Some days you just wait at your favourite on-ramp somewhere in Westphalia in hope for the next immigrant passing by. At least (s)he will stop for you for sure and give you a ride. You just have to wait for it. Without them, hitchhiking in this area would be pure horror.

Here, in Westphalia, many German families with a background in former Sovjet republics settled down. So the hit ratio is pretty high to meet a member of those families. This happened also this morning in June, on my way to one of those former republics: Moldova.

It’s 7 am in Hörstel, my mother just gave me a good-bye ride to the on-ramp. For ten minutes angry, annoyed faces are passing by, brainless women looking at the happy hitchhiker as if there’s no tomorrow, ignorant business man just move their moustache and push their gas when driving by. Maybe I was looking too much as just beamed there from the beach in Honolulu. So what, then an old VW Passat is stopping, in there a German man with hard Eastern accent. To Osnabrück, oh wonderful. He’s lived most of his life somewhere in cold Siberia, and before telling him that hitchhiking there is pretty cool, he lets me out already at the parking in Brochbachtal, just before Osnabrück. Might be a mistake, as traffic here is pretty low in general. A good forty-five minutes jumping around, some Dutch cars and trucks, nothing special. Suddenly a woman on her way to work stops. She has to get off at the first on-ramp to Osnabrück already, but is in hope that nobody cares if she’s five minutes late at work, so she offers me to bring me to the OS-Nahne on-ramp, which is much better to hitchhike. Soon she tells me stories about her country of origin, Kazahkstan. I’m happy to be able to listen for some minutes – and she as well seems happy to be here in this place today.

In the past, hitchhiking out of Osnabrück always seemed to be a pain in the ass. Up to twenty long minutes of waiting seem to be normal here. Is there really a difference in people in different areas of Germany? Lots of traffic is passing by on its way to the highway, but nobody has time today to stop. Though Germany won it’s world cup game against Ghana yesterday, people do not seem to be in party mood.

Nevertheless, maybe half an hour later a van stops. Fully packed till the end, he manages to make some place for me to sit somewhere. We’re going all the way to Hanover! My driver is on his way there to the daily market. Since some years they’re establishing their business with selling oriental herbs and dry fruits on the markets around, which seems to be quite a success. Not surprisingly then, their origin. I never had guessed, but soon we both dream about Baku, Azerbaidschan. For him it’s a bunch of funny memories from his youth, for me it’s another exotic country out there to discover. We have an amazing time on the road, changing cars and goods in Bad Oeynhausen where his brothers joins us. The obligatory food and drinks offered as well, of course.

In Hanover I try out something new for me: A sign! Should be easy to attract some Polish drivers with a PL sign here, and indeed, five minutes later I’m on my way to Warsaw. It’s a big truck, so we’re moving slowly through Germany, but that’s not the matter now. It’s vacation time, no hurry, no stress, usual business. Just hitch with the flow. I have to remember this philosophy quite some times the next thirty hours. All I wonder so far is that I’m actually crossing all of Germany without any  Germans stopping for me. Weird.

Inside the truck I take a little nap, as my driver is not that pleased with speaking some low-level Russian with me, and my Polish language skills are unfortunately limited to one offensive sentence about the policija. Meanwhile my driver is talking non-stop on the CB radio with some other guys, and when approaching Berlin, he explains me somehow that there’s truck waiting for me at the service station on his way to Krakow. Uh, wow! Already mentioned that I love Polish truck drivers?

Thou, my new driver has to have an one hour stop at the service area. No problem, sunbathing and watching passing traffic. No hurry today, though the thumb is itchy and wants to continue business. Suddenly an exhausted couple with baggage for four is arriving. They somehow were hitchhiking to Dresden, but got a ride to the opposite service station in direction West. Now they just ran over the busy Berlin ring-highway. An absolute no-go in Germany. Probably they were also as happy to be still alive.

They leave the the service station some minutes before my truck starts, and in simple Russian we communicate along the way until the Polish border. He’s doing an eight hour break now, so I get out. I was sure that not even a year ago it was possible to hitchhike at the old border, with traffic being slowed down to 20 km/h. Now the highway is open, and traffic just flies by. But I’m on Polish ground now, and it’s of course possible to hitchhike along the highway. Several cars stop, going only to nearby villages. At some point I get a ride to Legnica. A friendly Polish dude speaking perfect German, and his only sorrow seems to letting me out at the right petrol station. We stop at the first little one, just to check the cars. I insist of going further, “just drop me off at the last one before the crossing with the Görlitz-highway!”. But out of two cars at the station, one SUV with Ukrainian number plate is filling up gas. As I wait for the driver to get out of the mini market, the second car driver offers me a ride to Lublin in their old, demolished van. I wait for the Ukrainian, and indeed, the young couple is driving all the long way to Kiev, so I take this one, of course!

With a good speed we rush through Poland, along Wroclaw and Katowice. The couple is more interested in themselves, so I get some time for just another nap in the back of the car. Just before Krakow they decide to stop for the night, and we say good bye a good 15 km before the city gates at a huge service station. It’s 10 pm already, but I guess it’s a good time for hitchhiking Hörstel-Krakow in a day time. 15 hours, could have been faster if not taking trucks through Germany. Damn.

But now the real trip starts. Heavy rain since Katowice, dark clouds and temperatures below 10 degrees at night. Krakow symbolizes the end of two-(three) lane, fast European highways. Slow, rural Polish country roads, fully packed with slow traffic start here; the last survivors of the communist regimes, as my Ukrainian driver is joking about. Somewhere here, behind those unpronounceable city names as Rzeszow or Przemysl, the real Eastern Europe starts. And I’m going to love it already, for sure. Now it’s time for night hitchhiking, and talking to several drivers soon tells me that people here are extremely friendly. Everybody offers me a ride into the city, but nobody is going further to explore the wild East. It’s just a matter of time, and now I make a top-ten hitchhiking mistake.

A dude explains me in perfect German that he will bring me to the next service station along the highway. My map shows none, and intuition also is pretty sure that there is no other service station along the last 15 km of highway. But his friendliness lets me get into the car, soon to discover that he meant a petrol station just somewhere in the suburbs of Krakow. Now I’m here, at an abandoned BP petrol station, no traffic at all, heavy rain around me, nowhere to go. The only car in half an hour is a young woman in her old fancy BMW, and soon she offers to take me to the next pub and have a good drink with her friends. “We’ll see how the evening goes”, but I’m not up for experiments, so I try my luck here.

It’s some approximately 280 km towards the Ukrainian border, and my aim is to reach this one in the early morning hours. Sleep is for the dead, I swear to myself, and try to relax in the romantic surrounding of unhealthy smelling gasoline and the pouring rain, now falling down in cubic meters.