The dying art of thumbing a lift

With petrol prices soaring, is it time to get the thumb out and brush up your hitchhiking skills? Brian O'Connell takes to the…

With petrol prices soaring, is it time to get the thumb out and brush up your hitchhiking skills? Brian O'Connelltakes to the road to see if he can hitch his way from Bantry to Bundoran

UP UNTIL LAST month, I hadn't stood on an Irish roadside with my thumb out for at least a decade. In the early 1990s, when I used to travel home from college in Cork to Ennis, Co Clare, nine times out of 10 hitching was my preferred mode of transport.

In fact, having usually blown the bus money the previous night, it was often the only mode of transport open to me.

Back then, there was safety in numbers. On any given Friday morning, the Mallow road out of Cork could be populated with dozens of hitchhikers, many with parka jackets pulled high over chins to keep out the snarling wind, or trying their luck with a decidedly less well clad female in tow.

READ MORE

Some carried elaborate and quirky signs, while others worked the road in small groups, with some of them hiding behind bushes - revealing themselves only after a car had stopped.

Generally speaking, I had what might be termed a successful hitchhiking career. It got to the stage when I had my "regulars", mostly truck drivers coming from the port in Cork to Shannon, and invariably I got home before the bus. I was never left stranded.

The interaction with strangers was enjoyable, and I can only remember one tricky situation, when I had to remind the driver, firmly, "that's not fourth gear, sir".

Having started driving last Christmas, I vowed, whenever possible, to give a lift to any hitchhikers I came across on the road. Yet, hitchhikers on Irish roads are an increasingly rare species, and over the past six months, I have not had a single opportunity to stop and give a lift to someone.

Not so much as a German backpacker has appeared on my horizon. All of this got me thinking - is the art of hitchhiking dead in Ireland? And if so, why?

To answer these questions I felt it necessary to reconnect with the latent hitchhiking gene. So, flagging my intent on national radio, several weeks back I set out an a misty Monday at 9.15am from Bantry in west Cork determined to get to Bundoran in Co Donegal, solely reliant on the power of my thumb.

IN 1997, AS A result of a hazy late night bet for £100, songwriter and comic Tony Hawks set out to hitchhike around Ireland with a fridge. The resulting book detailing his experience went on to sell half a million copies, and Hawks became an instant media hit.

His book showed, if nothing else, that it was still relatively easy to get a lift in Ireland. If an Englishman with a fridge on his back could get around with minimal fuss, then surely anyone could.

The experience helped Hawks rediscover his hitchhiking past. "I hadn't done it for years when that bizarre bet came along," he says, "but I had this feeling that Ireland could be a place that would be supportive of something like that. In the past few weeks I've been in Ireland making a film based on the book.

"I was pretending to hitch with the fridge, just for promotional shots, and two people stopped! It seemed to me 10 years on the willingness to pick people up is still there."

Hawks sees hitchhiking as a dying art form, yet he also feels that with rising transport costs, there has never been a more opportune time for us to get hitched.

"We all want to have fewer cars on the road, and we have this phenomenon now of lots of cars with only one person in them. It's a shame . . . hitching has got a bad name because of our obsession with making everything sound dangerous. It's not," Hawks says.

True to the discipline, when I ask him when he last took to the roads, he says it was only a matter of weeks ago, in Cannes of all places. "I have a summer house there and I flew in recently and there was no one there to meet me. I also couldn't get anyone on the phone and buses had stopped, so I thought, to hell with it and I started hitching. Got to my front door in an hour-and-a-half. Not bad going," he says.

Hawks is one of a small but determined community of hitchhikers, many of who saw the boom years as good for business, but bad for hitching.

One of those is committed hitchhiker and renowned travel writer Bruce Northam, who recently completed a trip to Ireland in which he and his mother hitched their way around.

A service company transferred luggage from place to place, and they stayed in luxury accommodation including castles and manors along the way, needing little more than an umbrella to protect against the rain.

Northam, who has hitched his way across the US several times, says there are essentially three types of people who stop for hitchhikers - "born-again Christians, gay people and Vietnam veterans, all mostly harmless." Northam traces the decline in hitchhiking with the rise of cable television and mass paranoia in the US.

"I hitchhiked as a survival mode from 1978 until 1988. Then you had the advent of cable television, when bad news was brought into everyone's back yard.

"So I blame CNN for the decline in hitchhiking, when local news became international and fed this paranoia. If a hitchhiker was killed and buried in Australia for instance, suddenly everyone had to have a problem with hitchhiking and therefore stopped picking people up.

"Of course affluence also contributed to the problem - the nicer car you have the more you will worry about what a hitchhiker smells like!"

On his recent journey to Ireland, his experience was largely positive, perhaps suggesting that a resurgence in hitchhiking here is indeed possible. "I think Ireland is still one of easiest places in the world to hitch. The nature of hitchhiking is enhanced by smaller more intimate roads.

"Sure, some towns are now bypassed and there are more motorways, but there is still a lot of parts of the road where cars are doing less than 30 miles an hour. And as any committed hitchhiker knows, that makes for optimum hitchhiking."

Undoubtedly, several factors have contributed to the decline in hitchhiking in Ireland in the past decade - fear, affluence, insurance issues and improved road networks, have all played their part.

As the two-car household became more commonplace, offspring didn't feel the need to stand on a roadside with a rain-soaked scrap of cardboard their only ticket home. They could just take mummy's GTI instead.

ANOTHER NAIL IN the coffin of mass hitchhiking was the change in attitude of road hauliers, a group traditionally seen as the hitchhikers main ally.

Jimmy Quinn, president of the Irish Road Haulage Association, says that economic and logistical realities signalled a change of mindset. "When you get a vehicle moving up to 50 miles an hour, the last thing you want to do is slam on the brakes and stop. That act of slowing down, stopping and restarting again, would cost in the region of €10 at today's fuel prices, so it could become an expensive hobby for the haulier."

Quinn also points to the fact that many Irish towns are now bypassed, so hitchers and hauliers don't get to meet that often. "The life of a haulier can be very soulless now," says Quinn, "it used to be a much more sociable scene. Between 1983 and 1987, when I was working as a haulier, I'd often pick up hitchhikers to break the monotony, especially on the Continent."

But, he says that with the advent of cheap InterRail passes that came to an end. "Here in Ireland, having a second or third car in a family became more commonplace, and traffic on roads meant that if you were hitching from Cork to Dublin, by the time you'd make it out to Newlands Cross say, you could be halfway there on the hourly train service. So why bother?"

BACK IN BANTRY, I had 450km to travel to get to Bundoran, and gave myself two days to reach my final destination. It felt strange being back on the road, sign in hand, as SUVs and souped-up estates whizzed past.

Standing on a road in west Cork with a sign reading "Bundoran please", is perhaps the very definition of optimism. Soon, though, I was on my way, courtesy of a local restaurant owner, who dropped me to Glengarriff.

From there, a Lithuanian man who had served with the Russian army in Afghanistan dropped me to Farranfore, where a couple from Co Clare brought me to Ennis. There then followed a series of shorter lifts, including two middle-aged women, a gang of college students, a Nigerian economics lecturer and a young medical student.

All remarked on how unusual it was to see an Irish person hitchhiking and most had a hitchhiking tale of their own to tell.

Several lifts later, a man in a Saab convertible picked me up. With the roof down and reggae beats up high, he told me about his days hitchhiking through Europe.

The sun was shining; bare Ben Bulben was at our backs. It felt good. Real good. When he dropped me off, I had about 20 miles to go to Bundoran. It was coming up to 8.30pm - 11-and-half hours since I had left Bantry. There was still light, although it was fading fast.

Feeling confident, I decided to make a break for it. I positioned myself outside a local Statoil, figuring if I was stranded, I could sustain myself on sausage rolls for the night. It was cold, and aside from the neon reflection of the petrol pumps, there was little light on the road.

Just as I began to give up hope, I heard the siren call of the hitchhiker - brakes. A fourth year business student was making his way home from completing his final exams.

He used to hitchhike everywhere when he was younger, and hadn't seen anyone on the road for more than a year. We chatted about what he was going to do with his life. He had no idea, only that for the weekend he was heading onto Ballyshannon, for the Rory Gallagher festival.

"You'll easily get a lift up there tomorrow if you stand the other side of the town," he said, as he dropped me off at 9.32pm. Bundoran never looked so beautiful.