From the Baltics to the Balkans, via Wrocław

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I left the Baltic countries in a truck driving to Olsztyn, Poland. It was 10pm in Kaunas, Lithuania, and I was at a very empty gas station asking the few cars that came by if they were going in the direction of Poland. Finally, after about an hour of no’s, a truck with Polish license plates pulled up and I asked him for a ride. He had a lot of stuff in his front seat and looked a bit apprehensive about letting me in his vehicle, and after a moment’s pause he asked me if I speak Polish. I replied “Cześć! Kurwa! Poproszę piwo!” (Hello! Shit! One beer please! -- my full Polish vocabulary) and he laughed so hard that he waved me in. Nearly three weeks earlier when I had asked my new Polish friends, Mija and Kuba, what the most important word to know in Polish was, I had no idea that “Kurwa” would actually turn out to be so useful.

Traveler's tip #2: If you ever go to Poland, remember the word “Kurwa” (pronounced kur-vah, with a rolly r)

We got to Olsztyn around 4am and I was exhausted after sleeping on and off in the truck, feeling like I should talk to the driver since he was giving me a free ride but also just wanting to pass out. This is the downside of hitchhiking, especially overnight trips or if you don’t feel like being social. I walked about 200 feet away from the road and set up my tent in a field to get some sleep, only to be brutally awoken two hours later to realize that very busy road had materialized about 10 feet away from me, just out of range of my flashlight earlier that night. I packed up my tent and walked 6km across the city since the spot I was in was terrible for hitchhiking and found a much better spot at a bus stop right next to a beautiful lake. This is the other downside of hitchhiking, sometimes you get stuck in a bad spot and have to walk a lot. [Side note: I just realized that I’ve started thinking of long distances in kilometers but still think of short distances in feet and inches. Weird.]

The lake near the hitchhiking spot, perfect for a refreshing swim and a few back flips! 

After swimming, I was really lucky and found a truck driving directly to Wrocław (pronounced vrots-wav). What should have been a 6 hour drive turned into 9 when the extremely slow trucker decided to take only back roads rather than pay the tolls on the freeway. He spoke no English and very minimal German, so I got quite a bit of blog writing done on the road since all we could talk about is stuff like “My name is x I am from y” type of thing.

Traveler’s tip #3: Trucks are great for hitchhiking because they’re going long distances and the drivers are usually bored and appreciate the company of a traveler, but they are also very slow-moving and foreign truckers rarely speak English.

The Sky Tower, Wroclaw's phallic landmark

Eventually l got there and spent the next week having an awesome time in Wrocław. It’s a really amazing city; big but not too crowded, full of students and events, and I got the impression that it was a very liberal and open minded city. Go there if you ever visit Poland (which you should). Mija and Kuba, who already felt like very close friends after basically living with them for the last couple weeks since we met at the gas station, introduced me to their amazing friends and I immediately felt like I could fit in in Wrocław and have a great time living there. Wrocław also has an incredible fountain show at night, with a fountain that lights up to the music in an insanely trippy display.

The fountain show

The fountain show

Aiko, my new favorite dog

After a week of chilling, exploring Wroclaw, and getting quite a bit of work done on my current editing project (a grant proposal for an Israeli psychologist), I wanted to go to the mountains. I made Zakopane my next destination, in the center of Poland’s Tatra mountains. After some thorough research on hikes in the Tatras and consulting with several other hikers and travelers through the Couchsurfing website about the least touristy and most wild hikes, I felt prepared for Poland’s mountains. Just as I was about to leave to hitchhike out of Wroclaw, my plans took an unexpected 180. As I stuffed the final t-shirts into my backpack, Mija looked up from her computer, “dude, a guy just posted on the Poland hitchhiking facebook group that he’s going to Slovenia tonight and has space for an extra passenger.” I stopped in my tracks. Change of plans, I’m going to Slovenia! Ever since visiting Slovenia in the winter, I had wanted to come back and hike Triglav, the tallest and most sacred mountain in former Yugoslavia and the Julian Alps. This was the perfect chance. So I jumped on a tram in the opposite direction and met up with this trucker who was driving overnight to Slovenia, extremely thankful that I had no bookings to get in the way of this spontaneous decision.

Traveller’s tip #4: Never book anything in advance. Anything! You never know what great spontaneous opportunities you’ll miss out on if you don’t leave your options open. The best things happen at the last minute.

This time I couldn’t hold back from sleeping, and fell asleep immediately in the front seat, feeling a bit bad that the driver was listening to me snore instead of having a nice conversation to keep him awake, but he was really nice about it. After 6 hours of driving, we pulled into a rest area so he could take a nap also, and he let me sleep in the bed above the truck cab for a couple hours. That was a unique and cool experience, being in a tiny compartment above the truck cab where the floor was covered in mattress foam. When I woke up, I took advantage of the free wifi to decide where I was going in Slovenia, but a few hours later my idea to go to Maribor changed when we took a different route. So my next idea was Ljubljana. I sent a bunch of last minute couchsurf requests and got a couple responses saying they could host me later in the week, so, a few miles outside of Ljubljana, I finally settled on going to the mountains. 

The trucker dropped me off at the turnoff to Bovec, and I hitched a ride with another guy the rest of the way. He was really nice and had some free time, so he took me on a little tour of the area, showing me a spot on the river where there are music festivals and nature parties all summer, and eventually taking me about 30 minutes out of his way to my destination. People are so, incredibly nice! Hitchhiking really restores my faith in humanity; it’s the best way to meet the nicest people, because only really nice people are willing to pick someone up and take them to their destination just for the sake of helping out. And yes, I still have both of my kidneys. I arrived in Bovec with the warm fuzzy feeling in my heart, knowing that there are millions of people out there who always have my back.

 The Soča River, on the way to Bovec, Slovenia

The Great Hitchhiking Adventure: Baltics

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The route

4 weeks

2,923 miles

58 car rides with strangers

$0 spent on intercity transportation

$0 spent on accommodation

It all started as I sat in a friend’s apartment in Darmstadt, half working on editing a research paper (my job while traveling) and half scrolling through my Facebook feed, and I noticed a post in the European Rainbow Gathering page asking for hitchhiking partners to go from Berlin to the Rainbow Gathering in Lithuania. The following morning I packed my bag and hit the road, having a friend drop me at the nearest rest stop so I could hitchhike to Berlin. My final driver offered me a couch to sleep on in her apartment which doubled as the office of her doggy day care business, so I spent the night on a couch with a whole bunch of dogs. The next morning I met Jacob on the train as we headed to the hitchhiking spot in the outskirts of the city.

[side note: for those who have never hitchhiked, there’s a wonderful online resource for finding the best spots to hitch from, and how to get to them via local public transit, www.hitchwiki.org. You should try it! It saves the environment, and is a great way to meet the nicest people. Everyone who has told you you'll get murdered is full of shit, taxi and uber drivers can be a hell of a lot sketchier than people who pick up hitchhikers, who are generally former travelers themselves. Check out this article about hitchhiking safety]  

Several hours and multiple short rides later, we found ourselves at a gas station just before Warsaw, where we met two other hitchhikers, Mija and Kuba, a random encounter which would end up totally changing my course of events for my next few weeks. They taught me the Polish word “Kurwa”, the most important word to know in Polish, and we exchanged numbers since we were all going to the Rainbow. Jacob and I then began asking for rides into Warsaw, and the man who said yes turned out to be a doctor and a great guy who wanted to add to our travel experience by taking us out to dinner at a nice Italian restaurant. Several cups of wine later, we met up with Feodora, a Russian girl who I found through Couchsurfing who also wanted to hitchhike to the Rainbow, and the three of us spent the night in a friend’s apartment who I had met when my dad and I picked her up hitchhiking in Iceland. One of my favorite things about traveling is meeting people and having so many connections in every city; always having a friend to visit and a place to stay.

A scrumptious travelers' meal of crumbling bread, sweaty chunks of cheese, and pickled cabbage

We set off the next morning hoping to make it to the Rainbow, but the small northern Lithuanian roads didn’t have very much traffic, and we got stuck in Ukmerge after dark, so we set up our tents for the night to go the rest of the way the next day. We did have some luck hitchhiking that day though; a Polish police man picked us up and at the end of the ride he handed us 50 Zloty ($13) and told us that Poland has the best vodka in the world, "go buy yourselves a bottle." In the morning were lucky and got a ride directly to the rainbow, stopping at the driver’s friend’s farm house on the way to get a glimpse of Lithuanian village life.

When on a road with very low traffic, you have to get creative to entertain the drivers

The Rainbow Gathering was amazing. I don’t want to talk about it too much here, because I think it’s something that you need to go and experience for yourself without much preconception of what it will be like, but I spent most of my time making music around the camp fire, cooking and eating as a giant group, swimming in the lake, and attending workshops to learning how to do things like acro yoga and slacklining. It’s not a party like many people think--no alcohol or drugs are allowed--but it is a relaxing event where one can clear their mind, meet fellow travelers, and work on things like meditation, yoga, and emotional healing in an environment free of judgement. As I got sucked into the rainbow lifestyle, I forgot about my phone and connections with the outside world and I never made contact with the Polish hitchhikers who we had met near Warsaw, until, one day, Jacob and I were walking around and I suddenly thought of them and asked him what the word they taught us was. We started yelling “Kurwa! Kurwa!” and, out of nowhere, some people appeared in front of us and began to yell “Kurwa!” back. Fate had reunited us, but only to be lost again an hour later.

The lake, somewhere under the rainbow

One of the many Teepees 

After the Rainbow ended I planned to go visit the small Lithuanian villages where my ancestors moved to the US from, but when I walked out to the parking area to try to find a ride towards Kaunas, I randomly ran into Mija and Kuba for the third time. Nobody was leaving from the parking area so we walked out to the nearest village together and they asked if I wanted to come to an island in Estonia with them, where their friend lives. We split up to hitchhike and I decided that if I was picked up in 15 minutes I would follow them to Estonia, otherwise I would head south to Kaunas. 14 minutes later it was decided, I was headed towards Estonia in a camper van full of Czech hippies.

Our campsite, where we got stuck outside of Riga for the night

A picture on the ferry to the island Saaremaa, which ended up getting us a ride to our destination with the guy who took the picture

Estonia was like a dream. Saaremaa is an absolutely gorgeous island in the Baltic Sea, covered in forest and populated with beautiful women. We were staying at the family home of Piret (known by us as Pirate), a girl who had studied abroad with Mija and Kuba, and her mom cooked us amazing Estonian meals and set up their sauna for us so we could run to the sea, freeze in the [actually mildly warm] water, and run back to the hot sauna. We also discovered a little hut by the beach where we made a fire and had a bbq with marshmallows, cheese, and zucchini.

The magical hut

This is what Estonian swings look like

Selfie inception

pre-sauna

Our entry in the guestbook at the hut 

We then headed to Tallinn, an amazingly clean and beautiful city. We were lucky enough to be picked up by a guy who had 4 spaces in his car; hitchhiking in the Baltic countries was proving to be easier than anywhere else in Europe. In Tallinn we explored the city, went to some really funky local bars, watched some of the re-independence day festivities--a holiday to celebrate Estonia’s second independence from Russia, when the USSR broke up in the early 1990s.

Tallinn's main square set up for independence day

chachachachachachow

As with all of the Baltic countries, there was a clash of cultures between the Estonians and the Russians, and I was amazed to encounter Russians who have lived in Estonia their entire lives but still don’t understand any of the Estonian language because they have always lived in Russian neighborhoods and rarely interact with the Estonians. The tension was very evident, and the majority of the drivers who picked me up while hitchhiking in the Baltics asked me about Russia, Ukraine, and how it is reported in the American media. The general consensus that I encountered in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, was that people are terrified of Russia and think Putin is a power-hungry monster who is trying to reestablish Stalin’s empire. Russia’s takeover of Crimea without any significant penalties has led them to believe that the Baltic countries may be next, and there was a lot of nervousness that the US and NATO wouldn’t do anything about it. All of my drivers were very interested in my perspective on the situation as an American since US support would greatly help them defend against Russia, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to offer them much wisdom, as I haven’t been following the news much at all since I’ve been traveling.

Vladdyboy riding a bear, found in a Russian souvenir shop in Estonia

A few days later we left Tallinn to go to Upesciems, a village just outside of Riga, Latvia, where we stayed with a couchsurfer of Mija’s. I said goodbye to Mija and Kuba after the first night, as they had to head back to Poland, but I stayed in Upesciems another day in order to go to a traditional Latvian fish party. The fish party was great; tons of tents sold traditionally-prepared fish and beer, and famous Latvian musicians played all sorts of music on the stage. The beach was a short walk through the forest away, and at midnight there was a fireworks show. We talked, drank, and danced until the wee hours of the morning.

Fish Party! 

Fish with onions and peppers on top

A famous Latvian band

In Latvia and Lithuania, they sell live fish in grocery stores with the option to take them home dead or alive

Finally, the next day, I made it back to Lithuania to explore my family heritage. I went first to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, where Jordan, a friend from Pomona, had just moved to. We spent the majority of my first day exploring a magical park in the city. A juice bar with beanbag chairs in a field welcomed us to the park, giving us a good feeling about what was to come. As we continued into the depths of the park, we noticed that everyone around us had some form of wheels. Here we were, being boring and just walking on our feet, while everyone else rode around on longboards, roller blades, scooters, and multi-passenger bicycle-like things of every shape and size. So we went to the rental stand and decided to start out with a longboard and roller blades. The rental man didn’t seem to care much about when our “hour” ended, and time didn’t really seem to exist in that park, so we rode around on our new wheels for a while, discovering new parts of the park, dewheeling and discovering an abandoned bathroom building in the forest, and finding several paths that were unrideable on such small wheels, so eventually we went back to trade out our wheels for something with better off-road handling. We chose this:

Jordan and I on the Roller Tractor

The Roller Tractor, an off-road monster

It started out as a sort of joke that we could ride around on this bike that we had only seen 10 year olds on, but when we asked the rental guy if we would fit, he just gave us a look like “of course, duh, it's made for people like you”, and moved the seat back. Now we were able to conquer the whole park. And nobody seemed to think it was the slightest bit weird to see two twenty-something year olds riding off-road through the forest on what we had assumed was a child’s toy. I was beginning to really like Lithuania. We parked our newly dubbed “roller tractor” by the river because I wanted to go for a swim. Nobody else was swimming but it seemed like a nice thing to do, so I jumped in, and it was just as nice as expected. Wondering what time it was, Jordan ventured a guess that it was almost 4:20pm, and sure enough, moments later a group of guys came down to our spot by the river and we found out that it was, in fact, 4:20. She had predicted the future. After chilling on a log with our new friends for a while, we set off on the roller tractor for the next adventure, to discover what the blue thing was across the river. As we slowly maneuvered our way onto the bridge, a man gave us a disgruntled look that we were taking so long, but as soon as he saw our means of transport, his expression changed to a look of “oh, now it’s ok, I’ve been there before, I remember my roller tractor days”. Eventually we found the blue thing (mission accomplished!), which was graffiti on a storm sewer drain which doubled as a giant walk-in refrigerator. Crazy. At that point it was beginning to get late and we figured we should return our wheels, so we went back to the center of the park, no questions from the rental man about why we were so late, and went back to the beanbags to finish our adventure in the same place that it started. The day’s adventures had given me a really nice impression of Lithuanian people and culture; I love how they are so active, so accepting, so happy in the summer sunlight, and how they are so creative with their forms of transportation.

Beanbag in the park

The rest of my visit to Lithuania was more family-focused, and the next day I went to the Jewish information center in Vilnius to ask them what they knew about the Berkowitz [later Americanized to Beckwith] family history. They helped me look through the online archives, finding a couple of people who are likely distant relatives. I headed to Kaunas to stay with a friend there, and the next day I set out to find the villages where my family came from, Šaukotas and Grinkiškis. Hitchhiking on tiny country roads wasn’t quite as easy as the highway, but eventually I made it to Grinkiškis, where I found the old Jewish cemetery that my ancestors were most likely buried in. All of the gravestones were in Hebrew and there were very few last names written, though, so I wasn’t able to find any Berkowitz’s. I never made it to Šaukotas because it was another 20km down a gravel road, but I was told that there are no remnants left of the Jewish community anymore.

The Jewish cemetery in Grinkiskis, Lithuania

The sign for the Jewish cemetery

A Star of David on a gravestone

A friendly, questionably homeless man who really wanted me to take his picture in front of the church

I was then planning to head south to Poland, but my plans changed yet again at the last minute when a friend I met in Latvia invited me to stay at her apartment by the sea for the weekend. We spent an amazing weekend drinking beers on the beach and exploring the trails through the bog in Ķemeri National Park under the full moon together. After the weekend I found a truck driving to Poland and jumped on board, reflecting on how one of my absolute favorite things about traveling alone is finding random opportunities with new friends everywhere, and the short travel romances which always feel so perfect.

Potato pancakes. Latvian style

The beach in Latvia, with Ilona

Pomona Reunion: Balkans to Berlin

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Europe round two started off on a good note when the Norwegian family sitting next to me on the airplane bought me a sandwich and beer and offered to let me stay in their house for the night. I politely declined the offer, as I had a connecting flight at 7am the next morning, but they wouldn’t let me refuse their gift of Norwegian currency to buy myself breakfast with. These random acts of kindness seem to happen all too often when traveling alone. I found a nice quiet corner in the airport to rest in and got myself a nice breakfast and a beer to start off the morning before boarding the flight to Dubrovnik, Croatia. Upon landing in Dubrovnik, I was greeted by friends Ryan, Tyler, Corry, and Zach, who I would travel with for the next couple weeks. Corry was traveling for the summer before starting medical school, Tyler was taking vacation from his cancer research work in Seattle, Ryan had just come from Spain where he had been teaching surf lessons for the summer, and nobody is quite sure what Zach has been doing, he just kind of showed up to have a good time. Our first stop was Sea Dance music festival in Montenegro.

Our first introduction to how ridiculously unorganized Sea Dance would be was the buses from the airport. After a couple of hours of confusion, there was no more space and we didn’t get on a bus. So we got a taxi to the border of Montenegro and hitchhiked the rest of the way to the festival, extremely lucky to find a driver who was willing to stop for 4 guys on the side of the road.

On the ferry with our driver

Getting into the festival was just as unorganized as the bus, which would characterize our experience with just about everything in Montenegro. Beautiful country, but not quite prepared for an influx of 20,000 foreigners coming to party. Once we got our camp set up, we took a taxi into the nearby town to stock up on groceries and booze, without knowing that there was an identical grocery store only a 10 minute walk from the festival grounds. The taxi driver repeatedly offered to sell us cocaine and weed at ungodly prices and when we refused all of his offers, he seemed pretty upset and charged us a ridiculous amount for the ride.

Traveler’s tip #1: When traveling in Montenegro, never take a taxi. Just hitchhike. It’s safer, cheaper, and more reliable.

Once we had enough food and booze for the next few days, we found another taxi back. This driver was much more friendly and reasonably priced, though upon seeing us drinking out of a 2L beer bottle in the backseat while stuck in a traffic jam, he passed his water bottle back for us to fill it with beer. He then continued to take swigs of beer and wave the bottle out the window at every girl who we passed, hiding it only when the police were nearby. Welcome to Montenegro.

The next few days went by in a blur of electronic music, beach chillin, water trampolines, 2L beers, and dubstep at the reggae stage (yeah...Montenegro). The festival took place at Jaz Beach, with beautiful views over mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. The days topped 40C (100 something F?), so there was really nothing to do during the day but lay in the water or play on the giant inflatable waterpark they had set up in the sea. The music played all night, meaning that there was only about a 1 hour period between when the music stopped and when it got too hot to sleep in a tent. So nobody got much sleep, but that was to be expected. The disorganization of the festival turned out to be nice in some ways though, as the fence around the festival grounds extended only about 10 feet into the water, making it extremely easy to bring in beer from the market just on the other side of the fence. Also, we discovered the greatest thing in the world at the supermarket there: they had a grill tent outside of the store with tables to eat at where a guy would grill any meat you bought in the store for free. After a few days of a nearly beer-only diet, warm greasy Cevapi (Balkan meat sticks) was the best thing ever.

Somehow I managed to get away without a single photo of the festival, so I'll just leave this here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/seadancefestival/sets/72157655699858669/

And this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7YIOS_KCv4Ie4P9xVO9tyHPb6pNn8lIC

After a crazy 4 days, we got on a bus back to Dubrovnik. The rest of our trip together was already planned out except for our accommodation in Berlin, which I had volunteered to take care of. I was intentionally waiting until the last minute to book something, because it seems that opportunities always open up when you travel without plans, and sure enough, the guy who sat next to me on the bus was from Berlin and offered us his apartment to stay in. So that was cool.

Once we got to Dubrovnik we ate and immediately fell asleep for the next 16 hours. The next day was, yet again, putridly hot, so we spent a lot of the day in the water. But first, we explored the old town a bit. Dubrovnik has a really nice old town, filled with brick buildings and red tiled roofs giving it a very Mediterranean feel, though it is so packed with tourists that it doesn’t seem Croatian at all.

Sunset from our balcony

Dubrovnik old city

The kittens loved Thizz

We made the best of the tourist hell by renting mopeds and went to a beach where a local guy told us there is good cliff jumping. He was right, the cliff jumping spots were amazing, including cliffs anywhere from 5 to 20+ meters high, a few of which were overhanging, making them perfect for jumping and deep water solo climbing. Unfortunately we didn’t get to try the latter, as we didn’t have shoes and I stepped on a sea urchin on my first attempt. Ouch. But the cliff jumping was amazing, into the perfectly transparent blue water of the Adriatic. And there was a water polo field set up in the sea, where Ryan and Tyler got to test their skills against the Eastern Europeans.

The new rides

Thizz blocks a shot from Croatia

he shoots....he scores!!

cliff jumping in Dubrovnik

After Dubrovnik we all flew to Prague together. Prague is a beautiful bohemian city with cheap beer and really good meat. On our first night, a Czech friend that I had met in Egypt organized us a bbq with about 4kg of meat ranging from seasoned pork neck to sausages. I always like to experience the traditional local food while traveling, and it was amazing to eat this delicious meat that Czech people feast on regularly. The rest of our time in Prague was spent exploring the city. After working on a pub crawl in Tel Aviv a few months earlier and seeing how much of a rip off it was, I vowed never to do another pub crawl, but in Prague we did the Drunken Monkey pub crawl and it turned out to be a ton of fun. Another highlight was the blind museum, where a blind person led us through a series of completely dark rooms where we had to use our other senses to figure out where we were. I think they have museums like that in many cities around the world, and it’s definitely a worthwhile experience if you get the chance.

The BBQ gang

Prague

Prague

The last stop of our trip together was Berlin. Berlin is a great city filled with young people and creative ideas. Though the atmosphere is sometimes a bit too hipster and pretentious for my liking, it’s overall a great city to visit. We watched Zug der Liebe, a techno parade in the streets, went to a day party at a beach club on the river, found our friend Matt, saw the graffiti on the Berlin wall, ate doner kebabs, and got denied from several overly-pretentious clubs.

Day party in Berlin

Unfortunately it was time for us to say goodbye as our trip together to come to an end, but this meant the start of a new adventure for me. I hitchhiked from Berlin to Darmstadt with little money left but with nearly two months still on my Schengen visa. This was the first time I had hitchhiked in Germany and I was amazed at how easily I was able to find rides when asking drivers in German at rest stations. I never waited more than five minutes, and the drivers who took me seemed eager to show off how fast their fancy cars can go on the German autobahn. I reached the other side of the country faster than the train, making me seriously question why I had ever paid for transportation in Germany in the past. For about a week and a half I stayed with friends in Darmstadt and Mannheim before setting off on my longest hitchhiking trip to date, travelling nearly for free to reduce the stress of thinking about money, which has turned into possibly the greatest adventure yet. More on that coming soon.