minutes for a ride to exactly where we needed to go. We often got door-to-door service, getting dropped off directly at our next hostel, which was way more convenient than if we’d paid for a series of $50 buses and had had to lug our belongings around town, and we always had interesting conversations.
Before we ever accepted a ride, we ran through a few safety procedures: snap a photo of the driver’s license plate, just in case something happened and we needed to find them again; chat quickly with any potential ride-givers and suss out any inappropriateness; check that seatbelts worked; and make sure we had offline maps downloaded so we could surreptitiously GPS-track the route our rides were taking us on and confirm we were going where we needed to be. All travelers, anywhere, need to be thoughtful about the safety of themselves and their belongings; women travelers need to be particularly careful. That’s not fair, but it’s been part of my existence since forever, and since I’ve made bad calls in the past—gotten into the cab with the creepy driver, found myself lost at night in a town I didn’t know—I’m especially careful about preparing against them in the future. New Zealand’s extremely safe, which helped, but we didn’t lower our level of scrutiny, even so.
But everyone we met and got rides from, which ended up being about two-thirds New Zealanders and a third other travelers, were lovely or, at the very least, gave us a good story to tell afterwards.
We’d met Shaz, proud mom to two dogs and three humans, one of whom had just gotten out of the hospital after a bad car accident when she’d picked us up; she hadn’t wanted to be alone on her drive back home, stuck with morbid thoughts about her daughter’s recovery.
We’d met Marilyn, wife to a bioengineer who’d done his PhD at the university that Marta had just spent the summer at in Brisbane; they connected over research projects as she drove us ten minutes to a better spot to hitch from, and Marta walked away with her husband’s email and an offer to reach out for career advice or questions about graduate programs.
We’d met a French couple who drove twenty minutes out of their way to drop us at our next stop, who’d chatted the whole way in French, which Marta translated quietly for me to the best of her ability.
We’d met David, a lanky Nordic ski instructor doing a few months of road-tripping around New Zealand, who picked us up, took us to the mountain with him, and gave us tips on our parallel turns, then dropped us off at our hostel, with a quick stop to share the absolute worst milkshake any one of us have ever had.
And we’d met Adrian, world traveler extraordinaire and allover fascinating human.
When Marta left me, I continued the hitching adventures on my own; my first leg of the journey without her, on the ferry from Wellington to the South Island, had me meeting John and Jane, a retired couple on their way to their professional-skydiving youngest daughter’s 35th birthday party. They’d sat next to me in my booth near the windows, and after chatting about journalism and environmentalism and the growing trend of digital nomadism, they offered me a ride to Nelson, which was on the way to their party; we climbed down into the lower decks of the ship, where lines of trucks full of cattle gave way to orderly rows of passenger cars. We joined the other cars progressing like a line of ants and pulled out onto dry land, my smoothest hitchhike yet, and a good omen for the rest of the South Island.
I got two days’ worth of rides from Harald, a wonderfully kind Austrian management consultant with children about my age who had an unlimited supply of drinking water and mocha-flavored granola bars, a complete willingness to let me DJ the entirety of a five-hour drive along the curving cliffs of the west side highway, and interesting commentary about world politics and the service economy.
I hitchhiked out of Fox Glacier with a Spanish couple from Barcelona, with whom I practiced my castellano as we debated the costs and benefits of Airbnb on a tourist city’s economy and discussed the strange phenomenon of Spanish men living with their parents well into their 30s. They dropped me at my hostel in Wanaka, where I met two lovely Kiwi girls who took me with them to Queenstown. With them, I stopped to take sunrise photos, ate strawberries by the carton, and listened exclusively to Post Malone.
Out of Queenstown, I was picked up by a Kiwi and his German girlfriend heading to a splitboarding (like snowboarding, they explained to me, but the board can separate into two mini skis to climb up backcountry bowls and the like) festival; they were wildly unprepared for the journey and we stopped no less than seven times: at a copy shop, for the girlfriend to get her passport photos taken so she could send in her overdue visa renewal on the way; at a grocery store, for the boyfriend to buy lunchmeat for the slopes; at a sushi spot, to grab car snacks; at a gas station, to refuel; at a dollar store, for her to look for a cheap helmet mount for her GoPro; and at two different hardware stories, for her to buy thick leather mittens to go over her gloves as to not tear them up doing some climbing (apparently an ancillary activity to the splitboarding). I followed around good-humoredly, doing some grocery shopping of my own when the time came (waiting for rides with bags of food can be unwieldy, but since I knew they’d be dropping me off right at my next spot, I stocked up on cheese and bread and peanut butter and apples and ginger beer: the sustenance of champions) and otherwise stayed with my Kindle in the car, a window cracked as if I were their dog, panting in the backseat.
They dropped me in Tekapo, and there I met an absolutely lovely Israeli girl named Shiri who I traveled with for the next two days, who became not just a fantastic road-trip buddy but also a true friend; we talked about our families and about learning other languages and she taught me to swear in Hebrew while we waited at the side of the road—again, on the shoulder—for my time-lapse video of the sun setting over Mount Cook to finish capturing the moment.
My last hitch was one of my strangest yet; it was with a German woman who’d been living in New Zealand for the last six years or so with her partner, and it began normally; I filled the car with chit-chat about the weather in the South Island and asked her questions about her life in Christchurch. That led to a bit of a scary conversation where she leaned over, whispered “I guess I can tell you this since you’re leaving the country in a few days,” and then proceeded to lay out that Christchurch gets a big earthquake every 300 years, and we were currently in year 299, and the coming quake would likely be so big as to be felt for minutes all over the South Island, with aftereffects felt as far away as Australia and Fiji, and that the island would likely be isolated for weeks at a time, and that hundreds of lives would be lost. She coupled this happy tale with a forced illegal hike; she turned off down an unpaved lane and pulled over next to the gate to a sheep farm, clearly private property, and when I begged off, offering to stay in the car and watch our stuff, she clucked her dissatisfaction until I’d climbed out of the car and followed her through the gate. “We need some fresh air on this long drive!” she called over her shoulder as she picked a winding path through the steeply-sloped pasture, avoiding the rabbit holes pockmarking the ground, waiting for an unwary foot to slide in and sacrifice an ankle to them. I followed her around picked-over sheep bones—as eerie a sight as I’ve ever seen—and hurried us back to the car as soon as she’d snapped a picture of the two lakes just visible on the horizon line.
Each one of those rides was another moment of getting outside of my comfort zone, of being open to what might happen outside of my control. Of who might pick me up, what route they might take me on, what stops we might make, how fast they might drive, what they might be like, what they might need in a traveling companion. Of trying to find the beauty and the joy in whatever came my way. Of enjoying the connections made with people my life never would’ve crossed paths with otherwise. Of waiting, of not getting to be the one who decides everything, of not always getting from A to B in the most efficient way. But of accepting that, and beyond accepting that, coming to deeply love and appreciate that. That feeling that sometimes the journey really is the destination, and engaging with it with real, grateful open-mindedness.
Over these last six weeks of hitchhiking, of feeling awkward standing at the side of the road in hiking boots and sticking out my thumb anyways, I kept thinking about something I heard ten years ago in a conference room at MYLead.
Michigan Youth Leadership (MYLead) is a leadership development conference that I attended my sophomore year of high school and volunteered at my junior year; it’s where I first met and befriended Megan, who went to Michigan with me and has long been one of the most important people in my life. The conference focuses on helping students to make a positive impact in their communities through leadership and service, and activities included workshops and lectures on public speaking, goal setting, motivating others, understanding identity, and getting outside of your comfort zone. When I went as a participant, I was 15, and full of ideas, and so excited to learn. (Not much has changed.)
It was late afternoon, and we found spots in the stadium-seating auditorium for the last speaker of the day. A man, one of those motivational speakers with a zippy PowerPoint and a powerful speaking voice that knew just how long to wait for laughs, began his talk; his topic was on the importance of stepping out of our comfort zones. I don’t remember everything he said, but his closing anecdote has always stuck with me. A shy young adult, he found himself at Somerset Mall, where I’d grown up going shopping, on the Saturday before Christmas. He’d gotten there early and secured a good parking spot, and as he was leaving, he saw dozens of cars circling the lot. He decided that was the moment to break his fear of public speaking and stood in front of his car, hawking his spot. He had made a deal with himself—he wouldn’t leave until he had successfully convinced someone to pay him $1 for the spot. He talked to people, made his sales pitch, got denied and tried again and again. And within a few minutes, someone happily forked over the dollar, he reversed out, and he drove away, enjoying the warm aftereffects of overcoming some of his fear.
I don’t have the same fear of public speaking, but I certainly don’t like feeling on display, I don’t like not being in control, I don’t easily trust in others or in the universe. (You read this blog. You know all of that.) And these last six weeks of facing that fear and discomfort every time I stood outside with all my worldly belongings, of making the best of whatever situation I found myself in, of figuring out what my driver needed in a traveling companion and trying to be that, of adapting on the fly to whatever may happen, of walking the line between thoughtful safety measures and blind trust, of letting go and seeing what came my way—they helped me overcome it.
Hitchhiking: good for the wallet, great for the soul.