The idea came from a conversation a month before the Poznań Open, about hitchhiking after tournaments. Cheap travel, different experience – why not? When my fellow DK Wien member Chris and I announced in the WhatsApp group that we were hitchhiking home rather than taking the bus, the responses ranged from “you’ll be murdered” to a link about hitchhiking statistics that nobody had read. I half-agreed with them, but Chris had done it before, swore that it was actually pretty safe, and there was no better time to try.
On departure day we went to a promising spot we found online and waited about an hour for our first ride, a short hop to a better position on the highway. At the gas station there it took only 40 minutes to find a driver heading all the way to Wrocław. He even offered to take us further to Katowice, but we wanted to see the city, so we spent the evening wandering its beautiful streets before checking into a hostel for €6pp. Not luxurious but that’s what I expected from this trip.
Day two was better. Once you stop caring what drivers think of you, it’s surprisingly easy to talk to strangers, and Polish drivers were remarkably friendly: Nearly every third one gestured something back at us through the windscreen, even if it was only an apologetic wave to say they weren’t going our way. Over the course of that one day we rode with a Korean pilot, Peppa Pig actors(?), and an aluminium recycling professional.
Somewhere in the middle of it a CBD store owner picked us up and mentioned, without either of us asking, that he had been the main suspect of a shooting back in the 90s. He didn’t say much more about it, and I never worked out whether he wanted us to ask.
My favourite ride was a Polish truck driver who took us through the entire Czech Republic. He spoke a little German, but when I mentioned I was learning Polish he immediately switched languages and spent hours of the journey explaining how his truck worked. My Polish is terrible, yet I understood most of it from context alone. I was as surprised as anyone. At the Czech-Austrian border a final driver took us all the way to Vienna, even though it was a big detour for him.
Getting home from Poznań cost €16 in total, €6 of which was the hostel bed. As for all the warnings in the group chat: the worst thing that happened to us in two days was being ignored at the side of a road outside Poznań for an hour.
One honest footnote, and I say this as an Austrian: Austrian drivers were noticeably less welcoming than their Polish counterparts.
