Do ya have a bad hitchhiking story to tell? Tell us of your shady characters, close calls and bad hitchhiking experiences. Mine goes like this: It was March of 95 and I was hitching from Jacksonville Fla. to Fort Collins Co. along interstate 10. Once you get to El Paso you go north along interstate 25 to Fort Collins. I was just north of El Paso on I-25, it was midnight the stars were out, what a sight to see! I was on the shoulder of the hwy walking north not hitching just walkin with my back to the traffic when a 63 blue Chevy pickup pulled over onto the shoulder and came up real slow behind me. When I turned around to see the pickup I thought I'd got a ride! I wasn't even hitching! But then when I looked I saw it was two Mexicans in the pickup and they didn't even stop! If they were goin any faster they would have run me down! Right there at midnight in the middle of the desert! They were all big smiles as if to say gonna get you! Luckily they weren't gang members! I'd heard that the Mexicans give the anglos hard times if they catch ya alone! But I was lucky 1/2 hour later I got a ride all the way to Albuquerque and the next day I got a ride from a rainbow chick all the way to Denver! Thank God for the rainbows! She made me feel so at home! She was the best ride of the trip! Then I got a ride from 2 Indians going to FC. Cool! So that was the worst experience of the trip.Who knows if the Mexicans would have come back to finish me off! I didn't stick around to find out! I was lucky! Close call! Bustramp
Well my wife and I have decided to take some time to travel the South West, NM AZ CO etc. Let me know, we could get together.... Drop me a line at dan@watchfix.com or call 888-750-3330 Thanks Dan & Sheila
I never had really bad hitchhiking stories really, but this one I would like to share with you all: Tibet, the roughest and toughest country of them all, the charismatic emptyness and the massive mountainous surroundings makes you feel smaller than a drop of water in any ocean. And hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere is a very uncertain experience. There might not be any vehicles coming for ours. Or even days. Here it was that me and a girl friend were hitchhiking from Shigatse to Mount Kailash, the holiest of the holy mountains in Tibet. We hitched some rides from small tractors, jeeps, trucks, horse carriages and the likes. A few hundred kilometres we travelled this way and we were quite sure we would make it. We even made it through various checkpoints where Chinese police and military were closely watching everybody and everything that comes in and out. Ofcourse we needed a permit, since you basically need a permit for everywhere you go in Tibet. Ofcourse we did not have one. Then we got lucky. About half way there we hitched a ride from some guides in a jeep who where going to Mount Kailash themselves. We were beyond happiness, since hitching can be quite tiring, especially if sometimes you only make 10 kilometres in a few hours. Or waiting for hours and hours for the next ride. Jeeps are fast and reliable. We would be there by tomorrow. Not. After another few hundred kilometres or so we got stopped by some military Chinese guys. It was already around midnight and we would stop soon to make camp. The military guys wanted to see our permits. We showed them some fake permit we got somewhere. They could not be fooled. We showed them our passports and tried to persuade them to let us pass. No way. We offered them money, but they were not the kind of people who take bribes. Damn it, everywhere else in Asia they take bribes. After a long discussion with the military and our jeep drivers the military guys decided to send us back. And the jeep drivers had to take us. We tried to persuade them to let us go back by ourselves, because it was our fault and not the fault of the jeep people. Nope, they had to take us, because they were responsible for taking us there. And the previous town was more than a 100 kilometres away. And it was already past midnight. As you can imagine, everyone was mad and most of the madness was directed towards us. Us stupid foreigners with no valid permits. Not much we or the jeep people could do. They took us back to the previous town. They drove like madmen because they also needed to go back to the checkpoint where the others made camp. Sometimes we thought we and the jeep would drop right of the small mountain road into a massive and deep darkness. Or the jeep would turn over and crash into a big rock. We did make it though and then the jeep people were cool. They helped us to find a small guesthouse in the little town and they even apologised to us. They turned from pissingly mad to friendly again and then they drove the 100 kilometres back to their camp. We slept in a very simple truckers guesthouse that night and the next day we started to hitch again. This time the other way, back to where we came from. We never made it to Mount Kailash, thanks to the Chinese occupators of Tibet.
