I’ve never hitchhiked before…up until a few days ago. The place we have set up camp is about 20 or 30 minutes by car outside of town, and we have no transportation. Some say they have seen a taxi or 2 on the road others have not. The other day we headed into town to try and find some ministry to be involved in. While discussing how to get into town someone mentioned to us, ‘Just catch a ride in with someone passing by. It’s easy, someone will pick you up’. I was hesitant at first, I’ve heard so many horror stories about hitchhiking and it’s a situation that never turns out good in movies. We had no other way in, so we began to walk down the driveway to the main road. When we got to the road it wasn’t 5 minutes before someone saw us waving our hands and stopped to give us a ride. He could only take us a partial of the way but we jumped into the back of his truck with 3 other local men. Throughout the day, we traveled in 8 different vehicles, each taking us a short distance towards where we were going. The last ride was on a big construction type long bed truck with 6 workers. It was really funny watching the girls trying to climb aboard in our skirts. The tires were about to my shoulders. When we arrived at our driveway we learned that they expected us to pay them 100,000.00 meticas, which is approximate to 4,000.00 US dollars. We acted like we didn’t understand and walked away while saying ‘thank you’. They sat there and watched us for awhile and then finally drove away…it was a bit scary. We did make it everywhere we needed to go and hitchhiking was our only mean of transportation because of the distance. I did enjoy talking to the different people and hearing a little of their stories, but I’m not sure it’s my choice of travel.
