Return of the Marmite

I'd travelled by train and hitchhiking from Vienna, to a small town in Switzerland. I'd spent the weekend in Aargburg and then stayed the night in Freiburg in Germany. I'd hitchhiked from Freiburg to Friedrichshafen, had a wee adventure, but managed to get to Munich. Decided to stay the night at Munich central train station (Hauptbahnhof) before heading out to hitchhike towards Vienna in the morning.

So, apart from taking a selfie on my laptop of me with the Marmite, and trying to catch a nap here and there in the waiting area, I walked around the entirety of the Hauptbahhof, both above ground and below; and I walked around the neighbourhood, just to fill in the time. I also used the free wifi to look up things on the internet, to chat to Lisa and to do other internet stuff. When it finally got to dawn, I started walking, making my way to the city limits. I was standing just after a bus stop, not a perfect position but I had made a pretty large sign that said "Austria / Österreich". Being so early in the morning, the traffic was not very heavy and I did have to wait for an hour or so. A van stopped, an electrician on his way to work or something. He didn't speak English, but my German was good enough to ascertain that although he was going to Austria, he was going to or through Innsbruck, whereas it would be more convenient for me to go to Salzburg for getting to Vienna. He offered to either take me to Innsbruck or would drop me off somewhere on the way. I agreed to get dropped off on the way and hopped in.

Just as we were about to leave, some other hitchhikers had got off a bus at the bus stop and had come up to the van to inquire about getting a ride. I believe they were Austrians and wanted to get to Salzburg. There wasn't enough room, and to be honest, I was pretty glad. If they were trying to get to Salzburg as well, we'd probably get dropped off at the same spot and then either try to hitchhike together, which as three people would severely limit the possible rides we could get, or we'd be competing or have to take turns, which would really suck.

On the way, I made some small talk with my driver: he was from Croatia but had been in Germany for around 20 years. We had a look at the GPS while he was driving and we decided that the Raststätte at Irschenberg would be a good place to drop me off, and it was the last stop before he went one way to Innsbruck and I would turn off to Vienna; moreover, I had read about it on hitchwiki.org as a good place to get to if you were hitchhiking out of Munich.

He dropped me off, and I quickly figured out the best place to position myself to get all the outgoing traffic, where they'd have enough time to see me and have enough room to stop. I got my laptop out and took a selfie of myself, with my Marmite and my "Austria / Österreich" sign.

Absolutely perfect weather!

As I was putting my laptop back into my backpack, I noticed a guy walking over from the petrol station. As he got closer, I noticed he had a gun, and pretty much then, he announced himself as a police officer, and pulled out some ID. He asked me for my passport, so I gave it to him as well as my Swedish residency card. His colleague drove over in an unmarked car, and came out and had a look at my passport as well...they noticed my Austrian and German visas and asked if I spoke German, and I said I spoke a bit. I'm happy to say that I managed to answer everything in German, except the odd word that I didn't know here and there. While the colleague took my passport away to check it on the radio or whatever it is they do in the car, the original cop started asking me questions. How long had I been in Europe? (About 2 years) Where was I coming from and where was I going to? (I'd come from Switzerland, had a weekend meeting friends, I was heading to Vienna, and then eventually heading up to Berlin, then to Sweden). Do I have any drugs or illegal items? (No). He didn't seem to believe me, asking if I was sure I didn't have any drugs and started asking me if I had individual drugs...hashish? MDMA? Cocaine? After a couple of these, I told him that I had I was trying to hitchhike over borders and taking drugs would be too risky...luckily he found that pretty funny. He asked to look through my wallet, which I acquiesced to, because I didn't have anything to hide and just wanted to get on with my hitchhiking. He didn't find anything interesting, and asked if I could begin emptying my backpack. It was a bit annoying, but I started to do it anyway, answering his questions, and after a just a few seconds of taking stuff out, his colleague came back with my passport and said everything was fine with it. As the stuff I had taken out was literally sleeping bag and a couple of t-shirts, the cop told me that I could stop emptying my bag, and they pretty abruptly got back into their car and drove off.

Only about 10 minutes later, a car stopped, with a young couple. They asked where in Austria I wanted to go and I said Vienna. They were going to Vienna as well, and they would take me the whole way if I wanted. I couldn't believe it, a ride the whole way to Vienna from just 50km or so out of Munich. They were a young couple from Slovakia originally, but living now in Vienna. We made some small talk, and I tried to stay awake, but it was really warm, and I was really tired, and I fell asleep before Salzburg, and pretty much slept the whole way to Vienna. I felt a bit guilty, but they didn't seem to mind. When I woke up, we were on the motorway that runs around Vienna, and they wanted to know where they could drop me off. They weren't going near Lisa's apartment, so they decided to drop me off close to a subway stop. They let me out, and I was officially back in Vienna.

Picture of Gasometer I took  off Wikipedia.org
© Bwag/CC-BY-SA-4.0 

Where they dropped me off was at the Gasometer buildings. These are really cool, old gas holders for town gas, that have been converted to apartments, shopping areas and offices. I'd read about them, but hadn't been to see them personally (although I've seen them in the distance a lot), and I thought they were amazing. They gave me a feeling of dystopic, futuristic video-games, areas where the unassuming protagonist will begin their story. I didn't go in, though, I really wanted to get to Lisa's. I took the U-bahn to the closes stop to Lisa's and walked the 5 minutes or so to her apartment. I rang her bell, but nobody was home. As I didn't have my phone, I pulled out my laptop and tried to connect to the apartment's wifi from the street...didn't reach. I could either wait for someone to get home, or try to find some internet. It was a nice day, I didn't feel like walking any further, so I took off my boots, pulled out my book, and sat in the sun, outside her apartment, and eventually, her flatmate came home and let me in.

I messaged Lisa, had a shower, had a nap and then when she came home, we had dinner. After a day or two in Vienna, we took the train back to her parents house, and I finally felt my adventure was at an end. Definitely one of the longest continuous hitchhiking journeys I'd ever undertaken, I'd had a great time, met some great people and hopefully, won some great Marmite. 

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My Marmite adventure continues

I'd successfully taken an overnight train across Austria and hitchhiked into Switzerland. I'd spent a nice weekend in Aarburg, and agreed to stay with the other guys at their dorm in Freiburg. We took a train to Basel; our plan was to take a regional train to Freiburg, but due to a timetabling error on our part, we had missed all but the last one, a few hours later, and that would arrive at Freiburg too late for us. We went to the ICE train (InterCity Express), which are much more expensive, and asked the conductor if we were able to buy tickets on the train, as it was departing soon, and we were told we could.

We boarded and waited dutifully at our seats. Freiburg was the first stop, about 30 minutes away, and we chatted the whole time. As we were pulling into Freiburg, we noticed the conductor finally reaching our carriage, but we were just pulling into the station, he was just waiting at the door of our carriage, to get out onto the platform. We disembarked at Freiburg, having semi-legally avoided the rather pricey ICE ticket. The guys took me to get döner, at their favourite place, and we took a tram to where they live, at the St Alban Haus in Littenweiler, on the outskirts of Freiburg.

On the way to Freiburg, I'd noticed that I'd left my phone somewhere. When I was in the dorm, I connected to the wifi with my laptop and used Google to find my phone's location on Google Maps. It is absolutely crazy how accurate the service is. I had left it where we had stayed for the weekend, and so I emailed somebody to let them know I had left it and to arrange to get it back somehow. I went on to hitchwiki.org to see if anybody had any information about hitchhiking out of Freiburg, and luckily, there was some information. For hitchhiking east towards Munich, the recommended spot was not too far from where I was staying. I was to sleep on a mattress on the floor - I stayed up a bit, checking emails and so on. I really wanted to take a selfie with my Marmite, so in lieu of my phone, I just used my laptop.

Hanging out with my Marmite in Freiburg

I got up fairly early, and got myself ready to leave. I took the tram a couple of stops to Maria-Hilfe-Kirche, and looked around for cardboard. Looking in a side-street, I found that again, it seemed to be collection day and it was no trouble at all to find a cardboard box in a bin on the side of the street. Unusually for me, I took more than one piece of cardboard, as I figured it would be highly unlikely I would get to Vienna in just a single day, and if I had a couple of pieces with me, I could take them with me as necessary, and the incident with "Aarburg via Zürich" had convinced me that it was best to have some spare cardboard with me. I made up a sign that simply said "East/Ost" and tried to find a spot. It wasn't the best, as the highway went into an underground tunnel randomly in the city, with no spots to pull over immediately before it, but a short walk further up the road, toward the city, I found a small spot that I thought would suffice.

I was only there for a couple of minutes (without music, unfortunately, as I had forgotten my phone), when a youngish guy in a small car pulled over. He was heading somewhere else in Germany, to attend a friend's grandmother's funeral, but could drop me off somewhere by the Bodensee (Lake Constance). We got along really well, had some really interesting conversation, and we decided that he would drop me off at Friedrichshafen. To further my goal of taking a photo at every stop I made, I asked him if he could take a photo of me with my Marmite, which he was happy to do, in fact, even taking a selfie together with me and the Marmite. I put my email details into his phone and he said he'd email them to me[although, as of yet, I have not received the photo. It is possible I mistyped the address. His screen was fairly scratched, and it was quite difficult to see the screen properly in the bright sun anyway].

After he left, I headed down to the waterfront to enjoy some lunch. I had some Käsewurst that I'd bought from Vienna, that was a bit suspicious-looking and didn't smell the greatest, but which I ate anyway. I drank all the water I had, and went for a quick swim, as the day was absolutely sweltering. I walked a bit further along the waterfront, and found a public tap from which to fill my water bottle. When my shorts were more or less dry, I went off to start hitchhiking again. I knew that I wanted the highway 31, so I followed some signs for that, until it no longer had a pedestrian area and became more of a motorway. Luckily, this was a great hitchhiking spot, as there was a bit of shade available, and there was plenty of space to pull over, just after a bus stop, not to mention a public carpark next to me as well.

After about 20 minutes or so, I got my first ride. The guy was only going to Kressbronn, only about 20km down the road according to him, but he could drop me off at the gas station next to the highway. This sounded great, so I got in and we took off. It was not such an interesting conversation, mainly because his English wasn't the best and neither is my German, and he seemed to be with a young lady, who I imagine to be his daughter but was possibly old enough to have been a much younger girlfriend, who was a bit shy.

The petrol station was not as great of an area as I'd hoped. A tiny, rural sort of affair, it was a fair way off the highway. I wanted the traffic going back on to the highway, which was in the direction on the opposite side of a roundabout from where I was. The road I was on didn't seem to get a hell of a lot of traffic, and although the other roads seem to go to places and get more traffic, they hardly ever came to the petrol station. I went across the roundabout, despite it clearly not being a pedestrian area, and followed the road a bit. It curved consistently the entire kilometre or so to the highway, where it was even more clearly not a pedestrian area - it didn't really have anywhere for a pedestrian to stand anyway, so it would've been fairly dangerous to wait on the highway itself, not to mention cars were going pretty fast and if I'd been spotted by police, I could imagine having to deal with them (perhaps not getting in any lasting trouble, but I can never be bothered talking to police). The entire curved road was fairly bushy, meaning cars couldn't see me as they were heading towards the highway, the only reasonable place to stand was a slight grassy area immediately after the highway. It was far from ideal, but I only had to wait about 10 minutes before getting a ride, in a fancy Jaguar with a lawyer.

We started off the ride in German, but we soon switched over to English. I was pretty tired from being in the sun all day, but I managed to stay awake for the whole journey. A fairly interesting guy, he was involved with a program bringing students from the Maldives to Germany on student visas. He had plenty to say about the Maldives, not just the threat from climate change, but the intense corruption of the government. He also told me that a number of years ago, he had decided he wanted to something more than just legal work, and with the blessing of his wife, opened a micro-brewery in Munich with some other guys, and now they were looking at building up production capacity and expanding their sales area.

He dropped me off almost directly at the main train station, Hauptbahnhof. I had two options, I could stay the night at Hauptbahnhof, or I could make my way to the area I found on hitchwiki.org for hitchhiking to Austria and try to make it somewhere that night. I decided that I would wait the night at Hauptbahnhof, If I didn't get a ride before dark, I would either have to try to hitchhike at night (which I've done several times before, but it's not ideal), or I'd probably have to make my way back to Hauptbahnhof anyway. Even if I got a ride, realistically, the furthest I'd expect to get would be Salzburg, which would not be hugely closer to Vienna than Munich, but I had no idea if the Salzburg Hauptbahnhof was open 24 hours or where I could stay.

Munich Hauptbahnhof with my Marmite

So I stayed the night in Munich Hauptbahnhof, mainly trying to sleep in the waiting area. But it's not very comfortable in there, there's a faint but constant hum; too quiet to complain about but loud enough to annoy all but the most deaf. The security is not particularly keen on people staying there who don't have train tickets, and despite that, it managed to only be populated by the strange or the impoverished - myself included. There was a super-drunk Asian professional, who was dressed like a lawyer or something, and sat in his chair, moaning, retching and even vomiting a little bit; the crazy old homeless guy, with a large beard, mumbling to himself with periods of angry whispers and even the occasional shout; a weird, young kid, looked like a street kid, who was hanging around the ride-on cleaning machine suspiciously, and whenever I went out and come back, he'd be investigating something on the machine and then jump away when he noticed me.

So, the story will wrap up in the next post...what was that kid doing? Did I ever find out? #bleedpurple 

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