What's happened to hitchhiking?
By Duncan Campbell The Hindu | May 28, 2005 http://www.hindu.com/2005/05/28/stories/2005052807351300.htm A revival of hitchhiking would increase respect, cut global warming and improve educational standards. "THE HITCHHIKER'S Guide to the Galaxy" is riding high in the best-selling film charts and is also being repeated as a series on BBC radio. But what about the hitchhiker's guide to, well, Earth? When did you last give a lift to a hitchhiker or see one? Or when, even, did you last set out on the open road, stick out your thumb and wonder how far you would get that night? Travelling through the west of England a couple of weeks ago on election business, I was listening to talk of the late Douglas Adams' masterwork on the radio and thought � I know, I'll pick up the next hitchhikers I see and ask them what the state of real hitching is today in Britain. I drove and drove on main roads and side roads for the next few days and never saw a single one. When I was in my teens and 20s, hitchhiking was a main form of long-distance transport. The kindness or curiosity of strangers took me all over Europe, North America, Asia and southern Africa. Some of the lift-givers became friends, many provided hospitality en route. Not only did you find out much more about a country than when travelling by train or plane, but there was that element of excitement about where you would finish up that night. I'm sure I've blotted out the long, depressing waits in the rain, and I know that a woman who hitched solo would not have such warm memories, but I can still recall a couple of dozen spectacular rides and drivers. Hitchhiking featured in great books, On the Road, great songs "Me and Bobby McGee" and even merited its own eponymous dance. So what has happened to it? A few years ago, while in Los Angeles, I asked the same question about hitching in the U.S. in a column on Guardian Unlimited website (of the London-based Guardian newspaper). I had picked up a hitchhiker who had spent more than a day waiting on a busy highway in California, and we had talked about the problems of contemporary hitching in the U.S. The GU site is a wonderful research facility. Literally hundreds of people from all over the world responded to the column with their view on the state of hitchhiking. "If there is a hitchhiker's heaven it must be Iran," came one reply. >From Transylvania, I received this: "Everybody hitches and everybody stops. I wait only minutes generally for lifts. There is a culture of hitching and paying the driver a little for the lift, probably a quarter of the bus fare. Often they refuse it." Rural Ireland was recommended as a friendly place for hitching, as was Quebec � "if you don't mind being berated for not speaking French." But while hitchhiking was clearly still alive and well in many parts of the world, the general feeling was that throughout much of the west it was doomed. A thing of the past Americans had various explanations as to why it was largely a thing of the past. Some pointed out that teenagers could now own a car, or that the freeways were closed to pedestrians, while others suggested that the litigious culture was partly to blame, with drivers fearing a lawsuit if there was an accident. But most blamed a fearful nation. Fed on a diet of crime news, people assumed that anyone on the open road without the money for even a bus ticket must present a danger. Is the same now true in Britain? Certainly no one who reads and believes the London Daily Mail newspaper would be likely to open their car door to a stranger lest something dreadful befall them. But are the rest of us so wary both to hitch and to give a lift? In Poland in the 1960s, according to a Polish woman who emailed me, "the authorities introduced the Hitchhiker's Booklet. Every hitchhiker who had it could write down how many kilometres they covered. The booklet contained coupons for drivers, so each time a driver picked up somebody, he or she received a coupon. At the end of the season, drivers who had picked up the most hikers were rewarded with various prizes. Everybody was hitchhiking then." A century before Douglas Adams wrote his Hitchhiker's Guide, another adventure story writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, gave us, in El Dorado, what should be the hitchhiker's motto: "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." What better time to put that into practice, either by putting it to the test or by helping someone who is trying to travel hopefully with their thumb outstretched. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Has someone you know been affected by illness or disease? Network for Good is THE place to support health awareness efforts! http://us.click.yahoo.com/rkgkPB/UOnJAA/Zx0JAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- This is ZESTGlobal. 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