It is a couple, a 27 year old man who has just picked up his 35 year old girlfriend from work. She is called Irena, and can speak English, Polish, Russian and Chechnyan fluently. The reason? She works with refugees trying to enter Poland, and thus gain entrance to much of the European Union. She says the job is difficult and, at times, heartbreaking. She explains, also, that the spot I am hitchhiking from is not ideal, as most of the cars will only be travelling a few kilometres to nearby towns - lots of the locals do their shopping in Ukraine, where some of the groceries are cheaper, and possibly smuggle cigarettes too. They drop me off at a petrol station, where they say that lorries may pull up and take me for the rest of the journey. I thank them for their kindness and jump out.
It is not a problem, a woman who has been pulled over for a while approaches me and offers assistance. She takes me to the village of Jaroslaw and as it is now evening time she drops me off by a hotel and drives off. I circulate the building, trying to find the entrance, but to no avail. I hear a woman’s voice calling to me from a car.
“You want help?”
“Ermmm…yes please, I cannot find the entrance to the hotel”
“That’s because they have not finished building it! Don’t worry, there is a cheap one in the town square that should be able to put you up. Get in the car and we will take you there.”
We get chatting. She is an English teacher, and as a consequence her diction is well polished. She goes by the name of Barbara. Her husband, Peter, is in the driving seat with a mild grin on his face. Occasionally he mutters a few words to Barbara in Polish, then chuckles.
When I explain that I am trying to head in the direction of England they say I am in luck as Peter’s sister Klara will be driving to Warsaw tomorrow morning, and should be able to give me a lift. He needs to double check with her first, but it should be okay.
I wake up the next morning to the chimes of the clock in the town square. As promised, Klara picks me up at 9am, and we head off for Poland’s capital city. We chat the entire four hour journey. She is a good listener and a good talker. I am envious of her intelligence, and also her language skills - despite having always lived in Poland her English vocabulary is far more dynamic than mine.
She takes me into the centre of Warsaw and (with the satisfaction that she has completed a good deed today) slams the car up a kerb and screeches on the brakes. “Steady!” I exclaim, but she just laughs and says it is a company car, so she feels no need to look after it. She has, though, felt the need to look after me, and takes me to a cheap place to stay round the corner from the iconic Palace of Culture and Science.
After asking around it transpires that the motorway is a few miles west of the train station. I lug my bags across fields of wheat, and find a petrol station located on the pulsating motorway. I hold up a sign saying ‘Poznan’ - a city 150 miles west of here. After half an hour of people shaking their heads, a middle aged Polish man, who has just finished filling his tank up, approaches me.
“The traffic come here go other way to Poznan, but donn worry, I will take you to a better place to find a car to drive you.”
This kind man does just that, and he is not wrong. After waiting next to the pumps of unleaded for about twenty minutes, a minibus full of cheerful Lithuanians pulls up. They are on their way from Lithuania to Germany, and have stopped off for a cigarette break.
As luck would have it, there is a one spare seat on board, and the drivers refuse to take any payment for it. As the sun goes down we thunder along both main roads and winding lanes of Poland, weaving in and out of scenic countryside and picturesque villages. On board some of the woman are practicing their German, some are nattering in Lithuanian, some are sleeping. A few of the women share with me some of the hop-filled Polish beers they had just bought. The drivers stick to coffee.
By the time we reach the western part of Poland, it is pitch black. The minibus pulls into a village near Poznan which is much different to the quaint old places we had sped through earlier. There are no churches, but there are a plenty of strip joints, seedy bars, gambling outlets and drive in motels, all with are advertised with flashing neon lights, which gives off the ambience of Las Vegas - albeit on a much, much smaller scale. I decide this is the best place to say farewell to the Lithuanians. I shake the hands of the men, and give each of the women a peck on the cheek.
The next morning I awake in one of the motels, and on opening the curtains I discover that this is a hub of lorries. Perfect.
When we pull out of the park and join the queue of lorries heading towards Germany the driver, Dennis, starts talking about his family. He shows me photographs of his two children, and speaks of how he misses them when he goes away. He lives in eastern Poland, near the border with Belarus, and has been a lorry driver for twenty years.
We drive along a bridge over the River Odra, a natural border separating Poland and Germany. There have been no checkpoints since 1995 due to the Schengen Agreement, so we speed across. Within a few blinks of the eye we are on German soil, and switching lanes on a wide autobahn.
After quite a while on the road, Dennis pulls over into a petrol station in the village of Ebendorf, which is situated in the former East Germany, and we both jump out.
After enquiring around, I learn there are two hotels situated in the Ebendorf. The first I find is way out of my price range, so I locate the other one, which is much cheaper. But as I speak with the lady working at the reception it transpires that there is no room at the inn.
I don’t know if it is a nuance of desperation in my voice, or a look of vulnerability in my eye. But as I turn to leave something causes her to usher me back in and whisper that there is a spare room, but it is usually only given to people under exceptional circumstances. I am not sure if she is implying that my situation is ‘exceptional’ or not, but I seize the opportunity and accept the offer.
For the rest of the afternoon and evening I potter about the village, attempting to speak Deutsche. It should be easier than the languages of the previous places I have been to as German is in the same linguistic family as English. However, in most of my conversations the locals meet me halfway by using some English words. So for the most part we speak a fusion language: Ginglish or Englerman perhaps.
He is not wrong about the scale of traffic here. It seems that there are lorries from every nation of Europe stopping by - Estonian, Latvian, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian. Perhaps because of this, they are all going in different directions - north, south and east. But, frustratingly for me, not west.
Eventually a car with a Dutch number plate pulls up with two men in it. I ask the driver where he is going. “Holland of course” he replies, and midway into my explanation of what I am doing he interrupts and says “Hey its cool, get in, you can come all the way with us to Rotterdam. No problem!”
A proud Dutchman, Elbert is driving back home from a visit to Berlin. He talks of the economic crisis in Europe before unravelling his knowledge of the history of the low countries. As we near the border with the Netherlands he fills the car up with more petrol, as it is marginally cheaper on the German side.
Throughout the journey a Thai chap in his early twenties has been in the car. As we travel through the Netherlands I make conversation with him by asking what he is doing in Holland. He is quite vague, but the long and short of it is that he is here on what he calls a ‘friendship visit’ to Elbert. I don’t probe any further. We reach Rotterdam and Elbert drops me off and wishes me well.
I find a petrol station in central Rotterdam and after a short wait a courier driver pulls up and agrees to take me to the outskirts of town. He says that for insurance purposes he should not really take hitch hikers, but as I need to get home today he does not mind taking the risk. He drops me off at a lorry park, and after an hour of waiting around a 24 year old Polish lorry driver named Martyn, who is heading to Belgium, picks me up.
As we drive along the flat terrain, the conversation bounces between football, women and travel. Perhaps because we are getting along well, or simply because Martyn has a heart of gold, he decides to change his route to give me a better chance of making it home by the end of the day. He says knows a place which is full of lorries heading to Calais, where I can catch the ferry.
“Hallo mate, where you from?”
“Wales”
“What’s your name pal?”
“Wayne”
“Where you heading now?”
“Calais, for the ferry to England”
“Wayne I’m Jerry, I’m from England, a town called Deal, near Dover. I’ve just got this far from Hong Kong without flying, and from the Ukrainian border with Poland I’ve done it almost entirely by hitch hiking. Any chance of a lift for the final leg to England?”
“Erm…yeah, I suppose I could make room for ya…”
Wayne clears the clutter off the passenger seat, and tells me to get in. I shake the hand of the friendly Pole, and then jump across with my bags into the Welshman’s lorry. I am moving from the passenger seat of a right-hand drive vehicle to a left-hand vehicle, so my feet do not even touch the ground. Wayne lets Martyn drive off in front of him, and with a gentle beep of his horn he bids farewell. Wayne has only stopped for a toilet break, so after two minutes we are also on the road.
Wayne is great company. We talk, talk, and talk some more. “I love all the trrravelling I do, the best think about ett is that ett brrrrooardens the mind” Wayne says in his well polished Welsh accent. As a lorryist of eight years he has touching stories about the countries he has been too, but like other drivers I have sat with he says the main things he detests about the job are the prolonged periods loneliness.
He sticks on his favourite radio station, BBC Radio 4, and the soothing sounds of the presenters cause me to nod off. When I awake, we are in Calais. I thank him and make my way to the foot passenger terminal.
I board the ship and before I know it we have set sail for England. I stare back at French coast, and feel a mild sense of achievement which is somewhat weakened by a sense of loss that the long journey I have made is now coming to an end. But nothing lasts forever.
I walk out on deck, and spot in the distance the White Cliffs of Dover. A smile fills my face, which mutates into a laugh, which in turn leads to a sob of happiness.
It has been a terrific 49 days. But there is no place like home.
