Whenever people ask me what my favourite way to travel is, they’re normally surprised to hear it’s hitchhiking.

Why? For a whole host of reasons, but I was not aware of the main one until I got a memorable lift out of Krakow, Poland, in 2018. I had been standing at Mogilany Ośrodek Zdrowia bus stop for about 20 minutes, when a convertible white Chrysler pulled up. The owner was Bartosw, a handsome, 30-year-old Pole with a strong build and a close-cut, brown-ginger beard that matched his short hair and moustache. He wore a scarlet T-shirt, stylish sunglasses that hid his eyes and had friendly facial features.

‘I can only take you about 20 kilometres,’ he said. ‘Is that okay?’

‘That’d be great.’

I got in, and Bartosw hit the gas. As so often happens with hitchhiking, the driver soon grew nostalgic about his own days on the road.

‘There’s nothing like a great first lift to start the day,’ he said. ‘I used to hitch loads when I was younger. While travelling in my twenties, I met this girl who was really impressed by me – maybe it was the solo hitchhiking, I don’t know, but I impressed her somehow. We started travelling together and she fell in love with me quickly, then I did with her. We spent the next four years travelling, mostly hitching.

‘It was amazing,’ he said, glancing my way. ‘We went everywhere and were so in love; travelling was everything to us. Sure enough, we got engaged – for two years. But when we finally married and settled down, it wasn’t the same, and we split up after one year. No longer on the road, we realised that we were actually quite different people. Funny, isn’t it? Travelling connects people, and we had little in common outside of it.’

Bartosw finished speaking just as he slowed down to drop me off before some traffic lights. I had already hitched hundreds of times before I met Bartosw, but it took his hilarious yet oddly heart-warming story to make me realise that there are few things I value more than getting snapshots of other people’s lives.

It’s certainly why I spent much of my twenties standing at the side of the road with my thumb out, and a large part of me suspects that stories like Bartosw’s also had something to do with me becoming a journalist.