During the spring of 2019, I was finishing my master's. I had a lot of time. With my friend Ada, I attended an entrepreneurship course. The course was taught by Matouš, an eccentric freelancer with dreadlocks. He organizes a lot of cool stuff with his friends, one of them is XChallenge.
XChallenge is a competition for two people. It starts in Czechia and ends in Czechia ten days later. You interact with an Xchallenge app that gives you tasks for which you get points. There are three types of them.
The first type is location-dependent. There are 100 unusual locations in Europe (in almost every country), and in everyone, you can do one task. For instance, in a city with a long bridge, the task might be "create human chain over the bridge." or it might be: "enjoy the longest zipline in Europe."
The second is a daily task. When you wake up and check the app, you find a new challenge that you can do only that day. It is something that makes your travel slightly trickier and a lot more fun. For instance: "use only one item from your bag" or "travel barefoot."
The last type of task you can do anywhere you want. These give you fewer points than the previous two types, but they are not easier. For instance: "invite a millionaire for a beer."
Everything is complicated by a simple rule: You spend less than 10 euros per person per day.
This constraint forces you to hitchhike and try to sleep outside or at people's homes. For the money, you can hardly eat. Taking a train and sleeping in a hostel is out of the question.
I never hitchhiked, at least not seriously. But Ada has a friend that disappears every summer to travel throughout Europe. He hitchhikes, earns money by busking, and lives on the edge. His name is Jirka.
The day before the competition, Jirka returned from Scandinavia. So we met him for some Vietnamese food and talked about his experiences. He described where to stand for hitchhiking, what to take, what signs to put up. He showed us a map: places where he got his ride well and places where he waited for long. His advice was great. We took notes. We felt like we are going on an adventure, and a wizard is sharing his knowledge with us.
We were deciding where to go: East, West, South, or North? Jirka recommended west Europe because it was our first trip. He didn't have the best experiences with Poland (something with highways not being hitchhiking friendly), and with Italy. When he added a story about riding with a guy high on drugs in the Balkans, we decided to go west.
The whole meeting pumped us up. We were anxious to do it ourselves. Moreover, we learned that Jirka didn't even sleep after his return from Sweden. We even asked for stuff that we didn't need. For instance, his sleeping habits are much more punk than we would accept. He was showing us the map where it is safe to sleep. Just find a green place a bit outside the city (of course you need to use the correct maps seriously, use them for everything, you can download maps offline, and it's great for hiking too) and go there. Usually, you can sleep there.
We wanted to prepare for everything, so our meeting ended in the streets of Karlín (middle of Prague). We walked around, and Jirka let us pick suitable places to sleep. Then he evaluated them. Sometimes he said about our guess: "This is not too good. There should be cameras around. Someone will kick you out." For another place, a narrow hole between houses said: "It looks like someone is already living there, but if you come there at 10 pm and it's empty, you can move in. Nobody will come for the night."
We were so excited about the adventure.
After the meeting, we bought three thick black pens and made a plan. We would try to go to Spain without doing too many challenges on the way there. Then we would go through France and do every challenge there.
We also prepared our things. I had a big bag with a tent and big stuff. Ada had two. One was medium with her stuff, and one was small. We called it a little sheep (as a reference to 17th-century Spanish writer). Little sheep contained everything valuable: phones, wallets, documents. The rule is not to put your expensive things in the trunk of the car. You can forget it there, or worse, someone can drive off with that. You want to have it close by.
The competition started at 12 with a video stream with rules and vital information. We could attend the start in person, but it was in the middle of Czechia, we wanted to have a head start. We went to Zličín. We were very competitive.
When I was hitchhiking, it was always something like: I'll try this; otherwise, I can walk or take a bus. So there is only a tiny array of negative feelings you might feel. If hitchhiking is the only mean of transportation the palette of your feelings is much richer. Mainly, you can sink into deep desperation.
First, we waited at a crossroad when there were red lights, we tried to wave at cards turning right (where we wanted to go), but there was no place to stop. Everyone minded their own business. So we moved to some roundabout. There it was not too much better. It was like an hour we were standing at the place. Then you feel like giving up and going home. That adventure is not for us.
Then I decided to find cardboard in the trash to write the destination. When I went back, I noticed a gas station. I asked everyone if they go southwest that we need a ride. One guy offered a place, but he went just a short way. But we were glad to sit in a car and going somewhere.
He dropped us a bit after Prague at a bit better place. We got one other short ride, and then we got stuck again at someplace around 60 kilometers from Prague. We got used to the fact that it might take a while. This time, it took a lot of time. We survived a short storm and had some food, and the sun was slowly setting. We waited and then we just decided to ask everyone to take us. And somebody did.
When I'm in a car, I feel obliged to talk to the driver and make the travel better for him and all passengers. Traveling with people I know, I would be quiet and mind my own business, when I'm sitting with someone in a car I speak, maybe a lot.
He was going to Germany to meet his friends in Stuttgart. It was our first conversation more in-depth. He was as old as we were, but he looked much older. We studied still and had a careless attitude. He worked in Mladá Boleslav as a car manufacturer from his eighteen years.
We stopped at Rozvadov for some McDonald's, and then we drove to Germany. There was a change of weather coming. For hitchhiking, the weather is crucial, so we checked the satellite images. It was raining in half of Germany, thus making it not hitchhiker friendly. We went directly into the storm and setting sun.
The driver took us to a small gas station somewhere near the crossing of A6 and A7. It was already dark and after the rain. It was packed, lots of were people chilling in front of their cars. We asked everyone if they go to Zurich. I have a friend there. She works for Google, and we hoped that we might get there for the night.
When you are hitchhiking, you don't have the best clothes, so we tried to stop cars that looked more regular than the fancy ones, at least from the start. People in fancy cars are helpful too. We collected some no's and decided to ask a guy with the fanciest car around, limousine if he could give us a ride. He wanted, but it was his work car, he called but couldn't take us.
Then we asked another guy in a fancy car, and he took us. He went directly to Zurich. We jumped in with the hope of bed there. When we fastened our seatbelts, something buzzed, and the seatbelts got tighter. We panicked a bit. An unknown guy can take us anywhere he wants. But it was just a safety feature of an expensive car.
We were talking to the guy, he was hiking with his family, and then he needed to go to Zurich for work. He usually does not take hitchhikers, but recently he was out of coins, and one hitchhiker offered him two euros to get to the toilet, so he decided to repay it with us. We were lucky.
When it was going well in a previous car, we scouted where we could sleep in Zurich. We wrote: "Would you mind having visitors this evening?" My friend Jana was fine with that. So now, in a back of a car, we scheduled all the details.
We got to Zurich around midnight. The guy dropped us close to Jana's place. Jana wanted to go to sleep, but she cooked us some spaghetti with cheese and ketchup (that's was a sign of a googler before the pandemic -- no food in the fridge). It was great food, and the best on that was that it didn't go from our 10 euro budget. Then we slept on her floor on a sleeping mat.
We thought that our first day ended successfully.