Hitchhiking to Łódź, Poland

After the last pivos (beers) and vodkas in Wrocław, I headed for Łódź — "Łódź kurwa" to its friends, or HollyŁódź if you're into cinema. The journey was fairly straightforward, though the start was a bit of a drag.

I'd just found my spot to hitch when several more people turned up and made it impossible for me to get a car for the next 30 minutes. Imagine six people thumbing lifts within 100 metres of each other — no driver was going to stop in those circumstances. Fortunately, these Polish hitchhikers gave up quickly and caught a bus, which let me find my first ride within the next 10 minutes.

It was a very friendly young Pole and we covered a good chunk of the route together. Based on the conversation we had, I wouldn't be surprised to run into him again at the other end of the world in a year or two. He eventually dropped me at one of the main crossroads in central Poland, at a bus stop heading towards Łódź.

I had a new ride in under two minutes — a couple of Poles heading to a nearby village to pick up two female friends. They didn't speak much English and couldn't take me too far, but it was good fun.

When the girls got in and started chatting in Polish, the passenger warned them that I didn't understand the language — though I had to clarify that I did know how to say "na zdrowie" (cheers) and vodka, which for some reason set off a round of laughter.

Then we nearly got killed by a spider. One had sneaked into the car, which triggered screaming from the girls; the driver instantly spun round, caught the spider and chucked it out the window. The only problem was that during this time he forgot about the steering wheel — when we looked back at the road we were in the oncoming lane with a car heading straight for us. He reacted fast and we avoided disaster by centimetres. The fright dissolved into laughter in about two seconds flat.

Finally, a trucker heading home after a tough stretch of work picked me up for the last 35 kilometres, and I only had to wait about 10 minutes for that. He was desperate to get back to Łódź, where apparently his girlfriend was waiting for him naked with cold beers in the fridge.

It was quite funny when he grabbed the walkie-talkie to chat with another driver from the same company — roughly one word in ten was kurwa (the Polish F-word). Even so, he was a great guy: he even rang my host in Łódź to sort out exactly where to drop me, and gave me advice on which tram to take to get to his place.

Any incidents of your own while hitchhiking?