Smiles & miles on a shoestring
Solo traveller Petrina Thong spent a year hitchhiking through 22 countries with no plan and no budget. Siobhan Downes finds out how she did it.
It quickly becomes clear that Petrina Thong isn’t your typical tourist when trying to track her down for an interview. She emails back on May 4: ‘‘I will get back to you about when I can Skype. I’m currently in the Himalayas and India hasn’t been the best place for a good and extended wi-fi connection.’’
A month passes, with no word. Then, on June 5:
‘‘For the past month I have been in the northeast of India, trying to enter Myanmar. However, due to a bomb blasting and some political issues, all permits to enter Myanmar by land have been cancelled. So I am currently trapped.’’
It was one of the final hurdles in a hitchhiking odyssey from Sweden to Malaysia that took 13 months and spanned 22 countries.
Petrina, a 29-year-old freelance scriptwriter, did it all on her own, with no plan and almost no budget. In fact, she estimates the whole trip cost her about $1400, which mostly covered flights and visas.
She paid to travel by air twice – the initial flight from her home in Kuala Lumpur to Stockholm, and then, only as a last resort, to get out of India.
The rest of her journey was conducted entirely by thumb.
If you look Petrina up on Instagram, you’ll see a fearless, grinning, green-haired rainbow chick in the sorts of destinations that most mainstream travellers are advised to avoid. Kosovo. Iran. Pakistan.
But she’s a somewhat unlikely poster child for solo female travel. As a young Malaysian girl growing up in a Christian household, Petrina says she felt life had too many restrictions.
She was fascinated with western media – popular American TV shows like The OC, One Tree Hill, and Grey’s Anatomy.
She felt stuck in her own country. She wanted to see the world for herself.
‘‘I would always see Europeans or people in the western world travelling for really long and doing all these things. I always felt envious of it.
‘‘I was like, no, I need to do it as well.’’
In 2012, she booked her first solo trip to Europe for a month. In 2013, she spent a year in California as an au pair. Then she needed a bigger challenge.
‘‘My initial plan was just to experience hitchhiking,’’ she says.
‘‘I also started reading up a lot on alternative lifestyles – people who survive without money. I found it very attractive, for some reason. I would have all these internal debates of like, ‘oh, I wish I didn’t like money so much. I wish I could survive without money.’
‘‘At that point, I didn’t really have much in savings. But I still really wanted to travel. So I figured, now is the time to just experience this whole hitchhikingand-no-money thing.’’
Petrina bought a one-way ticket to Sweden and planned to spend six months hitchhiking around Europe before flying home to Kuala Lumpur.
But when the time came to return, she decided flying was too easy.
‘‘That’s when I was like, you know what, I’ll extend my trip and try to hitchhike all the way back home to Malaysia.’’
For the first month or so, Petrina would always try to hitchhike with a buddy. ‘‘I would invite any traveller I’d meet along the way – ‘hey, do you wanna go here with me?’’’
She spent a while on the road with a guy who had a tent.
But when he started trying to make moves on her, Petrina knew she had to go it alone.
Initially, all she had was a backpack, with a sleeping bag and some clothing.
Along the way, someone gave her a tent of her own.
‘‘Anyone who has travelled with me, they realise I can sleep a lot – anywhere pretty much. It’s something I’m thankful for. I’ve slept at petrol stations, next to highways, or a lot of times I would randomly knock on doors and ask if I can sleep in the garden.
‘‘Eighty per cent of the time people would ask me if I was alone, look at me and go, ‘ok, just sleep on my couch’.’’ She scavenged most of her food – dumpster diving, scanning outdoor eating areas for unfinished plates, and asking for leftover produce at markets.
‘‘I’m travelling how a hobo would travel.
‘‘That takes getting used to as well. In the beginning, I was always embarrassed to say that I have no money. But after a while, I had to learn how to be shameless.’’
She also learned to take on the world one day at a time.
‘‘I’d only worry about where I’d sleep for tonight, and where I’d rummage for food for today, and where I’d like to be before the sun sets.’’ As a result, she says, ‘‘I’m much better at short-term goals.’’
In many ways, Petrina says, the experience gave her faith in humanity.
‘‘I think when you put yourself in a vulnerable position, you really get to experience people. A lot of times when we travel we don’t really interact with the locals that much, especially if you’re in a country where you don’t speak the language.
‘‘Travelling in this manner, I always had to be in the company of a local. I was always in someone’s car, or in someone’s house.’’
Iran was the country where she felt safest.
‘‘As long as I’m walking alone with my backpack, cars will stop and ask, ‘hey, what are you doing, do you need help?’ Even in the city, when I was walking around, taxi drivers would stop and let me get a ride for free.
‘‘They respect and look out for women. For them, if you’re female, you shouldn’t be by yourself, you should be taken care of.’’
For Petrina, a bad day was when no one stopped to pick her up. ‘‘I would start getting angry at every car that passes by. I’d be like, ‘oh, you selfish a ....... , your car is empty, why won’t you stop?’’’
Then there were the dodgy drivers in Eastern Europe and Turkey who would ask for sex. In those cases, Petrina would threaten to jump out of the car, forcing them to stop.
Her worst experience was crossing the border from Iran to Pakistan, where she needed a police and army escort within the terrorist zone.
‘‘We crossed over the border to Pakistan and I was being handed over from one man to another, people taking down my details over and over again.
‘‘Finally they just put me in this room and left me there for a night, not really telling me what the hell was going on. It was just like this bare, grey, empty room.’’
One of the police officers entered her room at night, armed with a gun.
‘‘That was one of the experiences when I had nowhere to run. I just stared out the window and tried to place my mind in a different universe.’’
After 13 months on the road, Petrina was ready to come home.
‘‘It felt strange to be back because everything felt so familiar. It was as if the whole past year didn’t even happen, there’s just a glitch in the system and now I’m kind of back.’’
She likes being able to spend money on a slice of cake without a second thought. She also likes driving herself around Kuala Lumpur.
But she’s already thinking about where she might go next. She wants to start from Canada, and make her way down to South America.
For now though, she’s focusing on those short-term goals – like colouring her hair.
‘‘I’ll probably do half green, half purple, and some turquoise, I guess,’’ she says, laughing.
‘‘It’s one of those things where if you start, you can’t stop.’’