Tsss, hissed the brakes of a local bus at the station in La Línea. I set on the front seat with the aim of getting to a petrol station on the bypass. In my imagination I was sitting already in the cabin of a truck, boarding the ferry. I didn't even notice, that I missed my stop and the next one was in Algeciras. It was late, so no more buses were going back. I could walk south to the place where the motorway was turning into a national road, but hitching by night in Spain just on the roadside was not a good idea. So I went north and found a massive obstacle. There was a river and only a motorway bridge over it, with heavy traffic and narrow emergency lanes. I thought there must be some other way to get through. I checked my map. A railway bridge was not far from me and when I found it, I realised it was very narrow so in case of oncoming train I would be in big troubles. I gave it a try.

The view of the river was fantastic. It was like unpolished mirror reflecting the lights of this urbanised bay, like an impressionist painting. I felt some kind of magic there and I found myself in there by pure chance. I loved that chain of chance. After the night at the station it took me a while to find a lift to Tarifa. The view of the mountains on the Moroccan side of the strait was very clear from there. I was at the end of Europe. I could even recognise buildings. It felt like I could smell the desert, even though it was miles away behind the mountains. Temptation to go to Morocco rose and rose.

Heavy clouds were escorting me all day long and just before it got dark they brought the first drops. I was standing in a drizzle for a couple of hours with no luck. Cádiz was something like hundred kilometres away. Nothing. Around 9 p.m. heavy rain forced me to hide in a supermarket entrance nearby. Fifteen minutes later a white car parked just in front. A young man with long blond hair approached me.
'Do you speak English?', he asked.
'Yeah I do.'
'It might be hard in this weather. We are going to Cádiz tomorrow, but now just wanna park somewhere for the night', he showed me his car and a girl sitting inside. 'Would you like a beer?'
'Yeah why not.' I smiled.
So after a while all three of us were chatting and I found out he was from Slovenia and his girlfriend was Austrian. They were travelling around Spain in a rented car.
'You can maybe sleep in there', he said looking at unfinished construction site, which was a common view in Spain after the recession.
'Well I was actually thinking about that.'
It's weird how sometimes we feel connection with someone straight away. This guy definitely was in a similar situation in his life. After they drove off in to the darkness, I camped in the empty building with no doors or windows.

The next day I arrived in Cádiz quite quickly brought by Nor, very confident and beautiful Moroccan girl. In Cádiz, on La Caleta beach I met a group of people who were juggling, playing drums and actually camping there as well. There were two Dutch lads, one guy from Germany travelling with his puppy on a bicycle, one Chileno and a few guys from Spain. There was also one Israeli girl who arrived in town the same day as me. I told her about my plans and because she wanted to pay for the ferry to get to Las Palmas, she asked me if she could join me. Why not. There were only two ferries a week, on Saturdays and Tuesdays.

On Monday morning guys took me to one of the Catholic organisations for free food. We all loved free stuff. There were different kinds of people in the comedor as everyone called it. Some were homeless, drunk and noisy guys living on the streets for years probably. But there were also people who couldn't support themselves anymore after the crisis hit Spain. Unemployment rate in the southern regions was up to thirty percent. And then there were people like us, trying to save every penny while being on the road. After the brunch I went to the port to see if there were any trucks coming already. I managed to speak to one German driver and he told me that his company had to pay extra for a second person in the cabin. Shit! My hope was falling apart again. I went to check my email and... I couldn't believe it. A message from an Australian sailor named Richard, who saw my note in Gib! I decided to go back straight away, but people from the beach convinced me to go for another free meal. Curiosity was eating me alive.

I stayed again in John's and other lads' flat, even though it felt like I was overusing their hospitality. Almost every day new couchsurfers were coming to their place. Shawn once had no place to stay in a foreign country, now he wanted to help others. The next day I met Richard on his boat Christina II, which was a beautiful sixty five feet ketch. Richard, a guy from Perth at his fifties, left Australia five years ago to sail around the world. His rough plan was to organise a few more crew members and possibly sail to the Caribbean. Possibly. Richard had to stay for at least four weeks to work as a programmer and repair his budget a bit. He also needed new sails, the old ones didn't really survive a storm he was hit by. So again I knew nothing exact. I was still stranded.

During the next couple of days I was visiting Richard quite often. We had some constructive chats about open source programs, open maps and charts, system in which everything is for sale, everything has its price. We were chatting also about sailors and their community. It wasn't as homogeneous as I thought. There was a lot of rich people who lived on boats, to show off in a way. They didn't move too much, some didn't move at all. But there were real sailors out there as well, people who sometimes sold everything to realise their dreams. People who often struggled to support themselves.

Richard wasn't sure how long he had to stay there and wasn't sure what would be his next destination. He also wanted his future crew to participate not only in the cost of food, but also in other costs as he couldn't afford it himself. I understood it, but I couldn't really afford it either. It was time to make a decision. So I decided to try my luck in Morocco. Direction Agadir!

'Sorry, are you going towards Girona?'
'Yes, where you going?'
'Em..., to South America.'
'What?'
Rafael, probably the third person I asked for a lift at a station near Perpignan, was really curious about my trip. So I had a ride straight to Girona and I started just an hour before in Montpellier. Perfect. After a few minutes we switched to English, as I couldn't fully explain myself in Spanish. He lived in Barcelona and even though he was very busy, as he was working up to twelve hours a day to pay off his debts, he drove off the motorway to bring me closer to town.

In Girona I was picked up from the train station by Toni, a younger brother of Miki. When we arrived to his parents' flat I felt that dictionary would be my best friend for a while. I studied Spanish before in university, but after years of not speaking, it felt like at least half the words just evaporated. Talking to Miki's mother was the most funny part. I was asking about something with broken Spanish and she was answering with simple English, just to practice it, as she had started to attend English classes. After two days of family time, fantastic food and a bit of sightseeing I hit the road again. Before I got to the motorway entrance it was already dark and getting pretty cold.

First lift was in a blink of an eye. To find a second one it took me three hours. It was past midnight when I ended up at a small service station not far from Barcelona with nearly no traffic at all and two more hitchhikers. Birgit and Josefa, two German girls, were on their way to Portugal. We had a nice time with some snacks, bottle of red wine, lots of laugh and a bored guy working in the station, looking at us while we were jumping around to warm up. We couldn't go inside, the door was shut for the night, and only one small window was left open to pay for fuel. There was also freezing wind from the mountains and no traffic. It would be much worse if I had no gloves. After a few hours the shopkeeper left the station, drove his car closer to us, opened the door and told us: 'You can sleep in here till the end of my shift.' Wow!

In the morning all three of us found a lift to a next station and there the girls found a car for me in just a minute with a guy going to Tarragona. After an hour we were together again and by the evening I ended up at a big service station in Sagunto, with lots of trucks and three more hitchhikers. Running away from winter I thought, just like me. When I came to say hello I noticed they had funny clothes, looking like some kind of hippie circus freaks. I didn't tell them that of course, I saw many freaks in my life, I was probably one of them for some.

Hampi, a guy with precisely trimmed beard and Andrea, a girl with long dreadlocks were from Switzerland. Second girl, Angela, was German. We started to play dice and tell stories from the road, asking around from time to time. We managed to find a lift for all of us in a pretty small car. The driver was Spanish who grew up in Switzerland and he dropped us off near Alicante. We found some field behind the station and camped there for a night. Staring at the black sky pierced with millions of stars I fell asleep happy that it was warm again.

Alhambra - Granada

Next morning, or rather noon, welcomed us with the sunshine and ripe oranges growing around. We started another day of lazy hitch. Hitching in Spain was like Spain itself, where you could always feel the atmosphere of siesta, where everything was half working and half asleep. After hours of such laziness I finally had a lift straight to Granada, the city I wanted to see since a while.

My driver wasn't a talkative person, so I could stick to the window and admire the landscape. Sierras were growing in our eyes, all covered in olive trees looking like green dots on naked rusty soil. I was dropped at a station on the bypass of Granada. Sun was already hidden behind the mountains. It looked like a massive fire glowing above the peaks. I went to the station to charge my phone a bit and check maps. By the time I did it Hampi, Angela and Andrea were already outside the station and drinking wine. It was a goodbye drink as they were about to split. Girls wanted to continue hitching to get to Cádiz, while Hampi convinced by a driver, decided to discover the city. So we started to walk together. On the way he explained me why they were dressed like that. It's an old tradition from German speaking countries connected with crafts. Every craftsman was supposed to travel around for a while to find out more about the world and improve his skills by working around. It dates back till the medieval times. Different craft has a different colour representing it. Hampi was working with wood and his clothes were black.

On our way to town we were popping in to different bars for a small beer and what surprised us was that all of them had free tapas with every beer. After a few bars with stomachs happily full we had to find a place to sleep. Hampi had his own technique to survive in cities, specially in winter: to find a high apartment block with lifts and sleep at the staircase almost on the top. No one uses it, just goes for a lift. We were successful with the first door we tried. It was unlocked even though there was a code. We fell asleep in a minute.

Next morning, after coffee and baguette, we headed towards the old town to discover Alhambra, Moorish fortress with castles and gardens built on the top of one of the hills. Alhambra was the last bastion of Muslims in Spain. It was surrendered in 1492 to the Catholic Monarchs. The sense of aesthetics, beauty  and rhythm was magnificent in this place. It influenced many artists, like M. C. Escher just to mention one.

In the evening, sipping a beer in a small tapas bar, we realised we both didn't have a shower for a while. It was about time. I checked my email to see if any couchsurfer replied. There was only one negative answer. So we decided to go for a hostel and we had found one in the city centre. It was in a beautiful, old building on one of hundreds of narrow streets. It had a nice atmosphere even though it was nearly empty. Or maybe because of that. I felt pretty good in there even though I wasn't a big fan of hostels. I mean I met great people in some, real characters sometimes, but they were foreigners most of the time, just like I was. Sometimes even owners weren't locals.

A soldier in Gib

After three days of a regular hostel life I headed towards Gibraltar. Hampi joined me as he had never been there before, just like me. After an easy hitch we ended up in a flat of three lads from Couchsurfing. Felix, a guy from Dresden was an IT specialist and he shared the place with two lads from England - John and Shawn. They lived a minute away from the border, in La Línea, because it was cheaper on the Spanish side.

The first day was spent on discovering Gibraltar. It felt weird to walk through the streets of the town. Kind of like being in England, but not really, as the weather was too good, architecture more Mediterranean and the mostly heard language was llanito, a mix of English and Spanish. The rock itself was an impressive piece of limestone and a home to hundreds of macaques, the only apes in Europe.

After some sightseeing it was time to start looking for a boat. Felix told me that in November, some guys who were crushing here, where able to find one even in a few days. Yeah I know it's too late, I thought, but what else could I do? Wait another year? No way! I left notes in marina offices and there were three of them: two in Gib and one in La Línea.

Days were passing by and hitching a boat was way different to what I imagined. There was not much movement at least at this time of the year. Sometimes I was sitting in a marina for hours just to have a chat with one person. In most marinas I couldn't enter pontoons without knowing the code or having the key. Just waiting. My hope was going up and down depending on whom I was speaking to. Some were saying: 'No it's not too late, there are still boats going.' Others weren't giving me hope: 'Too late man, we're all just wintering here.' I was checking my email like a maniac, hoping that someone sent me a message. Nothing.

After nearly two weeks spent in Gib I decided to go to Cádiz, to see if it would be possible to hitch a truck going to the Canaries by ferry. There was no info about it on Hitchwiki - the hitchhikers' wikipedia. I definitely needed some change.