Hitchhiking back in time

Every time I hear statements such as “I’ve been on an eye opening trip” or “My trip to (insert country) was a life changing experience” I always smile politely and nod, but inside I’m rolling my eyes and puking in my mouth. That was true, until I became one of those nauseating people who went on a journey which completely changed my perspective on human nature. In my defence, I didn’t mean to, I just stumbled on the experience.

It all started in December when I hit 22 and realised I had done nothing I had intended to do by this age, apart from inventing my own cocktail. I wanted an adventure and stories to tell in the future and I wanted all of this now. On any other day I’d have rang a girlfriend, gone out for some wine and concocted a scheme of how I could spice my life up, only to decide to delay that plan upon the visit of the following day’s hangover. Not this time! This time I decided to sign myself up for a charity hitchhike to Morocco with Link Community Development.

I convinced myself I would never raise the total amount needed to go, but how wrong I was. The generosity of friends, family and strangers was overwhelming; the donations just kept coming in. I’m not going to lie, I enjoy being cynical and masking that as being a ‘realist’, so when people gave so generously I was taken off guard.

I soon realised that I had always made harsh assumptions about human nature; I was a firm believer that most people only cared about themselves and would sacrifice you like a cheap lamb if it benefitted them. I’m not quite sure why, maybe one day I’ll pay someone £150 an hour to find out why but that’s beside the point.

It would be difficult to ignore that cynicism appears to be the general attitude of our generation. However, I don’t always remember it like that and my hitchhike was the wake-up call I needed.
Growing up with my family, much importance was put upon being responsible members of the community, helping people where they could and vice versa. My mother once sent me to our local shop for a carton of milk and I didn’t have the correct change. The shop keeper said to just bring the rest in at a later date and gave me a sweet. Nowadays if you’re a penny short on the bus you’re forced to find that penny before you’re allowed to travel.

When I started the hitch hike I was extremely concerned we would never get out of England as it’s not every day you pick up hitchhikers. There are constant ‘stranger danger’ warnings about picking up unfamiliar persons. I went on the hitch hike with two lads, so you can imagine how intimidating that might have been for people. We made it from York to Morocco in eight days thanks to the generosity of strangers who had nothing to gain, people went out of their way to drop us off at the next best place to hitchhike from, told us whereabouts to find food and hostels should we fail to get picked up again.

In France we were often invited back to people’s houses for food and shelter, even those that couldn’t give us lifts to our final destination would pull up to tell us we were in the wrong place to hitchhike for lifts and offer to take us to the next best place. I realised humanity wasn’t dead; I was just shielding myself from it with my cynical attitude.

I’m sure this is something that we’ll all have been guilty of at one point or another in our lives. It’s not rare to hear people who are only 20 years older than us talk about how different things were when they were growing up. I don’t think people all of a sudden became bad, I think people became scared of being taken advantage of.