Hitching and Other Forms of Transport: July 23, 2006

Our plan from Bern, Switzerland was to hitchhike our way towards Paris, stopping for a few days in Dijon. We extended our stay in Bern twice and finally left early one Sunday morning. We were able to hitch the first ride from within the city; a very kind middle-aged Turkish man stopped to pick us up. He could not speak any English and we couldn’t converse in German so we ended up battling in limited and broken French, a good sign though, as we were headed to France that day. He was actually a political prisoner and was living in exile in Bern. Through a strange mixture of French, German and English, we got a glimpse of his life, 13 years unable to return to his native country where his family still lived. He took us to a large service area/rest stop on the highway, just before Basel. Based on all of our hitching experiences in Japan, this seemed an idea spot where we were guaranteed a ride.

We had some lunch, updated our sign for Dijon and started waiting. And we waited. And waited. A few nice people stopped to explain that they were going North into Germany. One uni student tried to persuade us to come to Basel instead and swim in the nice river there and take a cheap night train to Paris. But we had only been hitching for about an hour and I had become insistent about getting into France. Switzerland was lovely and a brilliant surprise, but we kept extending our stays and the country seemed to have some kind of magical hold on us.

Three hours later, we decided to change the sign to a large and desperate “FRANCE”. I had started to insult the various drivers simply to amuse myself, and we shook our sign fiercely at every car with an F on their license plate. I was adamant they must at some point be headed to some destination in France. I was eager to eat French food, speak my rusty French and see loads of art. But the frogs disappointed us.

The next sign change was a sign of defeat. We took down the FRANCE and wrote Basel, the nearest city, only about 10 km away. We got a ride about 10 minutes later, these Swiss people were just too nice, and spent another day in Switzerland.

We swam in the Rhine in Basel and saw a film and walked through the whole city. Then we boarded the night train for Paris.

We are still huge believers in hitching, and certainly had an exciting ride in the back of the cow truck in the Alps, but I guess the train/bus infrastructure in Europe was too developed for most people to even notice us.

The night train was like the other all-night journey we had in Germany, pretty crap. It was too dark to take in any scenery, below zero (air conditioning sadists) and not much sleeping happened.

We used many forms of transportation on our travels. The trains were efficient but costly, bikes were by far the best (especially the free ones in Switzerland, though sometimes there weren’t any bikes left and we had to take scooters or kids bikes). Our own feet were hard to beat, boats/ferries were pretty fun, hitching ended up being mixed and night journeys took the bottom rung.