Wien

I didn't expect to visit Wien but when I met up with Kruopa in Bratislava, we decided to go there to see a lithuanian friend but our sms's were not received, so we ended up looking for hosts..note to Wien members: Why don't you have phone numbers on your profiles - bastards! The hitch itself was pretty simple, although some kind fellow had to inform us we were hitching on the wrong side of the road.. then I was holding the sign the wrong way round, a bit of Lithuanian mental dancing seemed to impress a woman at the petrol station and her and her husband who were going to Munchen, took us most of the way, then a Polish guy took us to the centre.

Eventually, after much arseing around at "Big Internet Cafe" - you have to set up an account there to use it for 10 minutes? Bollox! We managed to call a couple from Switzerland and Uruguay that Kruopa knew. They are both really cool people and definitely recommended as hosts... comfortable bed in the kitchen and good conversation.. I've been through Wien many times to hitchhike south but never actually visited the centre.. it's nice but very expensive!! Internet in the centre - 6 euros, holy fuck. Anyway, supposed to be hitching to Maribor later but I still don't have a host, so may go straight through to Zagreb.

Bratislava. eventually

My hosts from Roznov dropped me off in the early afternoon and I got a ride by some business man, then immediately picked up by some guy who was going to Bratislava. We passed over the Slovakia border, sold some batteries at a petrol station opposite the castle Elizabeth Bathory used to live in. Well that was quite fun, after that I learnt that the guy wasn't going direct but heading for the Hungarian border 100km from Bratislava, where he would visit his family. His family turned out to be a community of err hungarian/slovak gypsy's and some dreaded guys, there house was dedicated to marijuana. Well we smoked a couple of bongs full whilst sacredly watching the Ghana v Brazil game and then they went in search of more, they seemed to be having problems finding stuff.. so opted for cocaine instead, it looked like it was going to be a long dodgy night there because it was already 20:30, so I decided to leave them there and then and try and hitch to Bratislava. I got one ride eventually, 40km up the road and it was very dark, cars couldn't see me and were repeatedly shouting abuse at me, eventually I got a ride from a relatively old guy who called himself "John"... his son worked in England and after ringing my host, he decided to take me to his place, I was given an enormous chicken meal, bread, cucumber, tomatoes, beer, whiskey, an enormous bed in a seperate room and in the morning.. 2 red bulls, breakfast.Ha - the guy had a Rhodesian Ridgeback too, friendly guy but I reckon the AC-DC song "I've got big balls" was written about him, fucking gynormous conkers.

The next morning, I hitched up to Bratislava with one lift, after John had given me a lift to the hitching spot and given me 500 sk (it's about 18 euros), had a quick look around and joined my Lithuanian friend Kruopa at her hosts for a couple of beers.

Just about to go hitching to Wien..

Roznov Pod Rahostem

I'm now in the Czech countryside, in a town called Roznov.. i've not seen much of it yet because I arrived last night after an easy and rather uneventful hitch from Poland and my hospitality club hosts who are theatre actors took me to one of their rehearsals. A russian play called 5 matrioskas.. or something like that, anyway despite it being in Czech, it seemed pretty amusing. After that we hit the bar outside for a couple of cold ones, then went back to their house and spent the evening listening to metal, smoking a bit of weed and drinking plum brandy - fire water!

I woke up this morning and looked at my camera which had lots of strange photos on from the night before including a very artistic view of a cat's arse and another of the inside of my mouth. Well I'll stick them up on flickr when I have time, at the moment there is an insane thunder storm and I'm just supposed to get out on the road and hitch to Slovakia.

Czechowice-Dziedzice

Well, I've left for a 3-4 week trip to Istanbul and back and packed my bag much more carefully this time, I even took my passport. I left to the bus station to catch the bus to Centrum Park Janki but realised I had to leave some money at home, so ran back home and fell over a bottle of empty kwas, right on my nose.. that bloody hurt.

All my running around proved worthwhile though as I made it just in time for the bus, waited about 40 minutes and got a ride to Rawa Mazowieckie.. walked a bit up the road and hitched on the highway. Now most people, see nice things like the Pyramids on their trips, I witnessed quite a disgusting thing instead... I was waiting there on the roadside, when a drunk looking shepherd herding some cows, decided to look towards me and masturbate in the field. This went on for some time and was not particularly impressive.

After over an hour, I got a ride to Czestochowa with this well-dressed looking old guy who was the worst driver I've ever seen, he regularly veared (is that a word?) off the road, repeatedly got beeped at and didn't seem to know where he was going. Even though the road is a direct road to Czestochowa.

Of course the fool leaves me in the centre of the town, so I had to walk a couple of km's to get out of the city, eventually getting a ride from this half gypsy guy (or so he says) who has been looking for a job in Germany, he informed me that the meaning of life was anal, oral and suckfuck. He's a 38 year old guy with a 25 year old wife and likes his brutal sex. He said that Austria was a beautiful country and Belarus too, but Czech Republic is only good in certain places - like the 29km road of prostitutes going to Dresden!!!

This guy dropped me off just north of Sosnowiec and this is where I proceeded a 10km walk in the dark on the side of the road, going along the top of a river, through old buildings and lots of broken glass. By the time, I finished it.. I was absolutely knackered, I was on the south side of Katowice and had fallen down a hill and became really dirty, walked through all kinds of shit and had bonded with a cat who had decided to follow me for a couple of km's.

For whatever reason, there were no open petrol stations on my side of the road.. otherwise I would have stopped before. When I finally made it to an open one, the first person I asked took me down to Tychy, because he was going to Tesco and from a petrol station slightly south of there, I managed to get my last ride at about midnight.. to the wonderful Czechowice-Dziedzice.

I was there for only a second, when my host Ula and her brother came to pick me up. I went back to their house, had a great meal, a shower and then went into town for a stroll. Being a Sunday night everything was shut apart from one alcohol shop, so we bought some beer and sat at the market place, then went home and talked whilst drinking warm wine until 5.30 am (her brother went to work at 6!)

I'm off to the Czech Republic in a few minutes, we'll see how the hitching goes.

Kinga Freespirit Funeral

In the last few weeks, Kinga Freespirit.. probably the most-well known (and deservedly) hitchhiker contracted cerebral Malaria in Ghana, cerebral malaria is a terrible disease with a high fatality rate, unfortunately a few days later she died. I was trying to collect funds here in Warsaw, some people gave money but generally I was a bit disappointed and classed my fund-raising efforts as a bit of a failure.

Her friends and family are now setting up a foundation which will continue some of the work that Kinga started and donations are wanted, so please contact me for more details.

On Friday evening, I travelled up to Gdansk by hitchhiking.. it took about 6 hours, the traffic was heavy, there was a 10km queue after a crash and the police asked us to leave the "droga expresowa".. hmm none of the police have ever asked me to do that before here.. bizarre? I was hitching with my friend Martyna and they wanted 200zl from both of us, so we opted for the "we will disappear and you will never see us again" choice.

Kinga's memorial service took place on Saturday 24th June at 10.00am, it was in a massive church in the old town of Gdansk, it was my first funeral experience.. (actually about the second time I've ever been in a church), many good-looking people attended, from all different kinds of backgrounds, ethnicity and countries. Some people were there who had not met her and some journalists were there. Taxis were provided for everybody from the church to the cemetery. Overall the funeral was a very sad affair but there were inspiring parts and it was great to see lots of people there.. I am a bit disappointed in the local HC members though, where were you guys?

I didn't know her very well to be honest but there was a time when she was hosting many members in Gdansk and I was hosting in Warsaw and we swapped guests. We'd also talked about hitching in Africa, mainly Gambia and down towards Ghana (but I didn't make it because I was too ill to leave Berlin and had to return to Poland). It's quite sad that I didn't know her better as she was a good and interesting person.

You can read more here... www.kingafreespirit.pl and www.ledbydestiny.com

We were then invited to the wake by Chopin and her mother, amazing vegetarian food and good company. After that myself and Martyna hitched back from Gdansk in 4.5hours.. Jason (who has grown his hair and shaved off his beard, barely recognisable) and Magda (who hopefully won't grow a ginger beard) took the train which was 5.5hrs, plus they had to pay for it ;-), haha we win!

Guests & World Cup

Hey, didn't update this again for a while.... I've managed to sort out the old business so that it makes just enough, so that I can keep on travelling without doing too much. Which is good news for the Round the World Trip which will start in October. (not round the world with 80 gays, that's djdirect's schedule)

Had some interesting guests in town, unfortunately I managed to miss "kenkenfujita", he's the japanese dude who hitchhiked all through Africa, Middle East etc in insane countries like Congo, Angola and Yemen.. he popped into town on his way to Russia but I was out of the city at the time, camping in Zegrze with my guest "urg" who spent a couple of days, drinking beer, viewing the "centre of warsaw" as he calls it - which basically was rural places slightly outside of the city. There was talk of doing some old fashioned fishing but it never materialised.

The camping was good fun, or perhaps it was the Polish gin.. (evil Lubuskie).. our neighbours were insanely pissed guys listening to dodgy techno and trance, talking about as Sylwia put it... "trying to find girls for bad reasons".. hmm to be fair the whole camp ground was quite inhabited by chavs. One of the points of this camping trip was to see how the dog would survive in a tent, apart from initially ramming his head into the opening of the tent and then panting all over my face, he actually seemed to understand and my clumsiness was the only thing that would destroy it.

An enormous thunderstorm took place at night, which I liked.. Sylwia was terrified though, apparently it wasn't my best idea to put up the tent within a metre of an electrical plant.... well I went back to sleep and woke up without singed eyebrows and horizontal hair, which is more that can be said for that stupid american fuck Adam, who flew back to Poland (yes, that's right - not Hong Kong) from China just to get a Chinese visa again and then had to cancel his flight because his visa would only come a few hours after his flight left. The total and utter fuckwit now intends to teach in Turkey, which is without a doubt the last we will here from him. He may have a moustache like Ataturk once had but he has more chance of becoming a kebab.

Now then, Urg.. aka Patrick my guest, was an all-round good bloke, who enjoyed a mad night out with insane dancing and 20 beers a day, at first sight he looks a very smiley fella but I've come to realise, he is a bit of a mentalist, who intends on cycling through Central Asia in relatively cold months (November, December) and on through the Himalayas, finally finishing in Singapore.. now I only cycled the bike recently for between 15-20km and I can tell you that his arse will be in endless pain after such a trip. I forgot to mention that he is carrying more baggage than a saharan truck.

Basically he stopped here in Warsaw because both his tent and bike had broken (he cracked the frame, the bloody elephant), fortunately after a lot of time-wasting in Polish shops, with the polish branch of Trek and the stupid american bloke who is replying to his questions.. he seems to have sorted it out. It will take one month though.

You can read more about him here.. www.slowride.org

The World Cup - Polish team was an utter disaster.. the Germans are progressing in a serious und sheize manner, England are playing poorly and still progressing. Spain and Brazil aren't doing too badly but GHANA.. what a team! They're great aren't they?!

P.S.

Can't touch this