Poland - Italy
My parents did not want to let me go on my first journey alone. I was 16 and legally could not leave without their consent. So I found a companion: Marcin, a schoolmate who was already 18. We had not known each other long, but it quickly turned out that he, like me, wanted the unconventional kind of travel. The idea itself was born somewhere on a Wrocław tram.
We caught the first lift to Ząbkowice Śląskie, and from there to Kłodzko. From there we got a ride straight to the Czech border, where we celebrated leaving the country with a Litovel Černý Citron, still one of my favourite beers. It reminds me of freedom.
From the border we reached Brno with a Czech-beer specialist who spent the drive telling us about local breweries. At the end he even gave us his book on the subject.
From Brno we tried to hitch to Vienna after dark, but in the end we pitched the tent somewhere near the motorway. The next day we reached the Austrian capital without much trouble, with a lorry driver.
My family put us up there and suggested other places in Austria worth seeing. So we went to Salzburg, then to the beautiful lake Attersee. Later we reached another lake near Graz.
That was the end of our adventure in Austria. The next stop was the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana. From there it was only a short distance to the Italy we had been dreaming of.
After a few hours of unsuccessful hitching in the rain, someone finally took pity on us and drove us to Trieste. We slept there on hotel sunloungers on the beach, and the next day, tired of waiting for a lift, we jumped a train without tickets to Venice.
After exploring the city on water we decided that riding trains without tickets was not so hard, so we reached Padua the same way. From there we caught another lift to Bologna.
We liked the city very much: full of arcades, beautiful architecture and, most important on our modest budget, pizza at prices we could afford. We even found a jazz concert in a castle in the city centre, where we met the band's drummer.
One of the most absurd stories of the trip happened on the way back to the tent. We had pitched it earlier in the bushes by the motorway so we would not have to carry our things. The problem was that nobody had bothered to remember the way into the city.
We got so lost that the walk back took a good five hours, and we only arrived at sunrise. That forced us to take an extra rest day, during which the mosquitoes nearly ate Marcin alive.
The next morning we packed up and moved on. We hitched to Florence, where we saw the famous dome of Santa Maria del Fiore designed by Brunelleschi. We also ate pasta with burrata that was far too expensive for our budget, then jumped another train without tickets to Livorno, our final destination.
Luca's grandparents were waiting for us there. Luca is a friend from Wrocław, half Polish, half Italian. They spoke only Italian, but they hosted us beautifully. I have never forgotten the excellent espresso with a lot of sugar, which I still go back to now and then.
In Livorno, though, a basic problem appeared: we had run out of money.
We decided to use the skill we had already acquired: riding trains without tickets.
First we went back to Bologna, which we already knew, and looked for a train that would take us as close to Poland as possible. Munich turned out to be the best choice.
We had about an eight-hour journey ahead, and police checks at the border. We avoided them in a fairly unusual way: locking ourselves in the toilet together.
When the police knocked, Marcin dropped his trousers and sat on the toilet, and I, sucking in my stomach, stood behind the door, screened by backpacks so that the officer coming in would not see me.
I do not know how, but we got away with it, and we reached Munich.
From there we booked a BlaBlaCar to Prague. The driver turned out to be a surfer. We offered him the last of the coins we still had for food, but the kind soul not only refused the money, he gave us some cash for the road.
In Prague, probably from tiredness, Marcin and I had a small clash about where we should hitch back to Poland.
In the end we split up and returned to Wrocław separately.
That was my first, clumsy hitch-hiking journey. The whole thing lasted about three weeks and was a mix of spontaneous decisions, mistakes and luck.
Interestingly, exactly ten years later Marcin flew to Santiago de Chile to ride the last stage of my bicycle journey from Alaska to Argentina with me.