Wow. Alright. The Kyoto hitchhike. This is madness. Abs was pestering me for well over a week, urging me to do this. “What are you going to remember? Whatever you want to do? Or hitchhiking to KYOTO?!” It was a powerful argument that in the end got the adventurer deep inside me all tingly.

I bought myself a bucket hat for the trip (the previously mentioned excursion had left my delicate fleshes all pink from ultra-violent radiation), Abs crashed at mine, and the next morning we drove out to Kaseda to begin our adventure, one Wednesday morning.

We parked in Pierre’s lot, and walked down to the little side-street. Our cardboard read in foreigner-drawn Japanese: “North. Kyoto.” THREE minutes passed when an SUV slowed to a stop. The man inside leaned out, looking baffled, and asked in amazing English, “Where are you going?!” Kyoto, sir. Unfortunately, he was heading off to referee a sportsball game, so he could only take us the 5 minutes to downtown Kaseda.

From there we walked a block, holding the sign out, when a big fat Japanese dude in a wifebeater pulled over and emptied his backseat. I noticed a fine hat inside… the hat of either a copper, or a taxi driver. It ended up being the latter, thank goodness. He was on his way into the city to taxi drive, so he took us all the way to the interchange to the highway, which heads toward the heart of Japan like some kind of bizarre concrete vena cava (that’s the biggest vein in the human body. My girlfriend is so awesome she remembered just as quickly as a google search took).

Anyway, we were thrilled. We had gotten two rides in less than half an hour. We almost didn’t care where he dropped us off.

Until after he dropped us off. In the middle of a goddamn onramp. We were trapped. Our sign was no longer working. We busted out the purple marker and added “no ho e” in fancy japonese kanji underneath ‘kyoto’ so passersby would know we wanted “in the direction of Kyoto” and not “we only want rides that bring us all the way to Kyoto.”

Fortunately, only 20 minutes or so passed in the humid air, when a guy about my age stopped and offered a lift to Kumamoto, the prefecture straight north.

His name was Shogo, but his last name started with a ‘Hachi’ which is Japanese for ‘eight’ so therefore good enough for us. Eight was our new friend. He was super friendly. Apparently he was heading up to his alma mater, Kumamoto Uni, where he was planning on having a reunion with his younger buddies in the Civil Engineering program. They were gonna play some soccer than barbeque. Except he was running four hours late. He wanted to leave at 5 to get there on time, but he picked us up at like 9:30. HELLA lucky for us. Obviously we made a good impression, cuz a couple hours in he invited us to the barbeque.

A huge group of uni students, not too unlike the ones I left last year (except Japanese). They treated us to an amazing barbeque feast outside the civil engineering lab (a big garage full of I-beams and furnaces and other fancy stuff). They even fed us beer. Beer! FREE BEER. Ahem, sorry, reverted to collegiate for a moment.

Yeah, so the huge group of them were pretty much awesome. Just as our novelty wore off, we got a ride back to the highway, to the next service station. We hung around for another twenty minutes or so, when a car full of foreigners asked, “Hey, you guys heading north?”

Indeed we were. The group ended up being Kagoshima-jin like us, from a town farther north. They were heading up to Fukuoka. We shot the shit for an hour or so, and they dropped us off someplace between Saga and Fukuoka prefectures.

Pretty damn sweet. From there, we’d try to hitchhike more, but the daylight was steadily fading…

TO BE THE CONTINUED CLIFFHANGER!