How does one end up hitchhiking from Europe to Mongolia?
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| The old map Vojta's grandmother has shown to Vojta for him to show her our planned way |
At first, I was talking about my plan for a long time and was doing nothing to make it happen because I was doing my studies for ages. My original idea was to cycle to China, but I’m slow. So, when I did a little bit of math, I realized that it would take me a couple of years. That seemed a bit too long. (Also, I’m rather bad at repairing bikes, so my bike would probably fall apart before I would leave Europe).
Also, I didn’t want to go alone because that would sometimes be boring (and I would be sick of myself). My boyfriend Huan would never voluntarily leave his country for more than a month (except for a UFO attack or so), so I was looking for a travel buddy. In some countries on my way people tend to find penises very important, so it might be good to have at least one per group. I didn’t have any, so I was looking for people who happened to have one. I gradually found two traveling partners, who then always found a girlfriend and changed their mind.
Then after a short hitchhiking trip with Vojta, a friend of mine, we found out that we might not necessarily want to kill each other even during a long trip, so we decided to go together. Vojta is the most cynical and nihilistic person in the world but he usually keeps his word. (And he promised to learn Farsi for traveling in Iran even though normally he complains he is horrible at languages, so that was a good sign.)
We were still thinking about going by bike, but we eventually agreed to hitchhike. Also, my cousin was by the time hitchhiking to Japan and told me that Mongolia was nice. So I decided I wanted to go to Mongolia instead of just China. Vojta wanted to go everywhere, so making the trip longer sounded like a plan. (Vojta then found a girlfriend too – that made me kind of worried about the journey, but he didn’t back out.)
If you wish to travel like this, it is still helpful (but not necessary, I think) to earn some money before. The biggest black hole for money was the insurance, the vaccination (I’m not hardcore enough to blow this off) and the visas. (Yep. The dream about roaming around free like the wind ends in the very moment one reads the visa conditions for pretty much any country). So, I stopped telling people I was self-employed, and found a regular job.
Then for about half a year we were mostly talking about the journey and doing nothing (at least me, because I had a thesis to write and parties to go to). We decided to start in autumn, which was kind of a stupid idea, but it was still better than ending up in Mongolia in winter. Vojta would go anytime, and I still needed to graduate and do my side-jobs and go to bars and play role-playing games and to do my full-time job for at least a year because I had promised that.
In spring I started to feel guilty because I had still done nothing, so I at least googled the visa requirements and prices of vaccinations, which both made me almost faint. As to visa, going to Mordor would be easier than entering most of the Central Asian countries by land legally (the strategy of most of the governments obviously is to force any foreigner spend a yearly income of an ordinary citizen of a country to allow them entering that country). Also, we found out that we couldn’t apply for any of the most difficult visas from home because they are all valid for 3 months, whereas we would need the first of them in some 4 months after the start of the journey (I don’t count the visa for Iran because it seems – at least from the internet – that it’s not as hard to get).
So, we prepared mentally for a visa hell and started paying shitload of money for vaccination. Then I was too occupied by my thesis, so I just bought a backpack and besides that was still doing nothing, whereas Vojta was sending me pictures of cool-looking places usually someplace in Armenia where we won’t be able to go in winter because it will be too cold there. If he didn’t send me anything for a week, I started to worry that he was going to back off, and the closer the agreed start of the trip approached, the more paranoid I was.
Two months before the planned start I had to tell my boss that I was going to quit, and at that moment it became kind of serious. Are we really going? All the “big plans” I’ve ever came up with eventually failed to materialize. Is the trip really gonna happen?
I also realized that (besides that I still didn’t have the thesis done), I hadn’t arranged pretty much anything except for the vaccinations. But I still had too much work to do on my thesis (and at the back of my mind I still kind of expected Vojta to be kidnapped by aliens, a huge meteorite to fall on Europe or something else to happen that would prevent the trip from happening), so I really started preparing only when I finally graduated – about one month before the time we planned to go.
I bought some stuff (way more than I originally planned, but I was too scared of the 3 or 4 months of cold and heavy rains we will have to survive), we took up a first-aid course, I found a person who translated some basic hitchhiking sentences to Persian for us, we opened a new bank account to be able to withdraw money in other countries without an exorbitant additional fee, I was trying to heal my injured arms so that I would be ok by the time we start the trip, I bought several tablets that would enable me to access internet, write this and use offline maps – and always returned them because they always were somehow broken. (It seems it is nearly impossible in today’s world to buy a device that would be able to do all of these 3 things, have a battery and wouldn’t cost a zillion).
I also cut my hair short in order to make its washing easier and to look the least feminine and the most unattractive possible to random perverts. (It seemed to work for Kateřina Mandulová in Russia, it didn’t work for Viktorka Hlaváčková in eastern Europe much - they are both solo travellers, though - so let’s see).
In the meantime, I was sometimes hit by a sudden sadness that I would miss my boyfriend, or I was, on the other hand, afraid that he would give me some ultimatum (like I either stay, or he breaks up with me). However, he stayed as patient and supportive as always. Also (quite surprisingly) my family wasn’t freaking out much and nobody was seriously trying to convince me not to go anywhere and to do something more conventional instead.
Eventually I moved out of my room (a friend of mine will live there the next year) and put all my stuff to my mother’s house instead. The agreed day of departure was quickly approaching, Vojta had been probably sitting on his ready backpack in his empty flat for a couple of weeks already, sending me more pictures of cool places, whereas I was chaotically preparing 100 things at once. On the last day, I started squeezing the infinite pile of absolutely necessary stuff into my microscopic backpack, and I succeeded with some 4 hours delay. We said goodbye to my boyfriend and when it was already dark and freezing outside, we finally started hitchhiking. We caught no ride that day and eventually returned home, along with a Chinese guy on his hitchhiking trip to China whom we had met on the petrol station. The day after we were more successful, so the trip finally started.
The Equipment
Many of the cool travelers whose blogs I’ve seen have a detailed section where they describe the stuff they carry, with brands, price and weight at best, so I will try too:
- a horribly expensive new backpack (45 l) of a loud color (why does most of the outdoor stuff for short people have so flashy colors that you just cannot hide them in the shrubs if you need to?)
- a horribly expensive thick sleeping bag to minus zillion degrees (hopefully)
- a new tablet that enables you to write stuff and access internet (that’s pretty much it)
- solid boots
- my mum’s old skiing pants
- my cousin’s GPS messenger
- my old skiing jacket with only few holes
- my friend’s fancy old camera
- my boyfriend’s functional towel
- a 1951 army cooking pan from a flea market
- an army raincoat
- 2 magical T-shirts and a pair of pants that NEVER stink (add 100 points to the skill “civilization”)
- my LARP costum garment (more or less might suit the dress-code in Iran)
- sleeping bag linings
- a new waterproof jacket and pants from my mum
- a new small down jacket
- my boyfriend’s old cell phone
- a headlamp
- 2 camping mats
- a water filter
- some other random stuff (such as socks) I find unnecessary to describe
- my cousin’s tent, big enough for one human and 100 ants (it survived his hitchhiking trip from Europe to Japan, so it must survive this one too)
- a gasoline cooker
- a power bank
- medicines
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