Real estate realtors will tell you the location of any given mortgage means more than anything else. A shack by the ocean in California will cost more than a two-and-half bathroom house in middle of Nebraska. The lot on a corner of a busy intersection will surely overprice a place of the same size down a street. Brawn and speed might mean something in hockey, but it is the brains that trumps all. Wayne Gretzky wasn't the biggest, the fastest, or even the strongest, but he knew when and where the right positioning would be. His psychic-like anticipation earned him the most points in the history of hockey, by a wide margin of 900 points to the second-highest scorer. Just because he knew where and when to put himself.
In hitchhiking, the same rule applies. You will NEVER be picked up within a city. It's impossible, even with hundreds of them passing by every hour. Put yourself by a dirt road in the countryside with a car coming by every 10 minutes, and you have a wonderful chance of hitching one up. They are less preoccupied with the need of keeping the traffic moving, and you will look awfully lonely out there. Situate yourself next to a tope (a speed bump that reaches epic proportions) and your chance goes even higher, as vehicles will have to slow down anyway. Get eye contact with them, and you've almost got them reined in.
Before this trip, there was absolutely no experience with hitchhiking between us. After 100 days, we've been in 80 different cars driven by strangers, taking us to all sorts of places, sometimes at their own discretion or destination. We had butterflies in our stomaches when we first started hitchhiking outside Cancun, heading for Tulum, and for a long time we loved the feeling of seeing a car pull over, a hand waving us over from the window. Hitchhiking was much easier and more fun than we thought it would be, and we enjoyed meeting people and getting more intimate with the locals, and sometimes their food and hospitality whenever they invited us to their homes. It was truly the best manner of traveling we've attempted, and the motherly worries and misgivings about the dangers of hitchhiking seemed ridiculous. But by now, we've been spoiled. We actually expect a car to pull over shortly whenever we hitchhike, and if there isn't any within 30 minutes, we get disappointed and frustrated, cursing at the drivers for being greedy (what a thing to say for us parasites!). And when they do, we don't get the same feeling of joy unless the wait was long. But those failures have taught us to be better hitchhikers, to improve our percentages of getting a ride (and patience).
Once, outside a small industrial town with a wonderful name of Ocozocoautla in Chiapas, 40 km away from the nearest city (Tuxtla Gutierrez), we were on the shoulder of a two-lane autopista (freeway). The distance from the next city was good for hitchhiking, not too close - get within 10km and it becomes exponentially harder after that. We put ourselves by a place where drivers could pull over on a gravel parking lot. It seemed like an ideal place to thumb. But nobody picked us up for two hours... just an hour is too, too long. We became nonplussed and a little angry, wondering what the hell was wrong with that place. Finally a pick-up truck pulled us over, and we hopped onto the bed. The ride lasted only a kilometer and we were dropped off at a crossroads with the entrance to Ocozocoautla going one way... We positioned ourselves on the corner by the road to Tuxtla - and was instantly picked up by a box truck. Only if we had walked one kilometer further (we had already walked about 3 km to find a good spot), we would've had a much easier time. The problem was that the majority of the cars that came by were heading to Ocozocoautla or the other way in the intersection. By inserting ourselves on the other side of the intersection, the vehicles were filtered, and any cars going our way were certainly going to Tuxtla, not Ocozocoautla. Just so you know. Location.
Another thing about hitchhiking is the patterns in the type of vehicles and the drivers. Most of the time, it's pick-up trucks driven by male Mexicans without any passengers. Sometimes if the cab is full, we will have to climb onto the bed and ride with the wind splashing our heads. On hot days, it's a bliss to feel the contrast of the cooling effect of high-speed winds and the scorching Mexican sun. But we have to warm ourselves under our hoodies and sleeves whenever it's overcast or late afternoon, and brace ourselves for the ubiquitous topes that launches you from your seat like an ejection button in a fighter plane. While it's fun to ride on the back of a truck, it's a nice change of pace to find yourself in a air-conditioned, roomy SUV or van. A few times we had to put our huge backpacks on our laps, craning our heads to see the road, a bag sticking halfway outside the window.
Some drivers are garrulous, some are silent as a lamb. Some are histronic, gesticulating big and wide, some limit themselves to a nod or a shake of the head. Some laugh out loud, some remain tight-lipped. Communication is not a factor for us, despite our deafness. In fact, we consider it more challenging to be vegetarians in Mexico than to be deaf travelers there, attributing it to the readiness of the Mexicans to expect communicative barriers as soon they see that we're gringos. A hearing person inept in Spanish is no better than a mute traveler. But it does become more of a factor when we find ourselves trying to engage with an illiterate.
We feel as if a world have been unfolded before us when we hitchhike - we see the people upclose and catch a glimpse of their daily lives, and for an instant become a part of them. Tourists who visit the ruins and luxuriate in the hotels remain divided from the natives and locals, remain outsiders. We are certainly outsiders without a doubt, our white skin and backpacks conspicious like a sore thumb, but there is a level of intimacy with the culture and the people that we don't get anywhere else outside hitchhiking.
goofing off while waiting for a car
"here truckie, here truckie"
RESPECT THE SIGNALS
on back of a box truck, in Yucatan
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