First Hitchhiking Experience

"You know the way now right?" Csilla asks me as I say good bye to her room mates and start strapping my bags onto my body.

"More or less, I've got a little map on my iPod that will hopefully guide me to the motorway." I answer, a little anxious as it was the first time for me to embark such a long hitch hiking trip. All the way from Granada to Tarragona, which are about 800km of road along the coast line of Spain.

I start walking at about 8:00am to allow for enough time for the entire trip. However I overestimated the quality of the map and underestimated the distance to the motorway. After 2h of wandering I finally get to a motorway, now it turns out there is more than one motorway going along the north of Granada. I decide to follow the road until I find a petrol station.

"Hola, can you help me find the way to the motorway going to Barcelona?" I ask the shopkeeper in the first petrol station I find.

"Ah si si, es otherside, you go too far, go back and then right to next autovia." The young man at the till answers in broken English.

"Muchos Gracias, hasta luego." I answer in broken Spanish and walk back to where I had come from to hopefully find the right turn. Luckily this doesn't take too long and I find another petrol station to guide me towards the right 'autovia'. After a total of 3h I manage to get to the side of the road leading all the way from southern Spain along the coast to Barcelona. However the side of the road was all there was, no place for cars to really stop and pick me up. Nevertheless I put my bags down and hold up a sign reading 'Tarragona'. Five minutes later a big white van comes cruising by and stops abruptly at the side of the road. A big man with short black hair and very tanned skin gets out of the drivers side.

"Hola, como estas?" He asks with a deep voice as he slowly walks towards me. When getting closer he starts to smile, revealing his almost perfect white teeth which were perfectly framed by his dark face.

"Hola Señor, tu travaller a Tarragona?" I reply in a mish mash of languages.

"Tarragona? Si, yo voy a Barcelona." He answers and opens the backdoor of his van so that I could lift my backpack into the large and emtpy boot. I climb into the passangers seat and put my seatbelt on, as I search for the buckle I look beside my seat to also find a couple of empty beer cans scattered and bent on the floor. Oh no, it looks like this guy liked the alcohol a little too much. None the less I continued the trip with him, after all he seemed to be in a sober and functioning state. This was confirmed by the next half hour of driving during which we attempted to converse with his very very broken English. It turned out that he spoke Arabic, Spanish and French and hence the conversation continued with me attempting to speak using my very bad Spanish and French.

"Ok, you get beer!?" Mohamed asks me from the drivers seat and hands me a couple of Euros. I get out of the car and get a feeling of unease, I picture him driving off with my backpack and all the valuables inside of it. However I took my smaller bag with me, which contained the really important things like my passport and money. After getting some beer I get back into the car, I breathe, it looks like I was safe and this first test had been successful as he didn't drive off. We continue the journey and after another hour stop again, this time at a big petrol station.

"Ok, now I eat, yes?" He says as we get out of the van and step into the hot afternoon sun. I follow him into the big building, watch him order some food and then sit down with him outside. "Take this." Mohamed says as he hands me a bottle of cold beer and helps himself to one too. "No thank you, yo no bebo cerveza." I answer to his polite gesture to tell him that I didn't drink. However he keeps persisting and in the end somehow manages to convince me to drink it. It felt like he had some power over me as he was taking me all the this way for free. We finish the meal together and as we go inside he stops in front of the slot machines. He points at it and after I smile back he gets his wallet out and starts putting some coins into the blinking machine. I sigh in silence and lean against the wooden wall behind me. I hear the clinking of coins for the next hour and a half as he constantly inserts coins and presses various buttons. Every now and then I hear him make a small joyful noise which is shortly followed by a moan as he loses the just attained money again. In the end he stands up from the machine, 95€ had left his pocket and he was pissed off. He mumbles some (swear)words as he buys more beer to get over the loss he had just experienced. We get back into the car and I watch him open the first can as we drive off. This constant feeling of unease made the journey a little tense for me, which was even worsened by him picking up his ringing phone a couple of minutes later. The image before me was definitely not a comfortable one, more something that should be drawn by a caricaturist. Mohamed, with his phone in one hand, is now shouting at his son over the phone in loud Arabic and holding one beer in the other hand with which he also had to steer the wheel. Oh and then there was me to add to the caricature, the nervous young traveller sitting in the passengers seat clinging onto my seatbelt. 20 minutes later, at this point he had relaxed a little more, we see a police car behind us.

"We drive slow now." He said as not raise any suspicion or reason for them to stop us. Just as it seemed that they had disappeared ahead of us we see two police men outside of their car waving us to the side of the road. They check our passports and around the car, it was miracle they never saw any of the empties in between our seats or the the still full cans in between Mohamed's legs. In the end I have a little conversation with them about my time in Kenya and the Philippines and Mohamed recieves a 60€ fine for his MOT being out of date. We drive off and I sound a sigh of relief. This trip turned out to be a little more stressful then I had anticipated.

We continue the trip and after multiple pee breaks stop at yet another big petrol station. "I need coffee." Mohamed informs me and we walk into the building. The minute we go in the blinking slot machines fall into my eye and any attempt I make to stop him from being drawn in by them was without success. He walks straight to first one only giving me the words "I must!"

After putting 20€ in and running out of coins he walks to the cleaning lady who happily changes one of his 20€ notes into small coins. This he repeats, this time the cleaning lady shakes her head as he walks off, looks like she was running out of coins. After a total of two hours of agonising boredom he stops. This time 130€ richer, or so the machine makes him think. After all he had put 60€ into the coin slot. This win did make him a lot happier though, as a celebration he buys himself some more beer and we are off again on our way to Tarragona. After long hours of driving in the big van we get to the turn to Tarragona at about 12:00 at night. We stop at the side of the road and I get out of the car to say goodbye and thank him for the tiring trip. All of a sudden another police car pulls up in front of us and the two police officers shout at us in Spanish and gesture with their hands from inside the car. It looked like it was not legal to stop on the side of the motorway. Mohamed was drunk at this point, understandably as he had drank 6 1/2 litres of beer during the journey and probably some more before I joined him in Granada. So in this drunken state he stumbles to the window of the police car and attempts talking to them. A foolish idea indeed as they noticed the smell of alcohol in an instant. To this day I do not know what happened afterwards as the police sent me into town to meet up with the friend I was staying with. However I assume he went to jail at least for this night. I don't feel any guilt but more pity. Something must've happened for him to lose control over himself to this extent, maybe the next morning he learned from this mistake. I hope so anyway.