It's Funny, That Fish In The Water Tries To Swim

Whenever I hitchhiked I did it with the aim to get from A to B. This time though, things were supposed to be fundamentally different. This time I wasn’t hitchhiking from A to B, but from A to A and I tried to get as far as possible and to be back within 60 hours! It was a hitchhiking competition consisting of 25 teams with a healthy dose of crazyness and we were about to do a pre-eastern hitchhiking race within two and a half days at the 21st of April 2011 starting from Hamburg.

To win the race, my teammate Lily and me faked a wedding and we pretended to be on honeymoon.
Having just arrived from Barcelona, Spain, I had little ambitions to return to Spain through France, so we decided to go direction Istanbul.

10am, 21st April 2011, Susy’s Show Bar, Hamburg, Germany:

The race starts, each team tries to get as fast as possible to the highways with different strategies.
The wedding dresses were the perfect disguises to get a ride at the Altona parking space. Often we didn’t even have to ask because people were so curious that they even asked themselves where we need to go.
That being said, we were on our way to the highway direction south in no time.

11am, 22nd April 2011, Belgrade, Serbia:
After 25 hours, 8 rides, numerous conversations with drivers and an exciting journey, we arrived in Belgrade with decayed flowers and dirty dresses. Hitchhiking like that didn’t look much like a honeymoon no more, but more like a pimp and his hooker. We took it easy and didn’t hitchhike much further than that and took a stroll in the city.

6pm, 22nd April 2011, another gas station in Belgrade:
Apparantly, 6pm was too late. Hitchhiking late in Serbia was a bitter experience. There was almost no traffic at all! This was the beginning of a long night in the highway streets of serbia. Fortunately all gas-stations on the highway were opened 24h.

1:30am, 23rd April 2011, Novi Sad, Serbia:
Despite of the few traffic that there was, we slowly made it to a gas-station in front of Novi Sad. But there was still just no traffic. We wondered if we were ever able to hitchhike back in time to Hamburg. We needed to arrive at 10pm at this very day. As hours passed by, the chances were getting slimmer and slimmer to make it back to Hamburg in time.

6am, 23rd April 2011, 100km behind Novi Sad, ~20km in front of the Hungarian Border:
We made it one step further, but still almost no traffic.
The sun came out around 6:30am and the traffic increased.
Incredible how relieving it can be to have traffic.

9am, 23rd April 2011, the same spot.
Markus, our rescue angel came by with his transporter and took us till Munich in a smooth direct ride. We were overly excited to be back in good old safe Germany where there is a lot of traffic and where drivers drive as fast as they want.

2pm, 23rd April 2011, gasstation in front of Munich, Germany:

The race wasn’t over yet, if we just found someone who goes very fast to Hamburg we could still make it!
We split each other running from person to person in order to catch a fast ride going to Hamburg.
And hell yeah! We got a ride within 10 minutes! A polish guy who just came from his easter-vacations who drove to Gdansk who took us with 160km/h towards Berlin.

7:30pm, 23rd April, gas-station in front of Berlin:
Still 288 km do drive. There is still hope.
We jumped out and ran towards a young couple that was driving to Rostock.
YES! 18 year old Gina and 23 year old Robert served us with another fast ride direction Hamburg.
Even though Gina was only 18, she drove like a formula 1 racer.
We told them our story and they helped us by quickly passing each gas station at the highway watching for people with fast cars going to Hamburg. First gasstation: there was no fast car going to Hamburg.
Second gasstation: Bingo!

9:00pm, 23rd April 2011, Between Hamburg and Berlin:
A red Audi A5 S-line, Still 200 km to go and a fast driver. This car was god given, it was the ride which drove us directly to the place where we needed to go and it was fast! This car has the 160km/h mark on the 12 o’clock position.

10:35pm, 23rd April 2011, in front of the Haus 73 in Hamburg, Germany:
Even though our driver drove us very fast, the laws of physics couldn’t be broken. We arrived 35 minutes too late… Our team was disqualified.
That being said, it was nevertheless so relieving that Lily and me made it to the venue at all.
20 teams made it back, 5 were still not back. The winner team made it to Valencia and back.
Celebrating with everyone and sharing stories has been great.

We did over 1800 km in 13 and a half hours!
That is the fastest trip from point to point that I have ever done.

The cup goes to the team “King Kong And The White Woman” and will be given to the winner in the next competition (see here).

The race was organized by Tramprennen.org

Tramprennen organizes as well a beneficial hitchhiking race to a far away location each year since 2008 in summer. Sponsors are giving money for each hitchhiked km and this money goes to VivaConAgua, an NGO which is building clean water supplies in third-world countries.