Out of Ljubljana

The hitching from Ljubljana to Genova was quite easy, but the beginning wasn’t very promising, as I waited quite long to get a ride to the Italian border:

(mostly technicalities)

Fortunately there’s no dilemma about the best starting spot to hitch from Ljubljana to southwest – it’s the entrance ramp to motorway in the southwest of Ljubljana, in the area known as Dolgi most, at the end of bus line #6. Another positive aspect was that it was Friday, when many students and other people go from Ljubljana to their homes in other parts of the country (though it also means there’s a lot of hitchhiking competition). However, I started too late (10:30 a.m.), at least considering my goal for the day, and then it took a while to figure what is the best sign to show if you want to get to Italy – ITA didn’t work, so I tried with Slovene towns in that direction.

My overall impression was that people usually pick up just hitchhikers with the same final destination. GO (Nova Gorica) is apparently too far, so not many people go there. Most people where passing PO (Postojna) but apparently they weren’t excited about making a detour to toll station, or more likely, they thought I want them to drive right into town. Sežana seemed too small to me, so I rather tried with KP (Koper/Capodistria), which worked in the end – my idea was to get to the border crossing just 1 km away from the motorway. It’s no problem to get from there into Trieste, but as I actually wanted to pass Trieste, it might have been complicated.

Dangerous styrofoam

I was lucky though, as the light truck did go to Koper, but after that also to Sežana, so T. dropped me at the last petrol station before the border, from where I got a short ride to the border crossing.

But we could have been also very unfortunate: he was transporting 12 pieces of styrofoam (expanded polystyrene), wrapped in some kind of plastic that was less strong than an average rubbish bag. It was just put on the truck and the driver was told it doesn’t need to be tied at all. But they were very wrong. After about 10 km on the motorway at 130 kph the plastic was completely torn and 6 pieces fell off the truck and everyone was VERY lucky that no-one was right behind us at that moment and also that the driver noticed it almost immediately. We quickly parke, threw the styrofoam to the side of the road and then on the truck, and this time of course we made sure it’s tied REALLY tightly.

After that the ride was quite uneventful, we exchanged a few hitchhiking stories (he was of the type “I prefer to take boys because girls get a ride immediately anyway” and also hitched occasionally), and commented on the wonders of budget airlines (he paid a 30-€ ticket for his daughter who lives in Portugal but as it was so cheap she didn’t care much about it and missed the plane, so he had to buy another ticket for 200€). In Koper we found the construction site immediately but not the entrance for the trucks, so we just stopped on the pavement. T. asked the boss “Come on, call two Bosnians to unload this stuff” but as they didn’t appear quickly enough we just dropped the styrofoam there – not that it was very heavy… And then off to Sežana.

Going to Spain

Why and where?

I had such a terrible case of a travel itch that I couldn’t stay at home anymore, so I decided to go to Spain, mainly because it’s a great country where I hadn’t been before and to test my Spanish. It was also warm enough in those places to make the trip enjoyable.

How

As I didn’t plan it some time in advance, the trip was bound to be very poorly funded, so I thought it’s a good opportunity to try long-distance hitching for the first time. A nice side effect was that I also went to France for the first time – it always seemed a bit weird to me that I’m sort of fluent in French but never been to a francophone country…

Where exactly

I had about 2 weeks for the whole trip, and Spain is of course too big and interesting to see everything, so I took a simple criterion to choose places – I was going to where my sister hadn’t been, i.e. I left Barcelona, Valencia, Andalusia and Madrid for the next time and the original plan was then to make a circle around Madrid: Salamanca, Ávila, Segovia, Toledo, Cuenca, Teruel, Zaragoza. But for various reasons, of all these towns I made it only to Salamanca :-)

Preparations

I checked a few websites about hitchhiking. The most useful info was that it’s easy to hitch in Italy from one service station (area di servizio) on the motorway (autostrada) to another, how to ask for a lift in Italian (Puoi darmi un passaggio?) and I saw somewhere that you can get from Bari to Switzerland in 10-14 hours, so I planned to stop overnight in Genova (I) and Toulouse (F) on the way. My first planned stop in Spain was supposed to be Salamanca, but then I found accommodation also in Valladolid, so I stopped there first. But more details will follow in future posts. It was risky a bit, as I had absolutely no previous experience to tell whether the plan was realistic or not.

Another thing that proved REALLY useful was a good road atlas of Europe (Euro Atlas from Marco Polo is better at least than what Michelin was offering), meaning that at least the petrol stations on the motorways are marked, as of course many people don’t know if there is one on their route or not, and which is the furthest they can take me to before leaving the motorway.

I found accommodation through Hospitality club, which also appeared to be a very good idea, but it also affected my travel plans, as I couldn’t find a place to stay in smaller places, at least not on a fairly short notice.