My new addiction

I am a huge fan of getting out of my comfort zone. If you do it enough you realzie that you are capable of anything.

Whether or not you want to explore each and every possibility is a different story, but being able to see clearly just how much in life is up to you is EXTREMELY powerful.

I was a shy kid. Now i can easily stand in front of a large group and sing a song or speak (Ok its still not easy but it hardly stops me from doing it).

I used to call myself “billingually impaired”, now im trilingual and speak two languages that most people consider extremely difficult, and can probably get around in another 2.

3 weeks ago, I set off into the mountains without a destination at first. I thought of an interesting place to check out and started walking what would turn into a 2.5 hour walk into the mountains.

One thing I really wanted to do out there was hitchhike but I was scared. I don’t like bothering people. I don’t like standing out. I don’t like reinforcing into peoples stereotypes abiut foreigners.

But I want to be someone who is brave enough to hitchhike, especially in a safe country.

So I tried.

And I failed.

About 40 cars that passed were full, deliver or utility trucks on duty (probably on a tight schedule) or they ignored me.

It’s not unusual, sometimes it takes a while to get picked up, and there were not many cars going in my directions, as I learned later, the village I was going usually only has 4-5 cars headed in that direction in a single day, all residents.

Yesterday, I went to the same place, this time taking a bus half way and taking a different route that might have more cars going 80% of the way.

The very first car picked us up and was heading to the exact same place we were!

The event there was fun but now it’s 24 hours later and all I can think about is hitchhiking. I want to try it again, mostly just because it still makes me nervous and I want to open myself up enough to not worry about such things.

I’ve been hitchhiking on two occasions before. Once was in Hong Kong, going to the beach near the airport (an hour drive). A friend led the way and 3 of us got a ride from a facebook rideshare group half way. Then we hitchhiked the other half and ended up in a fancy red BMW. We were a strange looking group. Two men, A ragtag foreigner, a hippie local and an innocent looking female college student. It took about 15 minutes to get picked up.

The second time was in Dali, the place where I really got out of my shell. The wide open landscape, the foot of the himalayas on one side and a massive lake on the other. There was very little public transportation and I made a few friends living out in a tiny vilalge so if I couldn’t get a ride, the other way was to hotchhike (and it was hard because the people I met either drove motorbikes that could only fit 2 people OR they also didn’t have a vehicle).

In that kind of place hitchhiking is fairly easy because people understand that its hard to get around and some locals do it to. Or it WAS easy until the area became gentrified by resorts and all the “black taxis” started appearing.

So my first time in Dali I hitchhiked about 4 or 5 times.

I understand that there are dangers to this kind of thing. I’m not sure I’d hitchhike in many parts of the world, but I know two women from Asia who hitchhiked around the world hundreds of times and never ran into any problems. They were incredibly smart about it though. Not only had they both trained in some form of self protection and carry a knife, they had learned psychological tricks to discourage people with the wrong intentions from picking them up.

I am not nearly as brave as these two women, but if they can do that, I can hithchike in one of the safest countries in the world!

I actually have to get up the guts to do it first. I find that I’m scared. My fears in Japan aren’t psychos or murderers. I worry that I’m scaring the fuck out of the local old ladies. I’m worried that they worry that I’m the psycho. I worry that if I do this enough, I’ll encourage debates on social media about whether Japan should close its borders to crazy foreigners. Xenophobia is not hateful in Japan but its very very present. Many people tend to respect you as an “other”, not as an equal.

When foriwgners do things that aren’t normal, Japanese people hate it, because they like normal, they don’t like when people act unpredictably.

More than anything I worry about causing strange and awkward situations because some people here are just awkward. Last time, the one car that stopped did so ahead at a dangerous curve in the road and spent 15 minutes trying to read a map and telling me that I must be mistaken because the place I was going didn’t exist.

I also heard a story from a student about how his parents picked up an Australian hitchhiker, the only hitchhiker they had ever seen in their lives and went 3 hours out of their way to take him to his destination. They lied to him and said they were going there because they felt guilty leaving him.

I don’t enjoy playing into people’s guilt and I don’t want to encourage this kind of help at the expense of the person who is helping me.

I also have low key anxiety about talking to strangers. I tend to absorb the discomfort of others, so if someone is nervous, I instinctually become nervous. Talking to strangers has never been easy for me although I have tried for many years to get over that.

Hitchhiking in the city in Japan does not work! People are confused and feel annoyed that you don’t pay for a ride like everyone else. Most people will probably assume you are looking for a taxi and not even taxis will stop because they have designated areas where they wait for passengers.

So I want to go back out to the country soon.

This pushing myself to get out of my comfort zone is really what excites me. Yesterday at the eco village I went to, there were many things that pushed me out of my comfort zone and I will talk about that more next time, but hitchhiking is the one thing that gives me lots of excitement when I try it.

As soon as I succeed I feel like I’m transported into a world where anything is possible and most of the diffiuclties we face are much more easily overcome than we imagine.

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