The Long Hitch Home Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Jamie Maslin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62087-831-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-033-4

  Cover designer: Anthony Morais

  Cover photo credit: Thinkstock

  Printed in the United States of America

  for

  Emily

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There are many people who deserve a special mention for their help during the creation of this book. I wish to express my gratitude to all of the many wonderful and varied people (over eight hundred) who so kindly gave me a ride during my long hitch home; to Danilo Gärtner, Owen Coomber, Wim Vanderstok, Ethan Martin, Wolfgang Glowacki, Jessica Nilsson, Manon Margain and Etienne Margain for providing many of the beautiful photographs used to illustrate this book. As always a special thank you must go out to Lucas Hunt: agent, gentleman, poet, friend; for his encouragement during the writing process and staggering patience in waiting for delivery of a long overdue manuscript. Above all, I must thank my amazing wife Emily, for her belief in me and my writing, and for paying my share of the rent during this long, drawn-out creative process.

  In the interests of protecting anonymity, certain names and minor details have been strategically altered in the text.

  There’s a voice that keeps on calling me

  Down the road, that’s where I’ll always be.

  Every stop I make, I make a new friend

  Can’t stay for long, just turn around and I’m gone again.

  Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want to settle down,

  Until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on.

  —The Littlest Hobo

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One: A Devil of a Place

  Chapter Two: Departing in Style

  Chapter Three: A Meth to My Madness

  Chapter Four: I’m Not Racist But . . .

  Chapter Five: Aussie Rules and British Tools

  Chapter Six: Indecent Proposal

  Chapter Seven: A Town Like Alice

  Chapter Eight: Darwin Dilemma

  Chapter Nine: Gangsta’s Paradise

  Chapter Ten: A Little Shooting

  Chapter Eleven: Nature Bares Her Teeth

  Chapter Twelve: Forgotten Temple

  Chapter Thirteen: Meat Cleaver Madness

  Chapter Fourteen: Boxing Clever

  Chapter Fifteen: Canine Carnage

  Chapter Sixteen: Evil from the Air

  Chapter Seventeen: Pleasure Island

  Chapter Eighteen: Touched for the Very First Time

  Chapter Nineteen: Hypothermic Hiatus

  Chapter Twenty: Kashgar’s Lost Arch

  Chapter Twenty-One: Honey Trap

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Raving with the Cops

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Environmental Apocalypse

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Extreme Hitchhiking

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Dog Fights and Departure Gripes

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Tank Graveyard

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Home Stretch

  Photos

  notes and references

  PROLOGUE

  The shrill of a military ambulance siren jolted me from my slumber as if I’d been punched squarely in the face. In an instant we were all on high alert, jumping from our seats inside the dank Red Cross field hospital, hastily preparing for the vehicle’s arrival.

  “Go! Go! Go!” yelled someone outside.

  Grabbing my helmet I ran down the aisle between two rows of steel-framed beds and collided with a petite nurse fixing a bandage around a soldier’s bloodied head, knocking her to her knees. There was no time for apologies. I powered through, running past battered soldiers and a barely human-looking corpse that had been dumped unceremoniously near an ammunition box. My heart pounded in my chest. I hoped I wouldn’t be the one who made a critical error this time.

  Forcing my way through the tent’s heavy fabric, I stepped into a torrent tearing apart the earth, creating ankle-high pools of muddy slop. Within moments the obese droplets had soaked me through. The rain fell with an unnatural intensity, the likes of which I had never experienced before. I shivered.

  Seconds later the ambulance skidded to a halt, slewing sideways and throwing a vile spray in its wake. Two medics reached it first. Wrenching open its rear doors with a critical urgency, they hauled out a stretcher holding a motionless form.

  A primal wailing came from inside the vehicle.

  I reached the ambulance and stuck my head in.

  Three bloodied casualties remained. The nearest cried out, clutching what looked like a bullet wound to the abdomen. He would have to walk. Supporting him as best I could we hobbled inside the tent, just in time to see a fellow medic pretending to have sex with the corpse.

  We burst out laughing.

  “Cut!” shouted the director.

  It was my third day on set as an extra, a job I was doing not out of love for the silver screen but for some quick hard cash while I was working out what to do with my life. Today I had been given the part of a Second World War medic. The day before it was a U.S. Marine, the week before that a British P.O.W.

  All was not going well.

  This particular scene, shot in the clearing of a pine forest in southern England, was battering us into submission. It had taken most of the morning and countless retakes. By now all involved were soaking from the rain machine suspended from a crane above the set, and were more than ready for a hot drink and a bacon sandwich. It would be a long time coming.

  “Do you know how much it costs every time one of you fucks this up?” yelled Rupert, an Assistant Director.

  He was fresh out of school—an expensive one—and rumor had it only got the job through family connections. He was the least-liked person on set, and competition was running high for that accolade.

  “Move over to the ambulance and stay put until I tell you!” he yelled at the extras in the tent. He accompanied his demand by giving those within arm’s reach a slight push as they went past.

  Could he be any more condescending?

  Yes.

  “Chop, chop. Quick as you can, I don’t have all day!” he added.

  But then he manhandled the wrong person.

  A big, muscled, no-nonsense ex-army corporal—a real one just playing the part of a medic on set—spun around and eye-balled Rupert with real venom.

  “Don’t touch me, boy!” he asserted in an uncompromising military tone that superseded Rupert’s tenuous authority. “Why do you touch people as they walk past? Are we incapable of reaching a point fifty feet away without you physically guiding us in the line of travel, or do you just have a thing about feeling up strangers?!”

  My heart warmed to him immediately.

  Rupert went white. The threat of real violence was in the air.

  He might
have had a fancy-sounding job title, but in reality Rupert was the lowliest of the multiple Assistant Directors on set, being a so-called third AD, one step up from the starting job in film—a production assistant or “runner”—and so was hardly in a position to sack the guy.

  Rupert stared at the ground, squirmed uncomfortably, then backed down.

  “Sorry,” was all he could muster in a meek voice.

  I never saw him touch another extra.

  It was another couple of hours before we got the scene right and made it back to the expansive catering tent. The place was heaving with a couple hundred extras: Nazis, U.S. Marines, Red Cross Nurses and Medics, all lounging at long tables looking bored. The majority had spent the morning here, waiting to be called for their particular scene. Not surprisingly, the best food had already been devoured, leaving us with the vegetarian option for lunch—lukewarm bean-based casserole.

  I headed for a table containing a couple of “U.S. Marines” with whom I’d worked the previous day: Chris, a big Greek personal trainer in normal life, who had a strange obsession—or, more likely, complex—with critiquing the size of other men’s biceps, as well as an odd pride in his almost total covering of gorilla-like body hair, and Russell, a full-time extra and total movie nerd who had been in just about every major feature film shot in the U.K. over the last decade.

  “Guess who you’ve just missed?” asked Russell as I sat down.

  “Job done! Job done!” said Chris suggestively with a smile, impersonating the legendary oddball on set, who supposedly concluded all his sentences this way. I had yet to meet him.

  “Is he here today?” I asked, intrigued at the prospect of meeting the man who had been the talk of the set the day before and had acquired the nickname, Captain Black—so called for his resemblance to the fictional nemesis of Captain Scarlet in the hit 1960s Supermarionation, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

  “The good Captain’s been giving it the large portion all morning. He’s really starting to put people’s backs up. Lost track of all the shit he claims to have done,” said Chris, who began to count on his hand, “Dance instructor on Harry Potter; personal stunt coordinator for Tommy Lee Jones; former stockbroker; 7th Dan Aikido black belt; archery instructor on Robin Hood, tactical weapons specialist; ex-Special Forces but currently in the military police.”

  “. . . who of course give him time off to be an extra,” chipped in Russell, rolling his eyes.

  “And he’s only twenty-four! The guy’s completely delusional. If he’d done half of what he claims, he sure as hell wouldn’t be scraping by doing slightly above minimum wage background work,” concluded Chris before adding, “Got very puny arms too.”

  Slightly above minimum wage or not, I wished I were getting more of it. The hourly rate wasn’t so good, but the real money was from all the additional things you got paid for: having your hair cut, getting wet on set, changing costume, receiving your lunch late. The list went on. I’d been booked for a few more random days this month but some of those on set had got weeks of solid work, and a decent slab of cash. I had a couple of other part-time jobs as well, setting up stages for pop and rock concerts, and gardening for a friend’s landscaping firm. None of it was big money, but if I wanted to go traveling, especially on the epic overland trip I had in mind, I needed all I could get.

  I told the others of my plan to head abroad.

  “You’re not going to write about your travels again are you?” asked Chris with a wry smile.

  “I might.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Can’t see why not.”

  “It’s just, I read an online review of one of your books the other night.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, it said, ‘The author sounds like a bit of a tool.’”

  “Sounds accurate enough,” I laughed.

  “How’s your last one selling?” asked Russell.

  “I’m working as an extra. I think that tells you everything you need to know.”

  Indeed it did. The trade was littered with artists, writers, musicians, and other creative types who hadn’t quite made it, at least to the degree of earning a living from their chosen craft. I’d had over forty jobs since leaving school, ranging from factory cleaning to investment banking, from sales to laboring, nearly all had been stop-gaps while I attempted to make a go of something else I was working on in my spare time—which, until recently, had never taken off. With the publication of my first book—a travel memoir on Iran1—the year before, I had naively assumed I would be waving goodbye to such an exasperating working life, and that I could finally become a full-time travel writer. If I ever wanted this to happen, then one thing was certain—I needed to start selling more books.

  Whether writing about my travels or not, adventure and exploration are, and always will be, essentials in my life. For me, they are like breathing—they keep me alive. Their promise nurtures my spirit when stuck in awful dead-end jobs, and while actually traveling the experience renews me afresh, letting the real me emerge, not the shadow of my true self I frequently feel when trapped in tedious, low-paid employment. So often between trips a sort of sleeping sickness descends upon me, a stagnation of spirit borne out of the monotony of making ends meet by any means. And my home town, London, was exacerbating the problem. True, it is a wonderful and varied capital city, and there is much in Samuel Johnson’s old adage that to be bored of London is to be bored of life, but it does also depend on what sort of life. If stuck in London with little money, it can quickly grind you down, with dejection and alienation soon setting in. Most of my good friends had now departed, and were scattered across the country and globe, leaving me wondering why I still remained. It had become a rut. With no car, and rarely having any disposable income, I was nearly always stuck there on weekends, most of which my girlfriend worked, leaving me alone and poor in one of the world’s most expensive cities. So I would wander, trying my best to wring every last drop of interest from its free museums, architecture, and parks that, by now, I had visited and gazed upon all too often, and which seemed to have their color slowly leaching from them. I needed to shake off the gray and get the sparkle back, to wake from my emotional slumber and live life to the fullest again; to swap monotony for rapture through action, doing, and being. I needed to get out of London; to make good my escape, and the further away the better.

  And I knew of a powerful and time-tested method of escape: hitchhiking.

  If there is one form of travel that awakens the real me, it is setting off on an adventure by way of a stranger’s car. Hitchhiking is the travel equivalent of a jolt from a defibrillator, an in-at-the-deep-end shock to the system that within moments of climbing into a random vehicle leaves me reborn as if a different person. On the road you are blessed with the company of such varied characters who drift freely in and out of your life, giving you the opportunity to become acquainted with people from backgrounds who, outside of the hitch, you might never meet. You never know who is going to pick you up, how long you’ll travel with them, and what opportunities will come your way. I ached for new experience, and knew that through hitchhiking it was guaranteed. I needed to gaze upon new landscapes and buildings, to experience new cultures, to meet new people, to taste new foods, but most of all to feel alive again—I needed to journey once more, for within the hitch was life itself.

  My plan was simple, to hitchhike home from just about the furthest point it was possible to go to from England—the southernmost tip of Australia, the island of Tasmania, where my girlfriend’s family came from and we had arranged to spend Christmas together. To make it back from Tasmania would encompass roughly 18,000 miles through nineteen countries: Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, France, and finally England. It would take me past wonders man-made and natural, through the changing of four seasons, and across huge environmental extremes of barren des
ert, tropical forest, towering frozen mountains, and verdant temperate pasture. I anticipated the journey taking between 3-6 months, for which I had around three thousand U.S. dollars to cover food, accommodation, visas and contingencies. It would be a tight budget and a trip like none I had completed before.

  I couldn’t wait to begin.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Devil of a Place

  The island of Tasmania, or “Tassie,” as it is affectionately known to Australians, is a special place. The southern most Australian state, if you keep going south from Tasmania the next landmass you’ll hit is the frozen continent of Antarctica. It is the twenty-sixth largest island in the world, roughly the size of the Republic of Ireland but with a population of just over half a million, fifty percent of whom live in Tasmania’s capital, Hobart, the second oldest city in Australia. This leaves vast swathes of the island empty wilderness. Towering forests, craggy wind-swept mountains, thundering waterfalls and elegant sweeping beaches abound. Unlike the dry heart of the Australian mainland, Tasmania’s climate is temperate. It has cold winters and highly variable summers in which you can experience four seasons in a single day. It is home to some of Australia’s best-preserved historic architecture and convict sites (the island was founded as a penal colony), the world’s tallest hardwood trees—the colossal Swamp Gums (Eucalyptus regnans) which can reach heights of 330 feet—and one of my favorite animals, the Tasmanian devil. This rowdy, muscular, dog-sized mammal is the largest carnivorous marsupial on the planet with the most powerful bite of any mammal relative to body mass.

  After a delightful Christmas with Emily and her family in Hobart—a charming historic waterfront city, whose skyline is dominated by the dramatic four thousand foot peak of Mt. Wellington—it wasn’t long before my mind turned to the Australian mainland and my imminent long hitch home. The only exceptions that I was prepared to make to my rule of nothing but hitching back to England, were when I was in a city—where it is next to impossible to hitchhike—or on seafaring sections of the trip. Under those circumstances I would pay for a ferry to the next landmass, or a local bus to get me to the city’s outskirts. Other than that, I’d thumb a ride the entire way. A ferry left Tasmania from the northern town of Devonport for the mainland city of Melbourne, but I wondered if I could begin my journey in more style than that.