I pretty much turn up the charm. Then, abruptly, she asks, “What do you really want from me?”
So I tell her: a free ticket to Niagara Falls. She is astonished by my honesty but not at all annoyed. “In my eleven years as manager for Coach Canada,” she says, “no one has ever asked me for a free trip. I’ll see what I can do.” She takes me to her colleague Bill, who promptly issues me a free ticket for the nine-hour trip. Bill then shakes my hand and wishes me all the best for my journey.
I feel extremely happy and lucky when I arrive later that evening in the town of St. Catharines (where Niagara Falls is located). It’s there that I continue my couch surfing by spending two nights with Nicole, a teacher in her early thirties who lives in a house with her two cats. Apart from her book club, she appears to hardly have any contact with other people, so couch surfers are a welcome opportunity for her to get to know others and socialize, which makes perfect sense to me.
However, we do not seem to share any common interests and I can’t help but feel that the atmosphere is somewhat too formal. The first night at her house we sit in silence in her kitchen until she offers to prepare some food for us. When I first offer to help, she declines, but then finally gives in when I refuse to be dissuaded. It doesn’t take long, though, before she is raising her eyebrows; apparently, I am not cutting the vegetables properly. I even begin to doubt myself and, accidentally, drop a carrot on the floor. That’s more than enough to make Nicole request—in a friendly but firm manner—that I wait in the living room. I offer to at least set the table, but seeing her appalled look, I instead go sit in the living room and play with the two cats.
Breakfast the next morning is also quiet. Nicole suddenly breaks the silence by mentioning the English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who is famous for his roles as Ali G, Borat, and Brüno. I’m relieved to finally find something in common we can talk about, and begin repeating lines from his films and telling her how awesome and funny I think he is. Sacha Baron Cohen! A comedic genius!
“I find him flippant,” says Nicole abruptly.
“Yeah, I don’t like him either,” I meekly respond.
In the evening I come back from wandering around town and proudly show her the apples, bananas, and sandwiches that various shops gave me for free. Nicole just gives me a skeptical look that clearly tells me this isn’t a way she would ever go about getting food.
Putting our differences aside, the next day she invites me to see Niagara Falls with her. Comprised of two waterfalls approximately 3,940 feet wide, about two-thirds of which lie in Canada and one-third in the United States, they are an overwhelming (and, thankfully, free) site to see in person. We manage to get unbelievably close.
We decide to ride the boat that goes directly beneath the falls. When we get to the ticket booth, I see that two tickets cost twenty-nine dollars. I present my usual spiel to the ticket saleswoman about being a reporter who is traveling to the end of the world without money, and then brazenly ask her if I can take the boat ride for free. The woman briefly looks over the papers I hand her that confirm my itinerary, waves Nicole and me through, and wishes both me and my assistant a nice boat ride. Nicole tensely watches me the entire time and clearly doesn’t approve of this approach, but she’s also equally impressed that we get to ride the boat for free.
But the mood on the boat ride quickly changes. In front of us there’s massive amounts of water falling from 165 feet above, which makes the tourists slide all around, screaming with either delight or terror. Directly in front of the falls, all we can see is a solid white wall and hear the hellish, deafening roar of the water. Both Nicole and I are completely enthralled. That evening, perhaps elevated by the excitement of the day’s adventure, she offers to drive me the next day across the American border to Cleveland, which is about 220 miles away. Lost for words, I offer her a hug of gratitude and, for the first time, see the beginnings of a smile on her face.
When we get to the border, I have to explain to the immigration office why I am entering the United States without any type of return ticket, which gives me flashbacks to when I tried to get out of Mexico one year. Back in 1997, my friends and I decided to go there for spring break. On our return I had difficulty reentering as I had only brought my American driver’s license, but the border officer wanted to see my passport, which my friends were supposed to have faxed overnight to the immigration office. After waiting for hours, all of us had to pay a fine of a hundred dollars before we were allowed to continue with our journey, so I knew that entering the United States wouldn’t be a walk in the park.
This time, the female officer looks over the official details of my end-of-the-world-without-money concept, makes further inquiries, and then decides to let me enter the country without a return ticket for a fine of only six dollars. Nicole, who is breathing tensely beside me, is probably already having second thoughts about taking me with her, and signals me to quickly pay the fine. However, as I do not have a single cent, the officer only gives me an irritated look and goes to get her boss.
He reads through my concept, looks directly at me, and says in a strict tone, “Sir, you will not enter the United States of America!” Stunned, devastated, and shocked, I try to think of what I’m going to do now. But within seconds—though seeming much longer to me—the supervisor laughs and tells me that I can enter and that it sounds like a cool project. This is what I can only surmise as being “border humor.” Nicole and I are both ecstatic, and I can tell that our unexpected success makes her happy.
Once we get to Cleveland, we make a visit to the art museum, as it has free entry. We then bid each other farewell, and I can’t thank her enough for her hospitality.
4
GO WEST,
YOUNG MAN
Iam standing near an on-ramp at the edge of Cleveland, holding a large cardboard sign that reads, quite simply, south. Luckily, I still have no idea what is in store for me in the coming weeks.
Hitchhiking here proves to be more difficult than in Germany. Although not prohibited officially, it is no longer in fashion. Gone are the times when one could experience adventures like those of Jack Kerouac. Today, a man standing with an outstretched thumb on the road is only looked at with suspicion. Nevertheless, except on freeways, it is still technically legal.
On average, about eleven cars go past me every minute, but not one of them stops. I spend a good eight hours in the same spot until an old couple traveling to the Hamburger Festival in Akron finally picks me up. But Akron isn’t that far, and after a short while, I’m stranded at the Hamburger Festival.
Hitchhiking up to Mauna Kea, Big Island, 13,796 feet.
As a European I am really curious to explore such a cultural and, for me, such a bizarre event. Along the sidewalks of a closed-down street in downtown Akron, I pass along many burger stands: beef burgers, steak burgers, steak burgers with buffalo wings on top, cheeseburgers with double cheese and triple meat, XXL burgers, XXL burgers with double cheese and steak on top—you name it! It seems that the entire US burger scene has traveled for this event to downtown Akron. You’d think getting a free burger around here would be a piece of cake, right? Unbelievably, no one is willing to even donate a solitary hamburger to my cause. So, using the few dollars that I received as a gift from Nicole, I take the bus to the neighboring city of Canton.
On the bus, I start talking with Harold, a man around my age. He is excited about my journey and keeps crying out, “It’s so amazing, man. You’re so cool. I can’t believe that I’ve met you!” He tells me that he has two kids in Miami from his first wife and two kids from his second wife, and he lives in a trailer park just outside of Canton. Suddenly, Harold invites me to spend the night with him and his girlfriend. Everything happens quite quickly and, spontaneously, I agree and get off at the next stop with him.
As we make our way to the trailer park, Harold calls his girlfriend to excitedly announce my arrival. But he then becomes quiet and I can tell that her reply doesn’t make him happy. He finally
interrupts her and furiously yells into the phone: “Hold on, relax, pull back!” and when she keeps going, he suddenly begins shouting at her into the receiver: “Shut up, you f***ing bitch! Shut finally the f*** UP!”
It is then that I realize I won’t be staying at their place for the night, and try to make Harold aware of this by hand gesturing. He moves the phone away from his ear and gives me a huge smile. “She’s only a little drunk . . . it will all work out.” He then goes back to swearing and hurling insults at her, using English slang that I have never, ever heard before. I turn around and wave once again to let him know that I’m leaving. How could I be so careless? I suppose the whole thing could have ended much worse.
I wander on a country road, somewhere in Ohio, facing the evening sun. I decide to keep going for a while until something happens. But the only thing that happens is that it becomes very dark, so I set up my tent behind a McDonald’s and sleep under the star-filled sky of Ohio.
The next day, I keep moving along the road, my backpack weighing nearly eighty-eight pounds. I start to walk more and more slowly, and it begins to feel as if I’m pulling a huge rubber band that is tied to my backpack. I wander through a beautiful stretch of countryside filled with small hills, alleys, and farms until later that afternoon, when Mickey, a rocker girl around forty years old with a cigarette stub balanced in her mouth and a leather jacket on her shoulders, takes me along for a few miles in an old van. She talks very patriotically about her part of the country and quickly gets to the point: “It’s a nice area because there are no black people living here.”
“What is the problem with black people?” I ask tentatively.
“No worries, I do like them, as long as they don’t live in my area.”
I have arrived in the legendary Midwest of the United States, the part of the country where every foreigner is first under suspicion. The locals apparently leave liberal thinking and open-mindedness to those maniacs on the West Coast; here, they prefer to stay conservative. I grow rather uneasy and I’m immediately reminded of a project my buddy and I wanted to do during our film school days in London, where the basic idea was that I would act as a reporter and ask people on the street for various favors. The next day, I would do the exact same thing, only as a person of African descent, and we would then compare the results. To change the color of my face and skin, we thought of applying shoe polish or chocolate cream—an experiment in blackface that is embarrassingly naive in retrospect. The project, unsurprisingly, was shelved, as our film professor found it to be beyond politically incorrect.
A few hours later, after being dropped off by Mickey, the number of cars passing me thins as the traffic of horse-drawn carriages increases—carriages carrying members of the Amish community.
The Amish are not allowed to use cars and live almost as if they were in the eighteenth century. Men wear straw hats, full beards, and suspenders on their pants; women wear white bonnets, plain, conservative clothing, and no makeup. They place emphasis on family, community, and seclusion from the outside world. Today, they live in 1,200 colonies in twenty-six American states. They lead their lives in the countryside, are known for rejecting modern technology, and only accept some innovations after careful thought.
I try to stop a carriage with my thumb, but the members of the Amish community react as indifferently as the 5,000 car drivers did in Cleveland yesterday. I become even more exhausted and ask myself where this trip is actually taking me. I will certainly never be able to reach Antarctica this way. The first doubts begin to creep into my mind about actually being able to accomplish this project.
At around two in the afternoon, I finish the last of my water and continue to be ignored by the carriages—even my efforts at waving, hopping, laughing out loud, and making funny grimaces don’t stop them. After walking for about six miles with my unrelenting backpack, I finally start to physically break down. The afternoon sun is shining down on me and I’m dehydrated. I have to stop every 500 yards and take off my backpack to rest.
In an earnest effort to pump myself up, I turn on my MP3 player and listen to “The Greatest Party in History” by the German singer Kante, vaguely aware that there probably is no place where the greatest party could be further from than Amish county in Ohio. (I later read that no alcohol can be served in the entire county and that the Amish refrain from modern forms of entertainment like music, television, and the Internet.) A short while later, the German hip-hop singer Peter Fox is roaring in my ear with strong bass tones, singing mightily about cocaine, needles, how Tarek wants to punch Sam, and about how “blood splashes.” While I’m listening to this, I see Amish kids by the roadside and adults and families on their way to church. Along with my extreme fatigue, this audiovisual mix creates a very surreal music video.
At this point, I can probably manage only one more mile before I fall down by the side of the road in a state of complete exhaustion. My head is spinning, I’m overheated, and I need water badly. Although I have given up hope by now, I still squat on the roadside and hold my thumb out to the carriages passing by. Astonishingly, an Amish man stops his carriage and offers to take me to his farm.
“Thank you,” I somehow manage to croak. He smiles back at me in reply.
As we ride, we approach a town sign that says Berlin, and I literally rub my eyes to make sure I have read this correctly. Am I hallucinating? Did I lose consciousness and get sent back to Germany? It would, somehow, be amusing if I really did get driven back to Berlin in a horse-drawn carriage. Mark, the driver, seems to have read my thoughts and begins explaining that the Amish are Christians who get baptized between the ages of sixteen and twenty years old, and then proceeds to give me a short history lesson detailing his heritage.
When the Christian reform movement arose in the seventeenth century, they were put at a disadvantage in many parts of Europe where the rules did not accept the Amish refusal to do military service and swear an oath. They were persecuted by authorities and finally forced to migrate to the New World. Since the Amish originally came from the region of Europe where German is spoken, they gave names like Berlin and Hamburg to their new colonies in America, something that I find genuinely fascinating.
Changing the subject, Mark cheerfully asks me what I’m doing here. “Why aren’t you cultivating your land at home?”
“It didn’t go so well with the land,” I reply.
“Now I understand why you don’t have any money.” Then he offers me his barn for the night, an offer I gratefully accept.
Over the next few days, his wife, Elizabeth, and his brother Ernie make sure that I am properly fed and rested; it actually takes me three days to fully recover from my exhaustion and near-dehydration. Once I am restored to health, I offer to help with the field work in order to thank them for their kindness and hospitality. Perhaps this isn’t enough, since Mark instead suggests that I sweep the stalls. It’s a job that is usually done by the women in the village, but I am happy to do anything to show my appreciation and gratitude for their astounding generosity.
Ernie and his wife have seven kids, which is about average here. During mealtimes, all of the kids—who range in age from three to fourteen—sit well-mannered at the table. There is no jumping, screaming, complaining, or talking. It’s a disciplined atmosphere, but also relaxed with the father and the mother talking. Before our first meal together begins, Ernie reads aloud a benediction from the Bible in German. I’m flabbergasted. Although their language is an old German dialect, which I understand only partly, the prayers themselves are said in standard German.
Mark and his wife live in a nearby house. When I first see Elizabeth, I have to wonder if I have landed on a Hollywood set and, like Harrison Ford, am actually searching for the witness. Basically, Elizabeth looks a lot like Angelina Jolie, and I have to ask myself why such an attractive, eloquent young woman is leading this rustic kind of life.
Elizabeth married Mark when she was nineteen years old and she does everything in the household, raises the
kids, and has never traveled more than six miles with her carriage. When we are lighting the gas lanterns one evening, she tells me that she is happy and has never thought about leading another kind of life.
This makes me remember a conversation I had with Karthik, an Indian physicist who took in both Nicole and me as couch surfers for one night in Cleveland. The main discussion that evening had been how Western society has so many choices that it makes us unhappy. He put forward the argument that arranged marriages have the advantage of not giving people very high expectations. Naturally, I had disagreed with this. However, while I am wandering through Ohio one night, I begin to think about my own life as a bachelor: the party acquaintances, the women I know through work or through my group of friends, plus the new contacts I make through online dating. Within one month I could get to know about twenty women, yet I had never fallen in love with any of them.
So who’s happier? I think.
After my few days of recuperating in this Amish paradise, Mark gives me his own bicycle for my journey. At first I don’t want to accept it, but Mark insists that it’s my salary for my work, and also shows me in which direction to head if I want to go west. I’m happy and excited about my impending bike trip through the idyllic landscape of Ohio. Upon saying good-bye to Ernie, he gives me a bible, enough food for the next few days, and, unbelievably, a hundred-dollar bill. I’m totally speechless. Mark urges me to take the money: “You have worked for it. Take it for a bus ticket. Or do you want to travel to Antarctica with the bicycle?” I laugh and recall my very first impression of the Amish as being unfamiliar with the outside world.
Cycling with eighty-eight pounds on my back is—how do I describe it?—not fun. After an hour, the gearshift on my bike breaks so that I can only cycle in sixth gear. The region is very uneven and the entire day consists of me riding uphill and downhill, so my progress is very slow. My water disappears by the early afternoon. I ask an old lady standing in front of her house whether I can get some tap water from somewhere. Wordlessly, she points in the direction of Danville, which is three miles away, and turns back to her house.
How to Travel the World for Free Page 3
