Hitchhiking: Allowing yourself to get in a vehicle with potential axe murderers, rapists and creeps. Not to mention the possibility of being kidnapped and sold into sex slavery… Like Eastern Europe isn’t scary enough without allowing yourself to get into strangers vehicles…

In Romania (and many other surrounding Eastern European countries), hitchhiking is as standard as catching the metro. The ultimate travel method, it’s friendly, cheap and gives you the opportunity to spend some quality time with locals, (a much more positive take on the initially terrifying concept). Although I have experienced short-distance, spontaneous hitchhiking in the Ukrainian countryside, I am yet to pack my bags and plan a day of city hopping by jumping from seat to seat in the trusty hands of generous motorists. So when my new German friends, Ma and Kalle invited me along for the journey to Cluj I decided to at least escort them to the E81 motorway and maybe even record some details of the car they were last seen in, you know… just in case… (It was silver… I think…?).

Australians (and apparently German’s too) don’t really know standard hitch hiking etiquette. But we weren’t just going to blindly stand in the middle of Bucharest with our

thumbs out; we decided to do some initial research to make sure we knew the lowdown on hitch-hiking Romania. We were directed straight to hitchwiki.org. Yep a website completely dedicated to hitch hiking the world. How convenient!

Reading the introduction to hitch hiking in Bucharest wasn’t the most encouraging piece of information we had come upon, in fact it directly told us that  “…hitching from some places in Bucharest can be very difficult, especially in the north near Otopeni and motorway 1 where they are constructing a new road and it is a very bad area full of prostitutes, stray dogs, gypsies and really no good places for cars to stop…”

Ok so avoid the North motorway, got it. So where were we advised to go that was prostitute/stray dog and gypsy free? Well here’s what hitchwiki had to say… “…Get the metro to Pacii (note the metro is a bit crazy – if you’re not careful the trains change lines without warning and you can end up at Gare Du Nord again!). From Pacii you have to find the main road going west, and go to the first bus stop. Get the first bus that says Carrefour and go all the way to Carrefour shopping centre, this is the start of the motorway. There’s a part where the fence is broken (it’s not broken anymore, if you get to the mall, you have to walk back a little bit, and or a) walk by the side of the entrance of a tunnel (kind of dangerous) or b) get out before the carrefour and walk (and hitch) a kilometre or two) and you can access the motorway here – it’s actually a very good spot to hitch, since traffic coming from the big shopping centre stops here.”

Ok, so get the metro and hope that the train doesn’t change lines without warning, get on a bus that is going to a supermarket, walk through a hole in a fence which may or may not exist anymore or walk through a dangerous tunnel… Sounds easy enough…

On the eve of the big day after feasting on home-made curry and discussing how un-German it was for Kalle to be drinking beer from a plastic bottle, we got creative and  successfully made some attractive hitchin’ signs, (although I did have to ban Ma from colouring them in; Germans obviously don’t learn to colour in kindergaden). The next morning I was woken up at an ungodly hour… (yes 8.30am is for sleeping and sleeping only in below freezing weather). But determined to chaperone the boys to the highway, I rose out of my oh-so-comfy bed and quickly checked the weather. -4 degrees… great. But it was all worth it, because for the first time in a month Bucharest was white. Yep, after weeks of being told: ‘it’s going to snow tomorrow’ the prediction had finally become a reality. Something about those ex-communist streets dusted with that soft white stuff made the city almost magical… Not the Dracula-country eery magical that had been present in the city for the past month, more like it’s-snowing-and-I-feel-5-years-old-again magical.

We made it to the metro and managed to make it all the way to our stop without the train changing without warning, successfully caught a bus to the supermarket, found the fence, found a hole in the fence and there we were. Just us and the E81. With the wind in our hair and determination in our hearts we were ready to face the oncoming traffic.

Guess what? It was coooold. It was very, very coooold. The excitement of hitch hiking had melted along with that snow that had brought so much optimism to the morning. But it didn’t take long for cars to start paying attention to us and soon enough we had someone pulling over. Speaking in german the boys started haggling… Really? The guy had asked for money already? What had happened to friendly locals, picking you up out of the kindness of their hearts rather then the weight of your pockets? I didn’t like this guy and was secretly relieved to see him pull back out onto the highway.

More people passed, some looking sympathetic, some friendly motorists returning our thumbs up…  Did I mention it was cold? I spotted a bus that was about to make return trip to the city and decided to let the boys continue their journey as a duo. Of course by the time I had crawled back under the fence the bus had teasingly left and I was left waiting in cold for the next ride back into the city (it was so cold I almost ended up hitch hiking back rather then waiting for the bus). Also the stray dog warning didn’t just apply to the North. I had grown used to Romania’s high population of nomadic canines but the ones that seemed to be circling the bus stop did seem a bit intimidating…

Maybe I was bad luck because it didn’t seem to take long for the boys to find that silver car that I would soon see drive them off into the distance. I must admit watching them embark on such an adventure made me reach extreme levels of jealousy but I have now become inspired to experience ‘traditional’ Romanian road-travel for myself. Hopefully the next time I write about hitchhiking Eastern Europe it will be from the passenger seat, cruising through Romanian countryside, not a care in the world and not a prostitute, gypsy or stray-dog in sight.

• Backpacking
• Bucharest
• hitch hiking
• hitchhiking
• Romania
• Travel
• Winter