On the road, putting trust in strangers

Feeling bold? Stick your thumb out on a road and see what happens. Maybe you’ll get a ride, nice conversation and even a meal. Maybe you’ll become disheartened as humanity whizzes by you, sarcastically giving you the thumbs up back. Or, worse case scenario, and perhaps the one that many people associate with hitching, you will become another statistic.

If you’re an open, trusting, and more carefree (than tightly wound) traveller wanting to see the world on the cheap, then hitchhiking can be an amazing experience; especially if you team it with couchsurfing. While there’s plenty of young New Zealanders who have opted to see the world this way, and many foreigners who come here to do the same, it’s not for everyone, and there are risks.

Two hitchhikers were seriously injured in an attack after they were picked up on the West Coast late last month. German tourist Michaela Brandl, 28, was stabbed three times in the neck while Niki Honda, 27, a Japanese-Dutch suffered pelvic injuries. A 38-year-old Otaki man has been charged with wounding Brandl and robbing the two women, as well as the murder of Christchurch caregiver Amy Elizabeth Farrall.

Michaela and Niki have vowed to carry on travelling, but another tourist who was bottled by a drunken stranger in a New Year's Eve attack in Napier told the Dominion Post that “some places” aren't safe for tourists and his heading home.

Hitching and couchsurfing are in many ways all about putting absolute trust into strangers, and your own instincts. When travelling in a way the doesn’t include hotels, tours and pre-arranged buses, the value you place on this trust in paramount.

After spending a good deal of my adult life hitchhiking through West Africa, Eastern Europe, the UK and the USA I had an experience that made me rethink my ways. A friend and I found ourselves dodging cars at a busy intersection to escape the driver who'd just grabbed her breast. We had just spent the day at the Dead Sea and were on our way back to our couchsurfing host in Amman, Jordan’s capital. It was a low compared to the other amazing or non-eventful rides I'd had before. 

GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

Couchsurfing.org is a global network where strangers connect to stay with each other around the world. Like Facebook, you sign up and have a profile; on which you write about your experiences, interests and values. If you are looking for a place to stay on your travels, you can either search people in the area you're going, look through profiles and contact these strangers to see if they'll host you; or you can put up a general request and see who responds. You could end up on a mattress on a floor in a family home, or taking a room in a hotel.

But where you sleep isn’t really the point, it’s about who you stay with and putting your trust in a system, as the websites states, to make the world better “by travel and travel made richer by connection. Couchsurfers share their lives with the people they encounter, fostering cultural exchange and mutual respect”.

 I don’t care at all for ticking off landmarks or taking tours as I feel this is a fake reality where you put this glass layer in between yourself and the living world in front of you.

Logistically though, there’s a safety net to this system. Once you have met, you write a reference for each other, to either help or deter others who are thinking of connecting. If you're unsure about someone you want to stay with, or host, then you can arrange to meet them in a public place first.

Cantabrian Richard Fleet has couchsurfed and hitchhiked through Europe, the Middle East and India. “For me, travelling is about connecting to new people of different cultures and backgrounds,” he says.

“I don’t care at all for ticking off landmarks or taking tours as I feel this is a fake reality where you put this glass layer in between yourself and the living world in front of you. If you stay in a hostel you end up hanging around with other Aussies and Kiwis who of course have no idea about the city you are in and it creates this ‘us’ (the foreigners) versus ‘them’ (the locals) view of things. I hate this, it feels inauthentic.

“When I am couchsurfing with a local I am learning the language, learning the food, sharing stories about each other’s backgrounds, being taken to the local bars and meeting their friends.”

Feilidh O’Dwyer-Strang, who lives in Wellington, says it’s the best website he’s ever been a part of. “I’ve met amazing people who I’ve stayed in touch with and I’ve had the experience of hosting someone and then travelling to their country and being hosted by them.

He’s gained trust in the couchsurfing community from the experiences he’s had. “In general, people who are willing to put themselves out there on a social networking site - which is mainly used by young people – by-in-large they’re going to be open-minded and trustworthy people.”

Aucklander Sam (last name withheld) has been involved in couchsurfing since 2007 when he went to a Couchsurfing event in Australia and met a bunch of travellers who had decided to get together through the website for a big dinner party. Since then, he has hosted about 60 times and surfed around New Zealand. He has organised many events in Auckland and runs the Facebook page Couchsurfers in New Zealand.

He's found the majority of surfers are in their 20s; many are students from South America. He had also found people from Asia were quite a large group, but Germans were perhaps the biggest users of the website in New Zealand.

"It is not that strange to me that the less money I spend on travelling, the better it gets - especially when you can see that capitalism is trapping people in terribly unfulfilling cycles."

“Germans are everywhere – they complain that there are too many other Germans around the hostels or surfing as well.” He has always heard good feedback from foreigners coming to New Zealand to hitch and couchsurf.

“They tell me how amazing it is, and are blown away by how friendly and welcoming we are here.”

CITIZENS OF THE WORLD

Christchurch couple Jess Irvine and Al Twohill are frequent hosts to couchsurfers. Attracted to meeting people from a wide range of backgrounds, they started inviting strangers into their home last year and have hosted a couchsurfer nearly every fortnight since.

They offer a room and will take their guests to the pub or to see sights. Because of the community that has built up around the Facebook site, Al says it would be hard to be a total dud and still find places to stay.

“It's really good to be able to read what other hosts have had to say about them before you decide to host them as well. We've also found that as it's much more personal than backpacking there seems to be an extra layer of trust - it's almost like distant relatives staying rather than complete strangers.”

The couple scope out their potential guest before meeting them by chatting and organising the logistics of getting to their home; if something seems off about them, they arrange to meet somewhere neutral first. “It's funny - the first time we hosted we were adamant we'd only host during weekends so we could be home all the time, but now we're completely at ease with just handing over the keys to our house,” Al says.

Other than offering a more exciting way for travellers to see New Zealand, he says it’s a great way to make friends, to do it you’ve probably got to be pretty open-minded and accepting.

FUN. FREE. BUT NEVER 100 PER CENT GUARANTEED

While not as popular as it once was, the highways of New Zealand are still often spotted with young hitchhikers, over the summer at least.

Other than getting from A to B, German traveller Svenja Sabel has found hitching in New Zealand has lead to some fruitful adventures. “Just the other day I was hitching from Blenheim to Nelson, and the woman I got a ride with was telling me about Golden Bay, I said I wanted to go there, and she said I could stay at her bach. One thing can lead to the other.”

Some of the best travel experiences Richard had on his overseas adventures, were from hitching. He estimates he has hitched about 40,000 km in total over the years. The biggest issue he’s ever encountered was the drivers’ skills.

“Quite often I get rides with people who get so excited about having some random traveller in their car that they nearly forget they are actually driving on a highway. So you have to put a lot of trust in random people’s abilities to drive.”

Hitching brought him to the European Hitch Gathering of 2011, an annual event on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria where Richard says “a rag-tag group of unorganised hitchhikers manage to put on a week-long meet-up in the middle of summer at some exotic European location".

To get to the gathering he'd thumbed rides from Slovakia down to Bulgaria where another 150 hitchhikers turned up from all over Europe. They spent a week camping out on the beach around a fire at night, talking about travels, sharing skills, cooking collective sandy dinners and drinking cheap Bulgarian wine. “I was introduced to some of the most interesting ‘travelling as a lifestyle’ people I have ever met there. They went on to become very good friends and since, we have been involved in setting up great nomad bases and organising more hitch gatherings since.”

I got picked up by a gangster looking 4WD with a couple of middle aged looking dudes, who ‘took me home for a Milo’. I thought I was going to die.

But, unfortunately, there isn’t that reference system when it comes to hitching, like there is with couchsurfing. Hitching is a snap decision and there can be dire consequences. New Zealand has its own dark history of the abuse of trust that can occur when thumbing a ride, going back further then the two most recent serious attacks.

Since 1970, three men and five women have been killed while hitchhiking in New Zealand, including a German tourist in 2005, and a South Korean tourist who was strangled and beheaded in 2003. Last year a coroner issued a warning against hitching in New Zealand after the chilling slaying of Czech hitchhiker Dagmar Pytlickova who had been hitching to Timaru. 

Sam says cases like these show it is not super safe to hitch, as many people believe. “I think it’s irresponsible for people to come here and say it’s really safe; just because they haven't had a bad experience doesn’t mean someone else won’t.”

Actress Alexa Neal had been hitching around New Zealand for years; while at university, an incident going from Wellington to Taranaki put a damper on this, she says, “I got picked up by a gangster looking 4WD with a couple of middle aged looking dudes, who ‘took me home for a Milo’. I thought I was going to die. I stayed calm and text my whereabouts and the time to some friends who text me back - making it obvious I was on my phone, I also took notes of road signs.

“I had an intuition that I shouldn’t get into the car, this is the thing with this travel, you really have to trust yourself, trust your instincts. The more you do this, the better they become and it’s really a profound experience. I got in the car anyway because I didn't want to seem impolite.

“I think the best way out of a situation like this is think on your feet, ask where they’re going, tell them that’s not where you are headed but thanks anyway. I didn't think on my feet but I took all precautions to slip out of that situation, and with a stroke of luck, it worked. I played it cool throughout the whole thing, playing on my phone, texting people so they knew that people knew where I was.”

Hitching is a gamble. All you can do is trust your instincts. Don’t get into a car you don’t like the look of. A good method is to copy the number plate and text it to someone who knows you're travelling.

If you are confident to freewheel it as you go then a combination of hitching and couchsurfing can be an incredibly cheap, and rewarding way of seeing the world.

Richard managed to travel some weeks without spending a cent. “That is one of the attractive things, as you therefore don’t need to work so much to fund your travels and have lots more time because you don’t have to go to work. But I’m more attracted by the experiences it has brought about than anything else. It is not that strange to me that the less money I spend on travelling, the better it gets - especially when you can see that capitalism is trapping people in terribly unfulfilling cycles.”

STAY SAFE

• If you can, hitch with someone else.
• Don’t get into a car just because you feel obliged.
• If you are couchsurfing, check their references. If they don’t have any (maybe they are new to the community) meet first before going straight to their home, or inviting them to yours.
• If your driver or host seems to be leery, then get out.

This content is brought to you with funding support from New Zealand On Air.