Gifts of misdirection

Between Stans, Switzerland and Ticino, Swiss-Italia; Como, Italy

Haha, hitchhiking through Switzerland. The weather conditions have improved. The mountains and scenery look as magnificent as ever. The automobiles plentiful on the road. The hair combed, the teeth brushed: we are picture-perfect ready to get to Italy.

[ There's something about time and space that possesses an internal capacity to prolong its wave penetration. ] Nothing happens quite as predicted. On this roundabout, we waited four hours. Watching car after car with only a single passenger take the one of two exits out of this small town, watching driver after driver wave and smile at us as if we were on a television show. Finally, an English ex-patriate gets us moving again on wheels.

With the directions of an Italian ex-patriate, we somehow manage to get on a small path parallel to the highway. A very wrong, but beautiful turn.

6 kilometers later down the same path to get to the next service station...

After 6 kilometers down the wrong direction, Virgile asked the first driver he saw at the station. Working his first day as an environmental scientist counting trees in Ticino, Bjorn took us in his old camper van which he himself had used to travel across the European continent. He allowed strangers make some delightful additions to the exterior.

Going through the longest tunnel in Europe (16km long of darkness), we finally made it to the Italian corner of Switzerland.







Even after so many detours, we persisted. We threw up our sign for Lugano, a lakeside town.




We were dropped off at a major gas station in Bellinzona, one city before Lugano, just as three other hitchhikers exited another vehicle: three college students from Lithuania, two young men musicians and a young woman collecting lavender species. Together we shared the gifts that our previous driver shared with us from his weekend trip to Amsterdam, if you get what I'm saying.

Rather than go to Lugano as our sign indicated, they invited us to Locarno, another lakeside town, to join other hitchhiking friends for a jam session by the water. We managed to catch a camper van on the way to a funeral in Locarno. In our goodbyes, they gave us a huge bar of Swiss milk chocolate: our hungry vegan selves caved into the sweet gesture, the gifts of travel.

Evidence of my happiness

By the next afternoon, we all managed to meet by the water, where we lounged for hours. But finally, we decided not to join them on their hike up the mountains to see the waterfalls and rivers; we continued on to the border of Switzerland and Italy, where we slept for the night.

The next day we walked across the border to Como, Italy, where Napoleon once too dipped his feet in freedom and filled his stomach with the fruits of Italian soil.