Getting hitched

So me and Helen decided to hitchhike down from Bastia to Porto Vecchio to stay with some men we met on the internet. It’s always nice when that sort of plan works out well, since quite a lot could have gone wrong. I like hitching: you linger in places where people were never meant to, and notice the litter, wildflowers and textures of concrete, tarmac and dirt by the side of the road. And instead of getting on the bus, plugging yourself into your ipod and watching the scenery rush by in a cocoon of foreign noise, you make eye contact with people, wonder whether they are potential murderers, chat and then never see them again. These are the people we who were kind enough to pick us up:

A woman, alone in her big maroon car, with two bras on the back seat, driving out to her parents’ village to pick up her daughters.

Dumé: a fat, twenty-something guy with a thick Corsican accent and fairly ripe body odour. His golden retriever was in the boot, and when we asked its name, he said it was ‘Killer’. Then he told us that he was a mechanic, and that the car we were in had recently been ‘decapitated’ in an accident. Sure enough, the dashboard was covered in scratches from the car that had ploughed through the windscreen, and he pointed nonchalantly to some stains on the roof: ‘there’s the blood’. He claimed that the drivers hadn’t died. We were not hugely reassured.

A middle-aged man in a smart suit and a dilapidated little car whose doors didn’t close. He worked for Air France and had lived all over the world.

Pierre, a pale, amphibious redhead with a pickup that only had one seat free up front. We crushed ourselves into it and once he had established that we were English, he turned on the CD which was already in his CD player and asked us to listen to his music to see if there were any mistakes in the English. Turns out he was a successful French country and Western singer with an improbably bass voice. We tried not to giggle at the fact that we couldn’t distinguish a single word of the song except for ‘all my dreams come true’. We assured him that there weren’t any mistakes, which was true in the sense that there weren’t any recognisable English lyrics except for one correct phrase. He was a little creepy, told Helen she was beautiful, asked us for coffee and gave her his number, but nothing serious.

Then we spent to night with Benoît, who was charming and cooked us huge plates of delicious food. He has worked on farms in Brazil, Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and India, and has now transplanted himself to Corsica.

The next morning we set out again. The first person to stop was a middle-aged man who asked ‘parlez-vous anglais’ in a strange accent – it transpired that he was Irish, and called Paddy! He drove us down to the apartment block he owned by the beach and we ate oranges, looked out over the sea and saw the pink bedrooms of his three daughters. He told us about the transvestites who hang out on the beach nearby, and the mafiosi dealings that had allowed his apartment block to be built right on the beach, despite the law banning houses within a hundred metres of the sea, to avoid la bétonisation des côtes (the concretisation of the coast).

Paddy dropped us back on the route nationale next to the Roman ruins at Aléria, where the landscape is very English: wide river, green fields and rolling hills. We eventually got picked up by two chain-smoking lycee students called Maxim and Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul told us that Maxim hadn’t wanted to pick us up, and they didn’t speak much, just drove very fast in a fug of smoke through the sudden downpour. The rain cleared, and they left us at a beach next to a Genoese watchtower. The sand was white, shaded by tamarisk trees, and we sunbathed.

Our final ride was with a middle-aged man who spent most of the journey shouting down his hands-free phone at various colleagues and public service representatives. He also told us about how he had lived for years in New York, and how we ought to go to Porto Vecchio’s huge open air nightclub, Via Notte. He left us at the supermarket where we met our second couchsurfing host, Stephane…