Hitchhiking to Morocco: Day two
The thrill of adventuring continues…
Day two
That first night was the coldest camping I have done in quite a long time. Wearing every single layer I’d brought barely made a difference, however as my outer layer had been a raincoat with the hood up, it did mean that when I farted the sound weirdly travelled straight to my own ear, sorted of like my own butt was pushed up against my ear canal.
Coldness makes it really hard to sleep, so that first night invovled a lot of confessions about wrongs committed at respective international schools Tom and I had attended in “the good ol’ days”. I would elaborate, except then Tom could be incarcerated. We woke up — technically actually you have to have been able to sleep to wake up, so I suppose we actually just got up — and literally had to rub feeling into our feet. The service station was stocked with what was to become our staple food: bagguettes and coffee — like we totally were one with the French culture, like totally. Also, I got to use a French phrase I actually remember: “Il fait tres froids dans le soir!” in my conversation with a bemused employee. Within minutes of holding up our sign for Lille/ Paris, a resident of the town who had come to the service station at 6 am for fags picked us up and informed us we were on the wrong side of the motorway. Zut alors!
This first hitch gave us a chance to see the town: basically it looked like a pretend village. Like a giant mini golf course, full of weird random monuments and statues and buildings of disconcertingly bright clashing colours.
A woman on her way to work very quickly gave us a lift, but dropped us off somewhere very very very random, and very vague. We had no idea where we were, but we had to walk for miles to get to a slip road. Therefore we hated her. She had been moody and now we were lost and it was 7 am on a Sunday and this was a deserted place. Grrrrr….. (By the end of our hitchhike, however, we have both agreed that actually, she probably was just not a morning person, and we really suck at French so we probably got ourselves into that mess… Anyone who picks up hitchhikers for non-murdering purposes essentially has a generous heart, so we are very grateful to her, and all our rides, and vow to always pick up hitchhikers. Except outside prisons, Tom qualified. And also, neither of us know how to drive, so that’s another little detail.)
Eventually we got picked up by a friendly dad of 2 who brought us to Lille, to what he assured us was the best hitchhiking spot for getting to Paris. To be fair we only saw the outskirts — in fact we only saw that tiny patch of grass by the sliproad to the motorway. But I firmly hate Lille. What a shithole. Seriously, it was gross and grey and dull. AND SO COLD. I felt hopeless and sad and I stung my bum whilst weeing in a bush. But Tom was not freezing and actually rather jolly, so I guess that makes him a better person, poo him.
After several long long hours, we were picked up by an angel by the name of Nadji. What a guy. We were his first ever hitchhikers, and he took us all the way to Paris where he lived, though he worked and lived during the week in Lille, with his cat. Normally the cat accompanied his drives home to Paris, but today, alas, he had to leave her behind. I think we were replacing that cat’s presence. I am so grateful for that odd little coincidence. In Paris he treated us to lunch in a Khmer restaurant! So I could speak to the staff in Khmer! SO EXCITING! We really did try to buy lunch for him, but he absolutely insisted, what a sweetheart. And he bought us a ton of baked goods — from a real Parisian patisserie! What a guy. My head explodes into pain with concentrated sugar, so poor old Tom had to work through that lot on his own. What a life.
Following this beautiful excursion, we had a miserable few hours trying to get out of Paris, to Toulouse — little did we know that Toulouse is 600+ km South of Paris, so no wonder no one was picking us up. A few rain soaked hours later an ex-military Romanian ship engineer of a Parisian luxury dining boat picked our sorry asses up and took us a 1/3 of the way to Toulouse. Interesting guy, cool job, a teensy bit intimidating, but once again, we were so grateful.
The service station he dropped us off at had one of those magic coffee vending machines we were growing so fond of, so we took turns getting coffee, reading our newly purchased road map of Europe (up until then we had NO MAP: fools), and utilising the loos. Whilst I relieved myself Tom made a friend: a Brittany Trucker. Friendly and cheerful to the extreme, I want to emphasize just how impressed I still am by Tom getting us that lovely lift without us having to once again take to the streets.
What a gem that ride was: he had THE most luxurious lorry ever, plush just doesn’t cover it. Also, it was a freakily controlling machine: lorry drivers have to take breaks after a certain amount of time, so his truck would literally force him to stop at those times, and literally refused to let him drive off even a minute before his breaks were up. He plays the bagpipes, partly just to get free drinks in Scotland —if we were ever in his town he’d show us, and seeing as I have ginger hair, perhaps I could do a little of the “Welsh dancing” (I think he meant Irish, but he was insistent). He had been in the navy — “there were no village people in the navy after I joined,” he told us quite a few times, whatever that means! He had quite a few jokes up his sleeves, for example: “how do you make a cat ‘woof’ and a dog ‘meow’? Tie the dog to the roof of your car and set the cat on fire.” Ha. Ha. Ha.
And the pearls of wisdom that we got from him: priceless. “A son explains to his father how to make babies” — which basically means not to confuse knowledge with experience (I think, he didn’t actually elaborate!). “If you have a little culture, spread it far like jam,” or “If you have a little culture it’s like a parachute, if you don’t shut up or you’ll crash.” To describe a particular village we drove through he used the expression, “this is where the crow flies upside down, to avoid seeing misery.”
His grasp of the English language was pretty good, (better than our pathetic French skills anyways) but he confessed he found all the double meanings of words rather confusing, for example, “journey” — to travel, vs. “johnnie” — Brittany traditional cycling onion sellers (these were words he often muddled since they sound exactly the same). Also, “car” — a vehicle, vs. “calf” — part of the leg.
When we finally parted ways, I really did feel sad to leave him, he felt like a slightly racist, very jolly, French father Christmas trucker dude. Another night of camping awaited us!
