Casa Robino

Category: Story Tags: hitchhiking, japan, vegetarianism, winter

A ridiculously inexpensive flight from Milan to Tokyo and back, my backpack, a fluent-Japanese-speaking girlfriend wwoofing on a tropical island in southern Japan who is waiting for you (while Europe is buried in snow), and a copy of Will Ferguson's book "Hitching Rides with Buddha" [1]. Pretty much everything you need for setting out for a trip to Japan. And here I go.

Ferguson's book is brilliant. It has all the features that I happen to like in a book: it's well written, funny, educational, useful, it tells a damn true story. I just had to read it before starting my trip, although my timing and the season did not allow me to go all the way to Hokkaido. And by the way, you have to do something during those 12 hours you're forced to sit in the plane, so you'd better have something good to read if you don't want to watch Bruce Willis saving the world for the 348th time on a 10-inch-screen with the audio resolution of a tamagochi. But the book needs some updating. That's why I'm telling you the story of my hitching in Japan.

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Category: Story Tags: 789, cat, germany, hugs, Netherlands, odessa, poland, Trust, ukraine

The road caught us, flexible and free like a cat. Its yellow, silently smiling eyes followed us. Sooner than I realized, we were guided by the flow of the events.

Again and again the magic of things revealed itself in any rides and in the simple beauty of our encounters. Angels and savers, monks and royals arrived to us. Speaking without language, skipping the barriers of words and indifference. The embarrassment of the hugs at the end of each ride and the laughs of the non-understood are an exercise of mimic: training for gesture and instinct.

Un-pre-dic-ta-ble. The road is life and it is a teacher.

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Category: Border Crossing Tags: Border Crossing, border guards, corruption, hitchhiking, Moldava, Romania, ukraine

Still filled with happiness in our hearts from the last ride, we walked up to the Ukrainian border guard. Hmmm, we should have known better. We gave him our passports and as he flicked through them he said: "Where is your arrival stamp for the Ukraine?"

"We didn't get one", I answered.
"Impossible", was his simple reply.

A couple of days earlier, while hitching from Moldava into the Ukraine, we ended up in a weird Moldavian transit zone. That's how we didn't get an arrival stamp when we got to the Ukraine, we explain. Apparently this is a big deal in the Ukraine. We got to sit on a wooden bench, while they drank beer, let douchebag Moldavians through, and sort of checked out our story.

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