Hitchhiking Russian Style...video included!

Hitchhiking in Russia happened to be one of the most spontaneous and memorable events of the trip.

The setting: A Russian freeway right by the Europe/Asia border. Yekaterinberg is not known for tourism, but the Europe/Asia border was one thing we wanted to see.

We took this fancy bus (notice the cute curtains?) from Yekaterinberg to Revda (about an hour away) and were planning on stopping at the border about half-way.

We were both so tired that we fell asleep and didn't hear the bus driver calling for us that it was our stop. (Brandon had made special arrangements for him to drop us off at the Europe/Asia border which is on the way to Revda because buses usually don't stop at the monument)

So when we both finally woke up, the entire bus was staring at us. That's when we knew we missed our stop. Brandon went up and conversed with the driver. Thankfully, the driver was kind enough to call another bus to take us back to the monument.

We drove back about 30 minutes and then we were dropped off. However, we were on the opposite side of the freeway then we needed to be so we had to run across 6 lanes of freeway.

We didn't stay around too long since it was cold, but we got a few fun border pictures.



And then we realized we weren't quite sure how we would get back into Revda. Remember how buses don't stop at the monument?

We had a branch party to get to. So the hitchhiking began.

Brandon would hold out his arm.

And then I would take a turn.

And the cars and buses would just keep passing by. And it got colder and colder by the second.

Here's a little video of what we experienced....

Finally, we became very desperate and decided we would take any ride we could get--even if they weren't going as far as we needed.

Our hopes kept getting shattered as cars would pull off and we thought they were picking us up. But they weren't. They were simply part of a wedding party. Yeah, its a big Russian cultural thing to go the border with your entire wedding party and get pictures.


After an hour of hitchhiking, a nice couple offered to take us part way. We were thrilled! Then we had to hitchhike again to get the rest of the way.

We have never been a fan of hitchhiking, but after this experience, our minds have changed. I just thought it was so ironic that of all places you wouldn't think would be safe to do this, Russia was actually fairly safe. It's not uncommon for random people to act as taxi drivers.