From Montpellier to Lyon?

Frida was a young Chinese mother married to a French computer programmer who passed some years in France. Their daughter was one and a half years old and was of course already sleeping when I came to their house in the night. Fridas husband needed to go to sleep since he had to work early but Frida could show me everything in their flat and talk a little bit before she left, too. I could choose one of the living room couches to stay there overnight. I slept very well and woke up by the little daughter Nina crying in the morning but I could go on sleeping and got up some time later. When Nina saw me she was first very shy and hid behind her mother. I had some little breakfast and then Frida showed me some of her art work and also some of the music she liked which was very amazing since she liked almost the same electronic and Drum'n'Bass music as I like, namely to go exhaustingly dancing with, which she also liked. So suddenly we had a lot of things to show each other and to talk about and cute little Nina became more and more selfconfident, came more and more closer to me and suddenly gave me her toys to play with and there was no problem at all any more. Later her mother, she and I went to by some groceries and she liked it very much to hold my hand, to let me make her fly from stone to stone and so on. After shopping we came back home to prepare lunch, the same time came Nina's father back from work to have lunch at home. Frida cooked some delicious Chinese meal where we others helped a bit and then we had lunch together. After lunch Frida's husband Médéric had to go to work again and we others played with Nina, shared music and I searched the web about how to hitchhike best from Montpellier. Then I left with a warm goodbye and took the tram to the other side of the city. Doing so, I had a chance to see the nice city center. Then, at about 5:00pm, I was at the other side of the city, took a small walk in direction to the street heading to the highway and somehow missed the right spot, so that my little walk turned into a longer walk until I found the gas station I wanted to hitchhike from. While walking, I found a Spanish couple trying to hitchhike, too, who had no luck because they were trying to move forward from the road. I took them to the gas station and together we found a lift to Nîmes quite fast, better to say to the Péage station, from which they wanted to proceed to Toulouse and I to Lyon. At the same time, after about 30 minutes waiting time, we found someone for our directions, they a truck, I a man going to Orange who worked for kind of an academic exchange program between France and Germany before and who was now director of a village for handicapped people close to Mont Ventoux. When he was young, he passed a lot of time hitchhiking great distances in Europe. He made a little detour to bring me to a service station before which the highways from Spain and from Côté d'Azur joined together so that I could have better chances to get someone even further than Lyon where wanted to go at least and where someone from couchsurfing was able to host me. I was quite sure that I could make it to Lyon even late, so I tried to find one for Germany for that evening for some time before going to Lyon. There were some Germans, most of them had no space left, but finally I met Werner from Fürth who had the one and only www.CurryWOSCHDhaus.com there who could take me for more than 750km until Karlsruhe. He was with his wife and daughter who slept most of the time in the back of the Mercedes while he and I sat in the front and had interesting talks about adventurous travelling as I did this summer. He told me that he did something similar when he was ten years younger than me, but he did it in the USA. There he learned how to work best being his own boss. He was a quite fast driver which I got to know when we were on German highways without speed limit, where he got his car up to 200km/h. Therefore we were at Karlsruhe Bruchsal station at 4:30am already. I needed to wait for another 90 minutes until I found a Chinese guy going to Köln who, after I explained him what hitchhiking was, asked me for my address to bring me to my house in Bonn directly. You probably can't imagine how happy I was about this lucky ending of my travel. At about 9:30am the 29th of August I was at home again.

Per Mobiltelefon

From Barcelona to France

On the Couchsurfing meeting at Gracia I got in contact with some nice people, but none of them had a couch to offer since they were staying in a hostel themselves. From that one bar, after it had closed at about 1:00am, a group of 30 couchsurfers and like minded people including me - in the first place there much more - walked through Barcelona to get to another bar which was still open. We could manage to get discounts on drinks since we were so many guests the bar woman was apparently quite happy about. At that place I got to know some British, German, U.S.American and Norwegian people. There were two guys from Norway who had no couch yet either. After that other bar closed, too, at about 3:00am, we three without couch went with three some Americans to their hostel to see whether there was still some bed left. There was: one bed in a female form. Of course that reminded me of Lisboa, and of course we could not get it. So after the two Norwegians had tried to beg for a place to sleep on the floor which of course did not work we were about to leave the hostel, but after we had closed the door, instead of going outside on the street we stayed in the building, went upstairs, better to say we took a very old elevator to the top floor. From there we climbed up a ladder on top of the elevator construction where we found a quite dusty and small platform but anyways we decided to stay there for the night. There were wheels and steel ropes we were afraid of getting the sleeping bags or feet involved with but we did a test with the elevator and it was no problem, so we went to sleep, not too comfortably. Well, there was actually problem which we found out about the next day as we discovered our sleeping bags had traces of motor oil. Lars, one of them, took a picture of me laying there. We put all our things in our backpacks because there were already some people working on the next lower level and we didn't want to be seen. We got out on the street at about 8:00am laughing about the crazy night we had just passed. They wanted to go Valencia, I wanted to find an Internet café to check my mails and to recharge my mobile, so I walked a bit in the streets of the city which was even more beautiful with not yet that much traffic and people on the streets as there are normally. On the other hand, the Internet cafes weren't open yet, so I went to a tourist information, got a map and information on busses to Montpellier. Also I got to know about a library with free Internet which I tried first, but the one I went to was not public while the public one was closed until the late afternoon. I started already thinking about having bad luck but then I found an Internet café which could fulfill all my needs since it had a toilet, electricity to recharge my phone and of course Internet, where I found out that a French girl from covoiturage going from Barcelona to Montpellier I had asked the day before whether she could take me to France hadn't answered me yet. I found another guy going the next day from Tarifa to Köln who I asked whether he would take me for some kilometers on that trip. But anyways I wanted to hitchhike, so I checked on hitchbase.com where was an excellent description how to get to a service station close to Barcelona heading to France. On the way there I had to enter very easily a restricted area where I saw a graffity on a stone telling 'hitchhikers go here' which I found quite funny. I was just on that station, asked someone and was lucky because he could take me for a short distance. He wanted to see his brother in his summer house next to the beach about 70km north of Barcelona. The station he put me to seemed to be good since many people were going to France from there - but almost all with the car full of kids, so I had to wait for almost three hours, meanwhile there were another two German hitchhikers, until we found some French people from Agen with two cars, Natalie and her daughter both driving and two guys with them, who could take the three of us close to Narbonne. There we waited for more than two hours. There were two other hitchhiking couples on that spot, one German-Nicaraguan and a Polish one. And there were many Arab and/or Muslim families travelling with a full car and often having things on the roof bound tight with a rope. Then there was one bus stopping, full of German tourists, and soon another. We asked the driver whether he would take hitchhikers. He told us he would have done if the bus wasn't full but that we should wait for other busses stopping, some of them might have space. We saw some busses just passing that service station without stopping, actually more and more were passing, so we found two guys going with a transporter to the Ardeche who brought me to Montpellier and took the other two with them. They were funny and of good mood so I would have liked to go with them if there would have been time. In Montpellier then I got am tram to Frida's home. It was 0:30am when I arrived.

Per Mobiltelefon

To Barcelona with a covoiturage?

The next morning Jose had to get up early to go to work while Patricia and I could sleep some time more. At about 9:30am I got up to get my clothes from the washing machine, trying to dry them in the sun. One hour later Patricia got up too and put all the clothes in the dryer and gave them to me after breakfast while I was trying to get a covoiturage on her computer she connected for me with her mobile with the Internet. Around 2:00pm Jose came back from his work and we had lunch together. Meanwhile I got a reply from someone for a covoiturage from Murcia to Barcelona which I was happy about. I thought, also after the wise advice from a friend from Germany, that to go back home to Germany I shouldn't take another risk that hitchhiking would not work and already thought about taking another covoiturage to Montpellier the next day. Jose needed to go back to work at 3:30pm and he took Patricia and me close to the place where the covoiturage would start. There was a shopping mall which Patricia wanted to go to and show me while waiting. After 20 minutes she had bought three pairs of high heels for her and another for her niece Sabrina. The shoes and also the clothes were really really cheap there. Less than ten Euros for a pair of shoes or clothes, I saw some shoes for six Euros, some shirts for three Euros. It was the last day for the summer sale. Then we went to the Cepsa station where we should meet the covoiturage guy at 5:00pm. After a warm goodbye she got picked up by a friend. With the covoiturage guy, Pablo, I had to wait for almost half an hour until another person came to go with us, Irene, who liked electronic music as I does and who was in Mannheim and Frankfurt in spring to go to the Time Warp party. Then in Alicante we picked up two other people to go to Barcelona, a Lithuanian student from Southampton preparing for one Erasmus year in Alicante and a waiter from Barcelona working in Alicante. The trip was quite okay. It was interesting how the landscape changed from mountains to other mountains. Well, this wasn't too serious. Once I fell asleep for about 30 minutes and as I woke up I had the impression that the mountains were greener than the ones I saw before I fell asleep. After half the way we had a short break at a service station where I had the chance to watch two Muslim women bowing and kneeling on a carpet in the light rain. Then we went on, I took the chance to sleep again a bit and about midnight we were in Barcelona finally where I had to hurry since the metro was already closing. At about 0:45am I was at the bar Teatre Neu in Gracia, a nice place actually, to meet with many couchsurfing people to hopefully find a last minute couch.
Which I couldn't.

Per Mobiltelefon

Murcia

The bus took first about three hours to get to Vera, that was because it passed all the small streets and little villages in the mountains like Purchena, Olula, Albox which made the trip nice for the eye - even if I slept about half the time. This could made me a bit happier, since my mood before was quite bad, feeling like, besides from the time in Malaga with Isabel, the Andalucia kept confronting me with bad luck. But still it is a nice landscape worth another visit, at least because it has the sun I was missing in Germany already for years. From Vera, the bus took much shorter than expected to Murcia. It must have been a false information with 2:30am. The conductor told me, the expected arrival time was 1:00am even after a 30 minutes break somewhere in between. At 0:45am the bus was already in Murcia and at 1:00 Patricia and her friend Jose picked me up and took me to a bar outside the city where Patricia normally was working, but not that day, since she came back from travelling in Norway just a very few hours before - her baggage was still in Jose's car, so he might have picked her up short before me. I got to know that Patricia was original Brazilian and that one of her work mates was her niece. We had some drinks and played Billard, then we went to Patricia's home at about 3:00am. They offered me a comfortable guest bed and I had the feeling of a warm hearted welcome while I fell asleep soon. The next day, Patricia and I got up late while Jose already had left to play Petanque with friends. We two went for a little walk in the village, visited a bar she was working in some time before and then Jose picked us up to take us at the first bar. Patricia had to work that day since the place was booked by Brazilian families to have a birthday party there. As you can imagine, with the hot Brazilian blood there was soon a lot of dance, rhythm, singing, laughter, and of course drinking. And lunch and supper, too. Jose and I went to a restaurant where two very big Paella pans were prepared for the party, each of them with almost one meter in diameter. The mixed Brazilian and Spanish food was really tasty and the dancing was fun for me, so I stayed the whole afternoon and evening and left with Patricia, her niece Sabrina and Jose after they closed the bar. We went to Murcia and had some frozen yogurt in the center, then we took Sabrina to her home and went to Patricia's at about 1:00am.

Per Mobiltelefon

To Murcia, finally...

I stayed all the night awake in that restaurant at the service station writing, then falling asleep, going on writing and falling asleep again. Then in the morning I went hitchhiking again and soon found a man working with kids having educational and social difficulties who could bring me close to Guadix through very beautiful and various mountains I wished to go hiking once. The service station I stood was Gaudix Sur. And I stood there for more than four hours, I couldn't believe that, since this station was perfect on the way to Murcia. At least I had some nice company in an old man selling his fruits there and in Yessenia, originally from Colombia but moved with her mother to Spain. Finally at about 1:30pm I left the station by feet walking into the city center of Guadix where she told me was an Internet café and a bus stop. I already asked Garazi from Bilbao and Patricia, my host in Murcia waiting for me already for days to come for some help to find busses or covoiturages. I walked in the city searching for an Internet café, finally found two, both closed because of the siesta, so I asked the two again while I was trying to get to a service station in direction to the Murcia highway. While walking a car passed me and the driver pushed the car horn. The car passed so fast that I could only guess that there was maybe Yessenia sitting in the back having finished her shift which was at 3:00pm as she told me. I went on searching for a service station but that street heading to the highway to Murcia seemed more and more to be a dead end into nowhere and almost no car was going there. I gave up, went back to the center and asked the two helping angels again. They did all their best but in the end it seemed to be like I was stuck in Guadix. At the bus station I could finally get a connection to Vera in the east of Andalucia and from there to Murcia a 90 minutes break. Start in Guadix: 6:00pm. Arrival in Murcia: 2:30am. I felt like travelling to Siberia or even further away - eight and a half hours of travelling, come on, Murcia is still in Spain, isn't it?

Per Mobiltelefon

Granada - the Alhambra!

The next morning Isabel didn't have to go to work so we could both get up late, having breakfast together after which she took me to a service station on the way to Granada. It was already about 2:30pm when I got there but I thought, hitchhiking from service stations in Spain must be much easier than standing with your thumb or a sign on the street. But what I thought was wrong. It took me about two hours waiting time to find someone who could bring me next to Loja and who wanted to show me Caviar and Salmon production in Riofrio, but unfortunately we couldn't see any Salmon in the river there. From that service station he took me to I could easily find someone else to Granada, a man who worked in a public office in Huelva and whose family lived somewhere close to the Sierra Nevada, which was very beautiful to see while driving, later also the Alhambra, approaching to Granada. I crossed the city all by feet, passed the Cathedral and went to the Mirador San Nicolas to have a good view over the Alhambra. Then I went back to the city center to take a bus to Albolote where I found out the day before a service station on the highway was quite close, at which I arrived at about 11:45pm with the kind help of a friend over the Internet, completely different from what I planned. What were the problems? First, of course, I started too late from Malaga, but that was ok. Then it took too long to find someone for Granada which was my fault since I did ask only for Granada and not for cities on the way, which I did after almost two hours of waiting. Then I should have walked faster in Granada to get one earlier bus for Albolote, which came every hour only. Then I should have had a better description of how to find the way to the service station, probably a printed one, since there was no public city map, almost no street names' signs and the people living there, even taxi drivers did not know about the streets I asked them, the ones I noted to get to the service station. Finally, the station was very hard to find during the night so it took me more than one hour to walk different streets and ways back and forth until I reached it. There were many obstacles as if I was meant to reach it that late. Tomorrow I was sure to get on more easily. For now I wanted to recharge my mobile, write something and rest a bit in the restaurant nearby, El Torreon.

Per Mobiltelefon

Chill out in Malaga

After that trip to Tarifa I wanted to spend another day in Malaga for the Feria. In addition, after that magic moment after I woke up in the late morning while Isabel was already gone working, I wanted to take a break, chill out and organize my way back to Germany passing Granada, Murcia, Valencia, Barcelona, Montpellier and Lyon. I didn't want any further experiments with Torino, Milano and Switzerland nor with the Cote d'Azur and Monaco. I had the feeling that I passed the zenith of my travel, all the rest was coming back home, no much desire for more adventure. So I spent some time in the Internet finding good couchsurfing and hitchhiking possibilities to not have to many adventurous interruptions any more. The evening I spent with Isabel cooking and eating some dinner and talking sitting on her terrace.

Per Mobiltelefon