Hitchhiking – Part 1

When I got back home from Alicante, where my six-month exchange took place, I happened to find a job that I wish I hadn’t. But I persevered. Because working at the reception desk where I more or less automatically perform those few tasks that were assigned to me doesn’t exactly provide any insight into how a tourist accommodation establishment actually functions, since I’m not familiar with the things running behind all this. I need change.

I work, and I work, and I work. A lot. 25 days a month, working night shifts, in a renowned Slovenian company that self-centred and also engages a bit in gambling and a little less with costumers. They aren’t looking for new employees, except us, students, because students come cheap, though we’re still expensive enough for employers that they complain about us.

When I find some free time inbetween work and sleep, I look for work experience and send my CV to small hotels, large hotels and hostels. I send my CV to as many as I can find, but I rarely get a reply, the reason being, as I later find out, that they’re not interested in my offer and don’t feel like bothering replying. Days go by, close to 100 by my count, even though it doesn’t really matter.

Because I work a lot, I have little free time or time off, if you will, so I can’t even make a trip to A Coruña I could speak to people in person, in hopes of making a good impression. Hitchhiking, where you meet dozens of interesting people, has its speed limits. Sometimes, you have to spend the whole night waiting for your lorry driver to get back behind the wheel, even if he agreed to give you a ride the day before.

But there’s the possibility of going to Girona instead of A Coruña and it’s 1,000 kilometres closer to Slovenia, my home country. Checking my time-table, I notice I have a few days off, then I work two days straight and have a few days off again after that, which is ridiculous, so I make arrangements to postpone the two days’ work until sometime in the future. That leaves me with a week’s worth of time for me to simply go.

And I went.

That morning, I woke up early and I managed to get out before 7 a.m., which was strange considering I didn’t have to rush to catch a bus or anything and that usually means I don’t exert myself much. My idea was to go to the Šempas lay-by and start my journey from there instead of taking a train to Jesenice and thus avoiding Italy. It’s worth mentioning that, in my experience, there are many Italian locals living near the Vrtojba border crossing who don’t go very far, so they’re not really much of help to me. Šempas, on the other hand, is just about ten kilometres inland, but it makes a huge difference.

Ok, so my dad and I were in the car and we arrived at the starting point, where we managed to find the driveway, and an open one at that, so we could drive directly into the lay-by. I took a walk and looked around to see how the lorry drivers were doing, even though I knew they were mostly idle on Saturdays. I saw most of them sleeping and already giving me the nod because with my two backpacks and my hi-vis jacket the obvious reason I must’ve been there was to look for a ride.

Good, I told myself, I’ll just go stand at the petrol station entrance and wait until someone offers me a ride, which should be anytime now, anyway, since the motorway is always full of traffic and there are always people going to Italy who are headed far inland. With a bit of luck, I thought to myself, I can get a ride far inland, maybe even to Brescia where I intend to turn towards Piacenza. When I got to the petrol station, I saw it being completely wrecked and the fuel dispensers were out of order. There was no way to enter the station, though the bar in the back of the station was open. I realised right away that I couldn’t continue forward and was thinking of whether to simply try the other side of the station or maybe call for help and try to reach the border. I decided to try to reach the border as I didn’t want to waste time, even though I had enough time to spend. Based on experience, I was thinking that if I didn’t make any big mistakes, I would be in Girona in about a day, around late evening.

Not much time passed, around half an hour, when Mojca picked me up and took me straight to the Arino lay-by near Padua which I was already familiar with and I knew it was a good place to stop and rest. From there, I continued on and thought to myself that by keeping up the pace I would arrive in Spain ahead of scheduled time, which would be interesting, as I always strived to increase my travel pace.

After this came a terrible blow when I got stuck at a large lay-by called Scaligera near Verona, which I was already familiar with as a town where I had made a few necessary stops to take a break, but it wasn’t a biggie. The problem was, I needed to be outside the restaurant where I didn’t have control over the situation because the car parks were located on both sides of the building, preventing me from keeping track of all passers-by. If some of them spot you, others don’t because they don’t see you or what you’ve written on the piece of cardboard and so they ignore you.

I continued the journey with two Argentinians who were on their holidays, but their accents quickly betrayed them, so I was relieved because I didn’t have to struggle with Italian anymore. They were headed to the Bergamo Airport, meaning this was exactly the ride I’d been waiting for to reach the outskirts of Brescia, namely the exit towards Piacenza and then towards Genoa. I was picked up by Luigi who was involved at the construction work at the Trebbia Nord lay-by where he also dropped me off. It was a relatively new lay-by and it looked empty as well, so I started worrying how I should move forward.

Even before starting my journey, I decided to try and find out how my travel would fare by choosing the route through Turin and Grenoble, which I thought would be a nice alternative to the otherwise coastal route from Genoa onwards; I’ve always had trouble bypassing Genoa and finding someone who would then be headed to Savona. I was immediately offered a ride by a gentleman who turned out to be a Macedonian and who picked up, as it turned out, someone he could reminisce about the good old days with, the days I knew almost nothing about because I had only remembered the remnants of the old era from when I was a child, namely the late 1990s. This was the last time I got a chance to change direction, as he could’ve dropped me off at the Tortona Nord lay-by, a stop I put in my itinerary as the ideal point from which I’d try to reach the coast as quickly as I could, but decided to try out my luck just to come across what later turned out to be the gorgeous Susa Valley.

Goce dropped me off at the Crocetta lay-by, somewhere on the outskirts of Asti, with still quite a distance to go. I was barely able to write down the route I would’ve liked to take when I was already picked up by Andrei, a Romanian, and Constantino, who later dropped me off at the Rivoli lay-by, right after Turin in the Susa Valley. This was the lay-by I marked down as my target because it was the first lay-by after Turin. I was suprised at our travel speed, as I arrived there as soon as 6:30 p.m., getting my hopes up about easily reaching France the very same day and then see where to go from there.

Well, as it’s usually the case, you get stuck on your journey and have to wait for a long time before being able to move forward. This happens at least once if the journey isn’t too long, say, about more than 2,000km for now. I happened to get stuck in Rivoli, as I couldn’t continue my journey no matter what and couldn’t even reach the next lay-by near Susa, let alone reach France.

A lorry driver passed by me, walking to and fro and cheerfully talking on his phone, as he had to stop for a mandatory rest period over the weekend and had to pass time somehow until departure. I eagerly waited, and waiter, and waited. He came up to me and asked me how was my trip, where I was headed, and where I came from. All this in Serbian. I don’t know whether everyone thinks you’ll be understood all over the world if you speak Serbian, but it seemed to work because I understood almost everything. I was I had met someone familiar. We talked a bit, as there was no one around, and then he left. I stayed and tried to move forward somehow, but to no avail. After a while, he came around for the second time and invited me to sleep in the second bed he had in the lorry cabin, so that I wouldn’t have to stay outside, even though I could’ve gone to the restaurant either way and thus avoid the cold. I had a lot of warm clothes with me, but the temperatures dropped considerably throughout the day, and a pleasant day turned into a not so pleasant night. I realised then that there was no way of me reaching France and even thought of heading back and set out for the coast. There’s very little traffic during the night and jaywalking across the motorway wouldn’t be my first attempt at doing so. Not that I’d recommend anyone to do the same, but let’s be honest, sometimes you just have to do what’s necessary.

Eventually, I gave up; the invitation had been too kind a gesture to turn down, so I tapped on the window as Stefan told me beforehand and he kindly let me into my new temporary hostel. And I say hostel because I had no idea at the time that there was, lo and behold, a real hostel, the HI “Cascina Govean”, just a few steps from the lay-by in the first village of Alpignano. I just realised this writing the article when I carefully examined the map to trace the route in order to try to successfully avoid all the mistakes I made, the next time I set out on a journey. What I know for sure is that I’ll definitely be bypassing the Susa Valley in the future, despite its beauty, at least when hitchhiking. I spent half of my journey of 1,470 kilometres to traverse those 90 kilometres. It was a total disaster.

That was one of the few nights I could sleep in peace. I usually recede into a dark corner at a restaurant, which are usually deserted during the night, and try to somehow get a few hours of sleep. I had lots of energy after a good night’s rest and that enabled me to continue my journey towards Girona more easily. It’s true, though, that most of that energy has worn off by now, so see you in the next issue when I’ll tell you everything from my stopover to the destination.