Eradicating Boundaries: It's A Small World Among Hitch-hikers After All ...

A small world no? It reminded me of that very close call when that global thumber André Brugiroux was in Tasmania at the same time as I. Alas he flew on to the Pacific hours before I could track him down through his literary agents! Better luck this time.

I can't tell you a whole lot about Barbara's book, except that it's in Dutch, looks brilliantly put together and has about a third of its prose dedicated to her hitching experiences in Australia. I sat down over tea biscuits and quizzed Barbara on all and sundry. A very gregarious soul, the meandering conversation demanded all I could muster to keep a clear picture in my mind and some notes alongside. The picture of a very special person emerged ...

Barbara learned to hitch-hike from the soldiers in Israel. It was 1967, she was 18, working on Kibbutzim, and public transport ground to a halt on the Sabbath. Soldiers enjoyed state approval and support in getting around by thumb, and passing vehicles, especially military, regularly shunted them around in groups, to get them home for the holy day. To this day hitch-hiking enjoys this status in Israel! Barbara learned to get around the same way, and when her mum came to visit, they hitched around Israel together! Her mother didn't exactly discourage her from hitching. She'd been a resistance fighter and courier in occupied Holland. With no easy transport available after the war she took to hitch-hiking. Barbara's parents had a hitch-hiking honeymoon!

Back in Europe through the late '60s and '70s, Barbara continue to hitch. Studying anthropology she hitched like most students to save money, always with a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Secretly though, she hitched too, because she loved it. It lent her a feeling of freedom and was ever so slightly subversive which held its appeal as well. But feminism hadn't really hit the Netherlands yet and solo women hitch-hiking won such disapproval that she wouldn't tell others of her love of it.

In 1970 she hitched to Turkey and narrowly escaped the cholera epidemic which forced the Turkish government to quarantine Istanbul., in 1974 she crossed the Sahara by thumb, by 1975 she was hitching solo and

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