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Strange nights spent away from where you normally sleep (usually no beds involved)

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    #26
    And some earlier teen exploits: we all told our parents we were staying at someone else’s house and slept on the shore at Venekotensee, an artificial lake down the road from the village/RAF camp near the Dutch border.

    After that there was an official approved teen party in John’s cellar (German postwar blocks always have big cellars) where I slept on a smelly rolled up carpet. There are pictures of this one, very rare at the time (79) and I’m wearing a nylon pac-a-Mac and have a Xmas decoration ear ring.

    And between that and Wolverhampton I was on the dole and used to hitch down from Fife to Peterborough, where 2 of the Brüggen crowd had moved. One return trip went horribly wrong (students on acid, ‘borrowed’ car, siphoning petrol in Bathgate...) and I attempted sleep on an M8 embankment and Waverley station. The latter had deliberately slidy orange plastic bucket seats to prevent vagrants like me getting comfy.

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      #27
      Hitching is playing an important minor role in this thread. I used to do it a lot, sometimes for short journeys when I knew the public transport, though cheap enough, took you round all the villages on your way home so hitching ended up quicker most times, and with often an interesting chat thrown in; I would also thumb lifts for longer journeys, usually from north Wales down to the south of England.

      I have probably seen no more than a handful of folk hitching in Spain over the past few years (though I did it once: got picked up by a tractor near Avila). I suppose the practice is similarly moribund in other places where posters here abide.

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        #28
        I slept in a toilet on an Amtrak overnight train once. I had a perfectly comfortable reclining seat elsewhere on the train, which is where I should have been sleeping, but my brother smuggled on some pre-mixed vodka and orange for the journey, and we got roundly trashed. I went for a piss and the toilet was really comfortable (not like the sort of train toilets were we used to, think the walls were lined with padding) and next thing I knew it was daylight.

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          #29
          2003: did a sponsored hitchhike from the UK to Morocco. A guy we met on the ferry who was transporting all his possessions in a vintage horse box pulled by a vintage car offered us a lift to the south of France and a night's stay in his chateau. Unfortunately the (English) horse box burst a tyre on the motorway straight out of Calais, we swerved off the road and had to catch another lift because none of the local garages stocked the right replacement parts.

          Later we got stuck at a service station in Bordeaux and slept most of the night in sleeping bags on the forecourt, until a Moroccan lorry driver offered us a lift to the South of Spain once he'd finished his nap. We climbed into the front of his cab. I was travelling with two friends, one male, one female. The male promptly fell asleep leaving me and my female friend fending off unpleasant advances in broken French ('la femme c'est la monde et l'homme c'est un tracteur et la monde a besoin d'un tracteur' complete with thrusting gestures). We had a furious whispered conversation weighing up pros and cons ('it's freezing outside' vs 'this guy is potentially dangerous'), but in the end we offended the lorry driver by appearing not to trust him when we rearranged seats and at one point our male friend was the only one outside the lorry, and he unceremoniously ejected us all.

          The following night we'd made it as far as a service station in the Pyrenees. It was a proper lorries only service station with a café in a portacabin that served steak and chips or egg and chips with a bottle of red wine for 5 euros each. How could we say no? We ate our dinner, played cards, waited as the last of the lorry drivers drifted back to their cabs, put on all the clothes in our rucksacks, curled up in sleeping bags in the corner of the portacabin and went to sleep. We were woken at 5am by the furious café owner who hadn't realised we were kipping there. Struggled to get a lift that morning until I decided enough was enough, nipped into the portaloo, put my hair in pigtails, did my makeup, changed into a mini dress, and got us a lift in three minutes flat from a Dutch war correspondent who did lorry driving between assignments to switch his brain off.

          Also 2003 but later: my boyfriend used to organise raves in various locations, old chalk quarries, tunnels under bridges, abandoned barns. There was one particularly lovely one in a beechwood forest with all the trees decorated with neon wool (don't worry, we litter picked it all before we left). Two university friends who came with me were city types and got freaked out by the dark and the dogs and the semi-homeless ravers, so they slept in my battered Volvo tank, while I snoozed in blankets under the stars.

          ​​​

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            #30
            2004: first trip to China, doing a summer camp in Changsha (known as one of the 'four furnaces' for how hot it gets in the summer). Last night there we went out drinking and doing karaoke before catching a 19-hour train to Xian. I foolishly didn't go to the toilet before I got on the train and discovered I wouldn't be able to. We had paid for seats and had a cluster of four seats around a little table, but Chinese trains also sell tickets without allocated seats and there's no limit to how many tickets people can sell. The aisles were full, the toilets had 3 people sleeping in each cubicle, people were sitting in the sinks. We got a rota going of each person having an hour at a time to lean on the table in the middle and grab a quick nap, and we stood on the seats every couple of hours to do yoga moves and stave off cramp. I didn't go to the loo until we got off the train and walked to our youth hostel at the other end. After that experience I always paid for sleeper tickets on Chinese trains.

            2005: so, I used to have an American f*ck buddy. I met him in a Prague youth hostel and we travelled round the Czech Republic together. He visited me in Suffolk when my parents were away (my mum expressed concern that I didn't know him very well and that he might try to rape me, I didn't know how to convey that he really wouldn't have to). We went to Stonehenge together once. He was back in Europe once I finished university and we arranged to meet in Amsterdam. I went to a ball the night before my flight, I was horribly hungover, my train got cancelled, I had to hitch a lift to the airport and run through the departure lounge in flip flops, but made the flight with minutes to spare. Met my guy in Amsterdam and it turned out he was camping in one of the parks. I was game for the first night, but we then both agreed the tent was way too uncomfortable for our plans so pooled our resources for a cheap hotel by the canal and spent most of the rest of the holiday naked and having a competition to see who could kill the most mosquitoes.

            ​​​​​​Immediately following Amsterdam, I caught a flight to Vietnam where I was doing another summer camp. The local liaison had arranged for us to join the Communist Youth League for their summer activities on a muddy beach near Ho Chi Minh city. It was standard team-building fair, treasure trails and decorating tents, but there had been some miscommunication so the local attendees were camping and we had no tents with us. They managed to open up a community centre nearby and gave us access to a sort of games room. We had 8 people, a hard floor, a pool table and several dining room chairs to try and bed down for the night. It was not a comfortable experience.
            Last edited by Balderdasha; 10-07-2019, 09:09.

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              #31
              These are great vignettes, Balderdasha.

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                #32
                Later in 2005: two days spent in a four-berth cabin from Shanghai to Chongqing with the other teachers who were going to the same city as me. I remember very little of this.

                Christmas Day 2005. Woke up with two friends under a pile of duvets in my little, freezing cold flat. Ate mini Marks and Spencer xmas cakes and chocolate coins that my mum had posted from England. Caught the local ferry down the Yangtze to the three gorges dam, wearing Santa hats and drinking red wine much to the bemusement of the locals. Went to book into a hotel in Yichang and had a comedy conversation with the hotel owner. He didn't want to book us a three person room because he thought it was immoral for two women and one man to share a room. I eventually ground him down with my infallible logic ('we are British', 'we are teachers', nothing immoral here, 'he is like my brother', 'we are poor, we can't afford two rooms'). Then went to a local pub and played Chinese rules pool with the locals all evening (you're allowed to stand on the table for tricky shots, it's great fun). Ok, so I did sleep in a bed that night but I thought it was still interesting enough to include.

                ​​​​​

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                  #33
                  Easter 2006: hiking along Tiger Leaping Gorge. We under-estimated how long it would take until the next guest house and arrived in the dark, narrowly avoiding trip hazards with our crappy head torches. The guest house was completely full, but we clearly couldn't walk to the next one, so the owner took pity on us and dragged an old mattress out onto the balcony. We fell asleep to the quiet hum of backpackers chattering out in the courtyard.

                  Summer 2006. My friend came to visit me and we met in Beijing. At the youth hostel we got chatting to two guys who had a plan to go to an obscure part of the great wall and, crucially, owned a tent. We grabbed sheets off the beds in our dorm room, slung them in our backpacks and headed off. The obscure part of the great wall was guarded by a tiny, fearsome Chinese granny wielding a scythe who wanted to charge us for walking through her back garden / field. Fortunately, I spoke enough Chinese by then that I just had a long chat with her about how she didn't need to fleece all tourists, and no-one got sliced. A couple of miles along the rickety wall we encountered a Chinese woman walking it in stiletto heels. More power to her. We camped on top of one of the less crumbling towers. The tent wasn't big enough for all four of us, so the guys magnanimously lent it to me and my friend. They were probably hoping to get lucky, but didn't. Those two guys were a large part of my decision to stop backpacking and build a more settled life. They had been travelling for years, had slightly dead eyes and treated people like single-serve friends the way Brad Pitt describes in Fight Club. I decided I didn't want to become like that. When we got back to the youth hostel, the management was enraged that we'd stolen the sheets.

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                    #34
                    You have a real gift for this

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                      #35
                      Why, thank you. I think it is partly that I have quite a colourful past to draw from. This is why none of my adult friends are surprised that I have been diagnosed with bipolar.

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                        #36
                        I'm quite certain that many would not be able to handle the same material as deftly.

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                          #37
                          An acquaintance of mine, some years ago now, down on his luck, ran out of money to pay rent etc and had to rely on the charity of friends. One of these mates ran a bar and for a couple of weeks this bloke was allowed to bed down on the floor of the bar with the understanding that he could help hìmself to beer but that the spirits (this guy could drink for England) were out of bounds. The bar (only one entrance) was locked at closing time, round about one in the morning, and opened again at roughly 11 the following morning.

                          The acquaintance began a job a few months later as a tour guide in Mallorca and started getting his act together but then succumbed to a certain white powder prominent on that island.

                          He's now clean and has been for a few years.

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                            #38
                            My reaction to these stories is to marvel at the boringness of my travels in my teens and twenties.

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                              #39
                              I might have mentioned this before. 1973 in the Yucatan. I was with with a buddy from Québec. We'd spent the afternoon drinking Bombas, so by early evening we reached the egging-each-other-on -to-do-something-really-stupid phase. Guy and I decided it'd be a gas to spend the night at Uxmal, one of the largest Mayan cities in the region. There was no security in those days and it was totally deserted. Magnificent in darkness but also spooky as all get out, genuinely sublime. There's an area known as "the graveyard." That probably wasn't its function, but was given the name by archaeologists as it's defined by a low wall decorated with skull carvings. Naturally we decided to sleep there. Unfortunately our mescal induced bravado hadn't reckoned with the local fauna, mainly insects including several species of scorpion. Despite our unusual state of mind, we realised lying on the ground was a not a good idea, which left the wall itself. It was only about two feet wide, but when you're drunk and tired needs must. I have to say it was a glorious experience. I really don't know how much I slept, if at all. But the noises from the forest filtered through a semi-hallucinogenic haze and shadowed by overarching pyramids is a memory as crystalline now as it was 46 years ago.
                              Last edited by Amor de Cosmos; 10-07-2019, 16:09.

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                                #40
                                My first trip to the Continent was in 1975 when a friend and I hitched to Reims to see another friend. We got a lift from a couple we'd met at Watchfield Free Festival who dropped us off somewhere in northern France. It was too late to get anywhere so we just slept in a field in our sleeping bags. Was woken up by a car crash at about dawn. I just thought that this was normal for France...

                                Hitchiking from London after seeing the Ramones in 1976, by the end of the second day I'd teamed up with some bloke going to Skye. We'd got as far as Fort William and spent the night on park benches before getting an early lorry.

                                In early 1978 three of us went to Manchester to see the Gang Of Four and various other bands at a venue near Belle Vue. My brother and a friend of his were due to pick us up afterwards and take us back home to Rotherham, meeting us by the entrance to the zoo by the triceratops. We got there and waited. And waited. After a long time I suddenly saw the car we were due to meet setting off from the other side of the triceratops. Chased after it for a short while before giving up. We wandered back into the centre of Manchester, past a large, ugly-looking pool of blood in one subway, and spent the rest of the night on the benches in Piccadilly station.

                                In the summer of 1983, me and the friend who I went to Reims with were asked by my cousin to help them by taking a car as she and her famimly moved from Llandrindod Wells to Gort. Over a two week period we never slept in the same place for two consecutive nights. The highlights included spending a night in the back room of a pub in Gort 'cause I was too pissed to drive and sleeping on the quay at Dún Laoghaire waiting for the first boat to take us to Holyhead.

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                                  #41
                                  How big was the triceratops?

                                  That, btw, is one of those stories that is inherently incomprehensible to generations that have grown up with mobiles.

                                  Did the utter demonisation of hitchhiking that Reed mentioned ever happen in the UK?

                                  My sense is that it never happened to anywhere near the same extent in France, for instance.

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                                    #42
                                    Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                    Did the utter demonisation of hitchhiking that Reed mentioned ever happen in the UK?
                                    Not when I lived there. Though women and girls hitching alone would have been viewed as "asking for trouble."

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                                      #43
                                      It used to be a regular thing, and once I was in a position to do so, I'd pick up hitchers anywhere. But I've bearly seen anyone with there thumb out in years.

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                                        #44
                                        Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                        My sense is that it never happened to anywhere near the same extent in France, for instance.




                                        Hitching in France was not recommended. It took ages to get anywhere, and you'd get drivers aiming at you.

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                                          #45
                                          Yeah, it was pretty rubbish.

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                                            #46
                                            That's interesting, because there is a French tradition of "l'autostop"

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                                              #47
                                              My French hitchhiking experiences were fairly negative as well.

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                                                #48
                                                If we did a thread just on interesting hitchhiking experiences, that'd take me about another week as well.

                                                Anyway, back on topic.

                                                2007: two-day sleeper train back from Tibet to Chongqing by myself. I was looking forward to some peace and quiet and alone time reading a book. Lasted exactly two hours until I went to the dining car and ordered dinner in Mandarin. All the waiting staff immediately gathered around me asking loads of questions, 'what language is that guy speaking?' (It was German), 'why don't this lady and her son understand us, they look Chinese?' (they were from California), etc. They kept me as their pet translator for the next two days. Bonus was I got free food. Downside was that the much older German guy kept trying to hit on the waitresses via my terrible translations (schoolgirl GCSE German does not cover translating romantic proverbs about trees).

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                                                  #49
                                                  My friend and I used to get the night bus from Soho to Heathrow and try to kip on the reasonably comfortable sofas in Departures, before getting the first bus home around 6.

                                                  As a night shift worker, I've tried to sleep under desks and on sofas in empty offices, without very much success. Just resting my eyes, really.

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                                                    #50
                                                    I have never come across romantic proverbs about trees, Can you help me?

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