When I first saw Vitaly I thought he was drunk. I was standing outside a petrol station near Fulda, in central Germany, when he pulled up in a battered Saab. Mud covered the entire left side of his car and the rear bumper hung like a drooping bottom lip. His hair was greasy. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. Only later did I discover that he had just fled besieged Kyiv. He was now driving to Bern in Switzerland, where he hoped to find work. I was heading to Morzine for a family skiing holiday. Vitaly offered me a lift.
My decision to hitchhike the 428-mile journey from Fulda to Morzine had been in part to test whether it was possible. I hitchhiked across the Balkans and then the Caucasus when I was at university. Now I wondered if the fear of Covid would put drivers off picking up strangers.
Some people claim hitchhiking became redundant years before the pandemic. The Guardian declared its death in 2016 after New Zealand police arrested a French hitchhiker for abusing local residents when he failed to catch a ride for four days. But the article failed to mention that the man had been attempting to leave a remote coastal village with a population of only 70.
A eulogy to hitchhiking may be premature but there’s no doubt it’s in a dormant period. In the mid-20th century it was common to see hikers sticking their thumbs out beside the road. Hitchhiking’s golden age was in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in large part to the popularity of the hippie trail across Europe and Asia. Today, hitchhiking’s decline is down to a lack of willing hikers, if anything, not a lack of friendly drivers.
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