Why You Should Try Hitch Hiking (in Southeast Asia, or Wherever)

I've never waited more than five minutes. Without fail, someone always pulls over. Work trucks carrying cement bags, a retired TV broadcaster driving home to Brunei, a pick-up truck carrying pails of paint, a man driving his motorbike to collect banking items in the mountains. The people that stop for you when you are walking down a highway or a mountain road are some of the most interesting people and make for some of the most interesting experiences. And hey, it's free.

It's a strange thing, hitch hiking in Southeast Asia. Standard transportation costs are generally low and affordable, but the variable of hitch hiking adds something special to the mix. For a brief (or not so brief) moment, you are given an unmediated opportunity to see someone go about their daily lives. You are invited to come along for the ride. It's the antithesis of traveling comfortably, predictably, of an organized tour.

Luckily things have always worked out for me. But simply by principle of approaching travel this way, you are negating certainty -- the certainty of where you are going, how you are getting there, how long it will take, the people you will meet and the things that will happen. And fortunately for us, people tend to be kind, generous, hospitable and just as curious as you.

Batu, Indonesia has been called Java's Little Switzerland. It is a locals' holiday town surrounded by magnificent volcanoes and rolling green mountains. I headed up into Selecta, an old Dutch resort, and started walking up into the hills. I got out of the angkot (van buses found in Java) and walked maybe 100 meters. The thought came to me that I should put my thumb out and see if someone would stop. Sure enough, within two minutes a man stopped on a motorbike.

His English was excellent, a rarity in much of Indonesia. He asked me what I was doing and I asked him where he was going. He said he was going up into the mountains to see friends, and I asked if I could come.

We spent the entire day together. The rain made for natural rest stops, so we had lunch overlooking a valley (photo above) and we talked widely about Indonesia, his life in Batu, my life in Canada and what I was doing there in the first place. We stopped at a rest shelter while the rain poured and talked about the family he had in Toronto, Canada. It turned out he wasn't exactly going to see friends. He worked for a bank and he was collecting loan payments from a family. We drove through the mountains and ended up here, where we were invited in for coffee and cakes.

He had driven me all around the mountains, and then back into Batu. We stopped by his home and I met his family. His wife insisted I have coffee and speak English with their daughter, who studies English in school. He told me that if I ever come back to Batu, I am very welcome to stay with him and his family for as long as I would like. He paid for lunch that day and rejected the money I offered for gas. 

I decided to hitch hike from Sipitang, Sabah to the Sarawak border in Malaysian Borneo. It was 5 PM and I was told there were no more buses going to the border until morning. I walked no more than two minutes and a work truck pulled over. Two guys from Kota Kinabalu were working on a construction project near the border. We arrived at the border, I walked across (and incidentally, didn't get the fucking stamp -- lazy border security, you dicks), and got picked up by a man driving back to Brunei. We drove for at least an hour or two to Lawas, Sarawak and chatted the whole way. He was a retired TV broadcaster.

That night in Lawas, I was smoking a cigarette outside when a man I had talked to earlier that evening comes around the corner stumbling drunk. He mentions that he is going up into the mountains, to Bekalalan, in the morning and that I'm welcome to come with him. We drove six or seven hours deep into the eastern mountains on rough logging roads and finally came to Bekalalan. Not technically hitch hiking, but nearly.

He insisted we need a beer break. No, beer breaks.

The road from Kampot to Sihanoukville in Cambodia is straight along the southern coast. That's one of the easier ways to hitch hike: the more direct the main roads to your destination, the easier it is to find someone going in your direction. Again, I waited no more than five minutes, and I big truck carrying hundreds of bags of cement pulled over. I jumped in the back with the cement bags, but one of the guys told me to come inside. They both spoke almost no English, but he asked me "Sihanoukville?" and I said yes.

We drove for nearly two hours, and he pulled to the side of the road. It was punishingly hot inside the truck, but somehow it didn't seem to phase the driver. With some hand gestures and the circumstances, it was clear this was as far as he was going. Just before he stopped, he looted around in a glove box and shoved 5000 Reals in my hand -- around $1.25 USD -- and gestured that I could get a motorbike taxi the rest of the way to Sihanoukville. No one, no one, had ever given me money to keep traveling like this before. I thanks them profusely and we waved at each other as they drove off. I walked another 50 meters and someone else pulled over.

There are a variety of transportation options in Cambodia, it's just that only two are really available to foreigners -- buses and minivans. A third option that I had seen numerous times seem to be taxis that are packed literally until they can't fit anymore. They leave the back hatches open so the goods being carried can hang out the back. A car like this pulled over, six or seven people inside a standard car, and the driver motioned that I can hop in the trunk. I'm in the back nestled between big water tanks and, well, the open road. Cambodians thought it was pretty funny, I guess. They took pictures and gave me thumbs up with big smiles as they drove behind us. I paid the driver the money I received from the last work truck, the 5000 Reals.

Hitch hiking can add to a travel experience. It can be challenging, unpredictable and humbling. Should it be exploited as a means to travel for free? Not necessarily, but some people certainly see it that way. I don't hitch hike that often, really, but each and every time I do it leads to a very memorable experience, like the two Thai ladyboys that picked up me up while I was heading north from Surat Thani in Thailand. Hitch hiking shifts the approach to travel, from self-importance and self-focused travel to literally reaching out to everyone around you and relying on someone's goodwill, which is found aplenty. The people you meet, the circumstances you find yourself in. This is stuff you truly can't buy.

Phnom Penh: "Paris of the East" or Brazen Wild West?

I've said it a hundred times, I'll say it a hundred more: I love cities. Whatever shape and size, I love the energy, the hustle and bustle, the edge of the city. Not to mention -- and I recognize I'm basically inviting disagreement in saying this -- I feel cities are increasingly the better representation of what daily life is like in most places. But one of the most notable exceptions to this is Cambodia, where around 70% of Cambodians continue to live in the countryside and in small towns and villages. In this case, Phnom Penh isn't what Cambodia is really like. It's an anomaly, and a miscreant anomaly at that. It genuinely feels like a big Wild West town, a frontier city.

Sure, there are the hallmarks of most big cities and capitals in "developing countries": trash strewn streets, homelessness and begging, chaotic and seemingly lawless traffic, shitty public services, open air street markets every few blocks, mothers bathing their children in a public park, gated and guarded neighbourhoods with expensive new apartment complexes, a Rolls Royce dealership, KFCs. Extreme divisions between the rich and poor. Phnom Penh has all of that and more in ample portions. But it has a very different quality.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and forcibly evacuated the entire city to the countryside into agrarian communes. The city, to the best of my knowledge, laid dormant and
basically empty for the better part of five years until 1979. Prior to their barbarous conquest, Phnom Penh was said to be one of the most beautiful cities in Southeast Asia, but this beauty and French-tinged sophistication seemed all but lost in the interim. Walking around Phnom Penh today, 35 years later, French colonial buildings are all over, but they are mostly falling apart and sandwiched between hurry-hurry-put-it-up apartment blocks, derelict and disused buildings often squatted, or commercial buildings built within the last five to ten years.

Foreigners come here for two or three things, and only those two or three things. One, tourists come for the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge south of the city, the torture base of Toul Sleng (or S21), and maybe the royal Grand Palace. Other than that, there "isn't much to see". Two, foreigners come for work. Embassy workers, foreign investors, small businesses. And three, most interesting and certainly most depraved of all, the sex tourist. You can see them mostly along the riverside, middle-aged white men sitting alone drinking beer at 10 AM. There are entire streets of bars that only faintly disguise their actual purpose of prostitution. It's pretty in the open, everyone knows what it's about. No secrets here.

I wandered into an abandoned French colonial building near Wat Phnom. The perimeter of the building had a high metal fence with one entry point on the corner, but people were hanging out in front and there seemed to be activity inside. Trees grew through the windows into the building, the roof had partially fallen in, faded yellow paint covering the building crumbled off with pieces of concrete. I've done it quite a few times now, but going into a place where poor squatters live and work is always delicate. You're never sure if you are welcome, you are never sure what might happen inside, and safety isn't really on the radar.

Inside, maybe three or four families occupied the ground floor of the building and seemed to be operating a car wash business. Kids played in the dirt with car parts, men washed and detailed $40 000 USD vehicles. Everyone present was a bit suspicious when I walked in (see: sex tourism), but quickly they realized I just wanted to look around.

The building was three or four storeys tall, but the only floor in use was the ground floor. And for good reason, the staircase leading up to higher floors was literally falling off the walls. The ceilings were caving in, there was shit and piss and debris everywhere, and an army of bats that flew higher up each time I came to the next storey.

Outside, men and women that lived in the derelict building were making charcoal. This kind of work is some of the worst I have ever seen, especially in places like the Smokey Mountain slum in Manila, Philippines.

I saw this alley and it looked beautiful in the light. It was a Sunday, so tons of people were off work (or not?) and milling about with friends and family. A group of men sat in plastic chairs yelling at a TV showing kick-boxing and gambling small bills.

I was walking out of the alley when a man said, "Have a beer." If you have never been to Southeast Asia, understand that almost constantly people are sort of talking at you: want a tuk tuk, want some weed, want a girl, and so on. I took a few steps and turned around and looked at him. He was sitting with his friends, just drinking beers. He said he wanted to buy me a beer. I couldn't refuse his offer. They bought beer after beer and we talked in broken English. We shared fried cockroaches (or some such insect) and smoked cigarettes. For a moment I felt like I was part of their neighbourhood.

Phnom Penh refurbished the central market years ago, and it seems set as an example for this new Phnom Penh. Clean, fresh paint, well-organized.



I loved Phnom Penh, but I love most of these kinds of places. Rough around the edges, lived in, gritty, however you might describe them. There's personality here, the city has character. Spend more than a day in Phnom Penh, and you will spend more time here than most.