This is me, Nils, a guitar and two full backpacks on an early December morning in Toulouse. We're all ready to move/hitchhike to Glasgow. Duncan's the one behind the camera, but if you imagine him at the end of the line.. it's definitely an impressive amount of stuff to hitchhike with!

We made it to Scotland just a few days before Christmas, having sat in a traffic jam in Paris for two hours, having camped a night near Lille, having found this amazing Englishman in the port of Calais who took the whole impressive line of me, Duncan, Nils and our things, and another hitchhiker onto the boat to Dover, defending his desicion of taking unknown people over the international border to a rather malicious border guard on his way to the ferry. In England we got a ride with a guy whose job was to defend the submarines in the Indian ocean from pirates, and another lift with someone who knew an amazing amount of Estonians (the ones I knew as well, there's not that many in my age group) and had done the same crazy door-to-door sales job in the States that I had done. He made us dinner, put us into his spare room in his flat in Manchester for the night and dropped us onto the sliproad to M6 with sandwitches in the morning. He was very much enjoying his job as a defence lawyer and had a very wide, skilled and at times a very confusing use of vocabulary. We added him into the list of "people who have picked us up hitchhiking that we need to send a postcard to"

We left our wonderful tipi behind - we never really got to properly live in it. Other than that, our escape back to wonderful, rainy Scotland was in every way a very happy, logical and exciting thought. Finding a real job, renting a real flat, buying real food, speaking a real language and having a normal life, yay!

foux du fafa

I don’t really have any memories of why exactly did I decide to stop and live in Toulouse. I’ve been telling everyone that I really loved the people that I met here, and that I liked the weather, and that I wanted to learn French, and that I like cheese and wine. And then I've been adding a month to my answer to "how long have you been in France?" every so often, as the time went by. You know the usual “talking with your driver to make conversation talk” when hitchhiking or “talking back to the guy who’s trying to chat you up” on a social gathering. I’ve talked about cheese and wine and wanting to learn French and about how long have I lived in Toulouse so often that I don’t remember what the initial reason for stopping here was. I doubt there was one.

I live in a house which is just big enough for the amount of hippies that live in it. Everyone here is excited about collecting as many inhabitants into our small community as possible, we have stopped at eight at the moment (it’s a four-small-bedroom family house) but there’s definitely more room in the living room and in the garage and in the attic! Yes we’ve discussed building some more little rooms in the attic so more hippies could move in! Actually quite often some nice hippie friends of our hippie roommates sleep on a mattress in the garage our outside in the hammock. The more the merrier. At least they bring cheese and wine. Did I mention there are a lot of hippies living in this house?

The brightest side of communal living is definitely the ability to share everything – food, time, skills, a sewing machine, stories, bills, languages (English, French, Swedish, Estonian in the house)... The worst is the inevitable lack of your own space – at any point there’s always at least four people in the living room smoking spliffs and playing board games, and sometimes there’s a party in the house/garden that you don’t really want to attend but you cannot escape the noise either.

During the whole six months I’ve been around all this hippieness, I’ve picked up French in an intermediate level, have learned to love cheese and wine and colours and scarves and collecting furniture from the streets, curiously have not picked up smoking weed yet, have lived in a tent, have built a big teepee in the garden for two of us to live in and have figured out the best dumpster-diving places in the area. As for dumpster-diving, the word to describe it is really so much uglier that the activity itself – all you really have to do is take your bike to the nearest little grocery shop around midnight and pick up nice packaged things from between all the cardboard in the bin behind the shop. They throw away almost everything and always in large quantities – yoghurts, meat, cheese, sausages, vegetables, more yoghurts, more meat (honestly our poor little freezer cannot accommodate more meat) more cheese, salad items, pâté, pancakes, eggs, mushrooms, apples, tons of bananas, sweets, bread... I must say it's rather nice to not pay for food, but it also comes with a being poor mindset, and with a different idea of a minimum amount of money you have to have on your bank account to survive. I am starting to doubt the benefits of getting all your food for free.

I’ve started to hitchhike with weird items like a big stuffed teddy-tiger and a weird hairy French hippie-guy and a bike (not everything at once, although I did try to hitchhike with two whole hairy french guys once but left them after an unsuccessful half an hour), I’ve took off in two day’s notice to Istanbul and in five-minute notice to Brittany. I’ve sat in Toulouse’s numerous parks with beers and juggling balls and guitars and cheese and wine and biked up and down it’s only hill for seven hundred times. I’ve considered getting dreadlocks and cutting my hair short and making cute little items to sell on the local Sunday markets.

I took my beautiful orange bike to a little park near the ring road of Toulouse one evening. It was a beautiful autumn evening with nearly twenty degrees of warmth so characteristic to any location in Southern France. And there we were, bike and I, on those two square metres of land in a random location in a random city in a random country, and I was counting the endless stream of cars hurrying up and down the ring road - first in whatever language I found easier to think in (can't quite remember if it was English or Estonian), then in French. And I realised that if I went and stood by this road and maybe smiled and raised my thumb then someone would stop for me and take me to... well wherever I'd like to go at that point. Or if I didn't want to go anywhere then I could just stand there and say random apologies to people who stop until I found a Very Handsome And Interesting Guy and then I wouldn't care about where we're going. Or I could stop random people who were jogging or walking their dogs or cycling by and ask them for... some company, or a cigarette, or if they had a kitten to give away or if they could teach me a little bit of French... I was this little insignificant person in a place where another little people where whizzing past in a speed of a hundred cars, joggers, bikers per second and I was this little wannabe do-not-smoke-weed "have done the same thing for every day for two months" hippie, but I felt like I could stop the world and pick anything and anyone I want to see in my universe. There's no apologies for staying in a rut. I really feel I need to to something else, find the next circumstances, the next people, the next location..

So when the next person asks me why I am staying in Toulouse, I am most likely going to tell them that I am not. I’ve done all the hippie things and everything above-mentioned is just an activity now, not a challenge. I might turn back to getting a job, paying for my food, speaking the language I understand, getting a flat for two and choosing things for it in a shop. You know the normal person’s life. I might go and live with my best friend in Estonia and get a random job in the old town of Tallinn. I might move back to the UK and start a teepee-building business. I might be just telling all that because I have my birthday coming up and I feel I’m getting old and haven’t achieved any of the “real stuff” yet. Real stuff like an office job and a steady partner and kids and a cat and.... the life I escaped a few years ago.

But I guess now I have the knowledge that if I only want to, then I can just get up and go somewhere else and do whatever. And I probably will.

13 000 km

This whole trip really started with having nothing to do in Toulouse in the summer (it empties as the weather gets unbearably hot) and me having a big pet tiger in the flat I was living in at that time.

I kidnapped the tiger, we named it Nils (the only Norwegian name we could think of besides Olaf, but that was ugly) and then we took it to Nordkapp (the very north of Norway), and then to Estonia, to Berlin, to Scotland and back to Toulouse.

It grew on us, I never took it back. I guess I can tick the act of stealing a tiger off my life list :) It's now sitting in our living room ow and is a proud and well-travelled member of the house.

Hitchhiking with a tiger was rather fun. I lost the count of people who said they just stopped for the tiger and that they never pick up hitchhikers. I guess a couple with a big teddy is not really in the top of anyone's "likely-to-be-murderers" list. It was also a great pillow (lots of nights in a tent), having it would cheer us up in hopeless hitchhiking spots (meaning what do you mean we're carrying around a big fluffy tiger?) and we could take touristy photos with him! I hate taking pictures of "me in front of the Eiffel tower" but with Nils it made being a tourist fun :)




aren't we just the cutest thing ever? :P p.s. I can't believe we dragged that tiger around for two and a half months...

Move over, day. I'm driving!

I think it is completely possible to travel without any money at all. At least it's definitely less expensive than not to travel and pay for rent. Don't take buses, trains or planes - hitchhike. Don't pay for food - get it free by dumpster diving or just by being in a right place in a right time. Don't pay for ho(s)tels - couchsurf or just sleep by the road side in a cosy little sleeping bag. I am a bit worried that this kind of lifestyle will inevitably end up with me being a little pretty anti-capitalist smelly homeless-looking creature, but I'm on my way to not caring about opinions either :P

I read a travel blog yesterday from people who are on a hitchhiking trip all the way through Africa, and I was thinking - why not, I should do it one day as well! A few days ago I got excited about an idea to hitchhike through Russia to the Far East. I've always dreamed of being able to consider such things possible.

However, what I actually did do is this:



A friend came over to Toulouse and jokingly proposed taking a little trip to Istanbul. A few days later we were on our way. And since we were in a travelling mood, our trip continued to Hungary through Romania and after that, why not, I decided to visit my friends in Estonia - it seemed too close for not taking the chance.
The green pins on the maps indicate stops, blue lines between them straight hitch-hiking shifts :) three weeks, 18 countries, 9200 km.
I didn't enjoy neither Istanbul nor Bucharest nor Debrecen that much, I'm mostly happy about all this because I now know how retardedly easy it is to cover any distance you want, go wherever you want, do whatever you want without worrying about such things as where do get all the money from(!) or where do sleep or what to eat or who's driving ..

The hitch-hikers guide to Geneva

Germany < --------------------- > France

I don’t think I would ever have gotten the experience of walking over the border river between France and Germany If we’d not been in search of a better hitch-hiking spot that morning. At 8 am early Sunday, any Alaskan town (or Scottish village in fact) would have been more busy than Strasbourg, a large town in France, situated a few kilometers away from the German border. No joke. French people seem to have quite a strict understanding about when businesses should be open and/or traffic can occur, and it’s certainly not a Sunday morning (or any evening or early afternoon really..). I guess they only ever come out on weekday mornings to buy croissants and pain au chocolate-s and then wrap up their scarves more tightly and hurry to their art schools or music academies or back home to write a book or an article or paint something in their studios.
Anyway, we walked out of France to this little German village, Kehl, which seemed wonderfully more inhabited, and got a lift straight away to a German autobahn; towards Geneva, Switzerland (around 450 km away), with this great guy who drove 30 kilometers to the opposite way from where he wanted to go, just to help us out. Another beautiful day!


We were happily sitting on that rock in this random German petrol station when a nice young man, who had just finished pouring water into his radiator, approached us, preventing us from approaching him. He wasn’t that fluent in English nor did we understand any German, so the conversation went something like: “do you have a car?” – “no” – “I have a car!”. Later we also found out that his dad has a steel company and a helicopter with a landing spot on top of the roof of his house and stuff. Anyway, on the way to the next service area he taught us some essential hitch-hiking expressions such as “are you going to Basel” and “We’re hitch-hiking” and “I don’t speak much German”; which I have to say, was definitely a useful addition to my previous German phrasebook consisting of sentences like “I want a drink” and “I love you” and “I don’t have any underwear”.

I had already practiced my German on several people in the next petrol station when a nice Swiss man with a nice Alfa Romeo and wonderful English agreed to take us to Bern. As we were proceeding through the numerous tunnels (Swiss people like to build their roads through anything on the way, in an unusual contrast to the Scottish way of lenghtening 100 miles as the crow flies to 250 miles by the road), we learned quite a lot about Swiss vineyards and guns; oh and about the latter - apparently every Swiss man who has been to the army has one, which some of them use when they are drunk and fallen out with their girlfriends...

The petrol station just before Bern was just as nice and sunny as the two previous ones, with an exception of one disturbing figure in it – a nervous-looking Czech hitch-hiker Martin *see footnote*, whose main activity seemed to be smoking, in preference of asking people for a lift. He was going to Geneva as well, and although we felt that waiting after this guy might take a while (he was approaching drivers with a cigarette in his hand and cursing heavily every time he got declined), unwritten hitchhikers’ etiquette still says that if you’re there first, you go first. So we decided to get aquainted to Swiss currency instead, meaning taking some cash Franks out of the ATM, and have some lunch consisting of cheese, sausages and chocolate spread, which we applied on a weird swiss toasting bread (aquired from the shop in the petrol station) with an Estonian bank card (washed previously in the nice Swiss toilets).

Meanwhile, Martin was still walking around randomly and smoking his sixty third cigarette of the day. So we asked for a special permission to go around the cars that he wasn’t interested in and soon found this lovely little french guy (with a scarf and everything, also he was a journalist) who had been partying heavily all weekend and needed someone to keep him awake in the car on his way to Nyon, 30 km from Geneva. Surprisingly, he came from Strasbourg as well, I wonder if he had forgotten, having lived several years in Switzerland, that it’s not acceptable to drive in France on Sundays.. To keep the conversation going, the lovely entusiastic hungover french journalist offered to drive the extra kilometers to Geneva for us, and turned back in a minute’s walking distance of where we were staying.


As a conclusion to this exceptionally long introduction, all I really wanted to say is that I’m travelling through Europe now, and getting aquainted to all it’s lovely people on the way:) Hitch-hiking is clearly the best way to travel – in addition to getting where you want to go, free (sometimes with complimentary coffee or cheeseburgers), you also get to know so much more about the people, culture, history, customs of the country that you’re travelling in; as well as yourself (because approaching random people in petrol stations can be a bit scary and keeping up your motivation levels after three hours of no luck might get a bit frustrating.. )

Anyway, by now I have come to a certain belief that you can hitch-hike pretty much anything and anywhere - as long as you ask enough people... men, women, couples, band vans, cars, trucks, buses, boats, ferries, bikes, helicopters, spaceships...

Leiden, Holland

Strasbourg, France

Zürich, Switzerland

Annecy, France

Leukerbad, Valais, Switzerland

*footnote* We met this guy again on our way to Zürich to Annecy a week later, and again from Annecy to Valais four days after that; we’re currently working on alternative routes between Valais and Lyon...

When nothing goes right... go left!

I have emigrated. Its weird to look out of the train window and see all the way to the horizon with no hills on the way. Or even just to be in a train :P I’d got so used to the still, peaceful, tranquil life of our little lovely Scottish village that it took me well over a day to realise that it’s not smart to walk in the middle of the roads in Amsterdam...

I must say that I feel more homesick for Scotland than I do for Estonia. I suppose I’ve been away from Estonia for over a year so have got used to being away, whereas it was only a mere week ago when I last saw the beautiful people, lochs and hills of Scotland..
(sigh)

I’m in Holland with no plans further away than three days, totally out of comfort zone. First of all - me and not planning don’t quite mix, secondly – me and not planning don’t quite mix! I love it. Feeling uncertain about what happens a week, month, three months from now. Whatever it is, it’s going to be great.

I have the best of Scottish with me though - a charm with a Scottish touch from a wonderful, beautiful Estonian friend, and I also managed to grab a live scottish guy with me, he’s truly the best of Scotland, better even than Ewan McGregor I think :P He's shy about appearing in this blog and I'm trying to keep things in here fairly impersonal, but it seems like we're going to be (travelling) partners for a while; so I want it to make sense when I, at one moment in the future, accidentally happen to use the world "we" instead of "I".


That's us!
Life is wonderful!
I'll be back to Scotland for my holiday! :)

baltic!

There are three inches of snow on the ground and people are talking about the coldest winter in decades and cancelling bookings because of the treacherous traffic conditions.
I disagree with most people in Ardfern though, thinking that snow is absolutely lovely and how do you mean you can't drive when it's snowing..? :P
I once heard a story from an Estonian truck driver about a heavy snowfall in France; all the cars were piling up in every available car park to the point where other drivers, tired from their own international trips and deeply discouraged by the snow, couldn't fit in.. so the police pitched up and quite quickly selected out all the Scandinavian and Baltic drivers and told them to hit the road; claiming that they're used to tough conditions!



Scottish people have a funny expression to describe cold weather - they would come in from the front door of the pub on a "cold" winter night, delivering a series of shivers, rubbing hands against each other, jamming up the fireplace and saying "uuhh, it's baltic!"
Now Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) do experience occasional freezing weeks during their winters (a few days of minus thirties celsius every winter), but compared to Scottish weather, so are the other seasons more extreme; more hot in the summer, more cold in the winter; oh perhaps not more rainy in the autumn, but anyway using the word "siberian" or "laplandic" would make much more sense... :P

One of our frequent pub-visitors, Robin (who has something to say about everything) suggested that the word "baltic" is not so much to describe the weather conditions in Baltic states as to say something about their personalities.. John, a superbly intelligent local who has an amazing ability to remain insightful and interesting even after fifteen pints of Guinness, thought that since Scottish people love their drink so much, it would be difficult for them to pronounce "Siberian" or "Laplandic" or even "Arctic" throughout most of the day, so they settle with using a slightly less accurate alternative..



Anyway our few weeks of baltic-like weather have just been lovely, looking forward to a white Christmas..