Riding With Strangers: California Hitchhikers in the 1970s

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

“For years, starting in the late ‘70s, I was taking pictures of hitchhikers. A hitchhiker is someone you may know for an hour, or a day, or, every so often, a little longer, yet, when you leave them, they’re gone. If I took a picture, I reasoned, I’d have a memory. I kept a small portfolio of photos in the car to help explain why I wanted to take their picture. This helped a lot. It also led me to look for hitchhikers, so that I could get more pictures.

“I almost always had a camera… I finally settled on the Olympus XA – a wonderful little pocket camera. (I’ve taken a picture of the moon rising with this camera.) One time I asked a chap if I could take a photo, and he said, “You took my picture a few years ago.” I showed him the album and he picked himself out. “That’s me,” he said, pointing…”

Not that hitch-hiking is remotely as much a thing today as it was 50 years ago, but even if it were then it wouldn’t be so revolutionary to, say, take a photo of everybody you give a ride to. We’re all carrying cameras all the time, and the price of taking a snap is basically nothing.

But for Doug Biggert, who died in 2023, began doing this with an analogue camera as he drove around California from 1973 onwards? That’s quite something. Little wonder he had to explain his project to his passengers (helped, later on, by carrying a copy of the photo album he’d collected so-far that he could show them).

A really interesting gallery with a similarly-compelling story. Also: man – look at the wear-and-tear on his VW Bug!

×

Note #26625

Off to Pembrokeshire on holiday I’ve had to stop near Cardiff to put some more charge into the car… which provides the perfect opportunity for the doggo and I to explore a nearby sports field and take in All. The. Smells. 🐶

Standing in a green park space, Dan gestures to his dog, a Frenchie, who's sniffing a nearby tree.

×

Delivery Songs

Duration

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Here in the UK, ice cream vans will usually play a tune to let you know they’re set up and selling1. So when you hear Greensleeves (or, occasionally, Waltzing Matilda), you know it’s time to go and order yourself a ninety-nine.

On a verdant manicured lawn under a summer sky, two parents walk barefoot after their young child, who is running towards a traditionally-coloured yellow-and-white British ice cream van with visible branding reading 'fresh dairy ice cream' and '99 flake'.
Bet you want a double-99 with monkey’s blood now, right? If not, maybe hearing the chime will make the difference.

Imagine my delight, then, when I discover this week that ice cream vans aren’t the only services to play such jaunty tunes! I was sat with work colleagues outside İlter’s Bistro on Meşrutiyet Cd. in Istanbul, enjoying a beer, when a van carrying water pulled up and… played a little song!

And then, a few minutes later – as if part of the show for a tourist like me – a flatbed truck filled with portable propane tanks pulled up. Y’know, the kind you might use to heat a static caravan. Or perhaps a gas barbeque if you only wanted to have to buy a refill once every five years. And you know what: it played a happy little jingle, too. Such joy!

A grey-haired man wearing a t-shirt and blue jeans leans casually against the open doors of a white van that's visibly filled floor-to-ceiling with 19-litre 'water cooler style' water bottles, plus a pallet lifter. The van is parked between red-and-white striped cones on an Istanbul street.
In Istanbul, people put out their empty water bottles to be swapped-out for full ones by the water delivery man2.

My buddy Cem, who’s reasonably local to the area, told me that this was pretty common practice. The propane man, the water man, etc. would all play a song when they arrived in your neighbourhood so that you’d be reminded that, if you hadn’t already put your empties outside for replacement, now was the time!

And then Raja, another member of my team, observed that in his native India, vegetable delivery trucks also play a song so you know they’re arriving. Apparently the tune they play is as well-standardised as British ice cream vans are. All of the deliveries he’s aware of across his state of Chennai play the same piece of music, so that you know it’s them.

Two men sit in the back of an open-backed vegetable delivery truck.
Raja didn’t have a photo to share (and why would he? it’s not like I have a photo of the guy who comes to refill the gas tank behind my house!3), so I found this stock pic which sounds a bit like what he described. Photo courtesy Aiden Jones, used under a CC-By-SA license.

It got me thinking: what other delivery services might benefit from a recognisable tune?

  • Bin men: I’ve failed to put the bins out in time frequently enough, over the course of my life, that a little jingle to remind me to do so would be welcome4! (My bin men often don’t come until after I’m awake anyway, so as long as they don’t turn the music on until after say 7am they’re unlikely to be a huge inconvenience to anybody, right?) If nothing else, it’d cue me in to the fact that they were passing so I’d remember to bring the bins back in again afterwards.
  • Fish & chip van: I’ve never made use of the mobile fish & chip van that tours my village once a week, but I might be more likely to if it announced its arrival with a recognisable tune.
'Howe & Co' Fish & Chip van, painted in white and blue and parked in a residential street.
I’m thinking a chorus of Baby Shark would get everybody’s attention.
  • Milkman: I’ve a bit of a gripe with our milkman. Despite promising to deliver before 07:00 each morning, they routinely turn up much later. It’s particularly troublesome when they come at about 08:40 while I’m on the school run, which breaks my routine sufficiently that it often results in the milk sitting unseen on the porch until I think to check much later in the day. Like the bin men, it’d be a convenience if, on running late, they at least made their presence in my village more-obvious with a happy little ditty!
  • Emergency services: Sirens are boring. How about if blue light services each had their own song. Perhaps something thematic? Instead of going nee-naw-nee-naw, you’d hear, say, de-do-do-do-de-dah-dah-dah and instantly know that you were hearing The Police.
  • Evri: Perhaps there’s an appropriate piece of music that says “the courier didn’t bother to ring your doorbell, so now your parcel’s hidden in your recycling box”? Just a thought.

Anyway: the bottom line is that I think there’s an untapped market for jolly little jingles for all kinds of delivery services, and Turkey and India are clearly both way ahead of the UK. Let’s fix that!

Footnotes

1 It’s not unheard of for cruel clever parents to try to teach their young children that the ice cream van plays music only to let you know it’s sold out of ice cream. A devious plan, although one I wasn’t smart (or evil?) enough to try for myself.

2 The official line from the government is that the piped water is safe to drink, but every single Turkish person I spoke to on the subject disagreed and said that I shouldn’t listen to… well, most of what the government says. Having now witnessed first-hand the disparity between the government’s line on the unrest following the arrest of the opposition’s presidential candidate and what’s actually happening on the ground, I’m even more inclined to listen to the people.

3 My gas delivery man should also have his own song, of course. Perhaps an instrumental cover of Burn Baby Burn?

4 Perhaps bin men could play Garbage Truck by Sex Bob-Omb/Beck? That seems kinda fitting. Although definitely not what you want to be woken up with if they turn the speakers on too early…

× × × ×

Dan Q found GC6VTEG Galata Bridge #3

This checkin to GC6VTEG Galata Bridge #3 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

After lunch with my work team in a delightful restaurant overlooking the bridge (which I’m just-about pointing at in the attached photo) I decided to take a diversion on the route back to our coworking space to come and find this geocache, my most-Easterly yet.

The coordinates put me exactly at a likely spot, but it actually took until I’d searched three different candidate hosts before the cache container was in my hand. Signed log and (stealthily) returned to hiding place. TFTC!

Dan stands on a busy, wide foot/road bridge, pointing at the top floor of a building overlooking the river that it crosses.

×

Team Desire in Istanbul

With visa complications and travel challenges, this is the very first time that my team – whom I’ve been working with for the last year – have ever all been in the same country, all at the same time.

You can do a lot in a distributed work environment. But sometimes you just have to come together… in celebration of your achievements, in anticipation of what you’ll do next, and in aid of doing those kinds of work that really benefit from a close, communal, same-timezone environment.

A group of men sit on chairs, a sofa, and the edge of a desk in a comfortable large office space.

×

Dan Q found GCB3FAQ The Grand Bazaar fossils

This checkin to GCB3FAQ The Grand Bazaar fossils reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

I’m visiting Istanbul to meet with colleagues, but we took some time off from our meetings and work this afternoon to come and get lost in the Grand Bazaar. While browsing the amazing diversity of stalls I found myself staring at the floors, which are made of the same kind of limestone as my kitchen floor (in which my kids love hunting for fossils!). Wouldn’t that make a great Earthcache, I thought… and it turns out it anyway is one! So I spent a little while hunting for the best fossil I could find (I’d hoped for a gastropod of some kind, but had to settle for a bivalve), and sent the answers to the CO. Fantastic stuff. TFTC! FP awarded. And, possibly, FTF!

"Dan Q" and today's date written on a small piece of paper, alongside a pen, which points to a bivalve fossil in a limestone floor.

×

Istanbul

Istanbul is… sprawling. I stood on this footbridge, over the water, to try to comprehend the scale of the place, but it’s just massive. The hills, which help the tall buildings to tower over you no matter where you stand, only serve to exaggerate the effect. Quite the spectacle of human settlement.

View from above a river, flanked by dense city on both sides, under an overcast sky.

×

Note #26129

Good morning, Oxfordshire! A freezing-fog farewell for me, this morning, as I get up early to catch a series of buses to the airport.

A wet rural road, lit by the sun's first light as it rises ahead, it's flanked by fields full of freezing fog.

×

Note #25533

Yesterday, Ruth and I made the first ever attempt at a geohashing expedition in Trinidad & Tobago, successfully finding a hashpoint in Chase Village in the West of Trinidad!

🔗 https://danq.link/gh-trinidad

Geohashing expedition 2025-01-15 10 -61

This checkin to geohash 2025-01-15 10 -61 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.

Location

Empty lot off Bhagan Trace, Chandernagore, near Chase Village, Trinidad.

Participants

Plans

I’ve been on holiday on the islands of Trinidad & Tobago this week. These island nations span graticules that are dominated by the Caribbean and Atlantic Oceans, so it’s little wonder there’s never been an attempted geohashing expedition in them. So when a hashpoint popped-up in a possibly-accessible location, I had to go for it!

For additional context: Trinidad & Tobago is currently under a state of emergency as gang warfare and an escalating murder rate has reached a peak. It’s probably ill-advised to go far off the beaten track, especially as somebody who’s clearly a foreign tourist. The violence and danger is especially prevalent in and around parts of nearby Port of Spain.

As a result, my partner Ruth (wisely) agreed to drive with me to the GZ strictly under the understanding that we’d turn back at a moment’s notice if anything looked remotely sketchy, and we’d take every precaution on the way to, from, and at the hashpoint area (e.g. keeping car doors locked when travelling and not getting out unless necessary and safe to do so, keeping valuables hidden out of sight, knowing the location of the nearest police station at any time, etc.).

I don’t have my regular geohashing kit with me, but I’ve got a smartphone, uLogger sending 5-minute GPS location pings (and the ability to send a location when I press a button in the app, for proof later), and a little bravery, so here we go…

Expedition

Our plane from Tobago landed around 15:20 local time, following an ahead-of-schedule flight assisted by a tailwind from the Atlantic side. We disembarked, collected our bags, and proceeded to pick up a hire car.

Medium-sized two-engine turboprop aircraft on tarmac runway, facing away from the photographer, under slightly cloudy blue skies. Caribbean Airlines livery (colourful hummingbird on tail).
Our Caribbean Airlines aircraft, landed at Piarco airport.

Our original plan for our stay in Trinidad had been to drive up to an AirBnB near 10.743817, -61.514248 on Paramin, one of Tobago’s highest summits. However, our experience of driving up Mount Dillon on Tobago earlier in the week showed us that the rural mountain roads around here can be terrifyingly dangerous for non-locals1, and so we chickened out and investigated the possibility of arranging a last-minute stay at a lodge on the edge of the rainforest in Gran Couva, or else failing that a fallback plan of a conventional tourist-centric hotel in the North of Port of Spain.

By this point, we’d determined that the hashpoint was in the old sugar growing region of Caroni, in which our originally-intended accommodation at Gran Couva could be found, and so it seemed feasible that we might be able to safely deviate from our route only a little to get to the hashpoint before reaching our beds. We were particularly keen to be at a place of known safety before the sun set, here in an unusual part of an unfamiliar country! So when the owner of our proposed lodge in Gran Couva called to say that he couldn’t accept our last-minute booking on account of ongoing renovations to his property, we had to quickly arrange ourself a room at our backup hotel.

This put us in an awkward position: now the hashpoint really wasn’t anything-like on the way from the airport to where we’d be staying, and we’d doubtless be spending longer than we’d like to be on the road and increasing the risk that we’d be out after dark. I reassured Ruth, whose appetite for risk is somewhat lower than mine, that if we set out for the hashpoint and anything seemed “off” we could turn around at any time, and we began our journey.

Ruth drives a car; Dan, in the passenger seat, looks into the camera as he takes a selfie.
Putting a brave/excited face on as we set off in our rental car.

Boosted by her experience of driving on Tobago, Ruth continued to show her rapidly-developing Trinbagonian road skills2.

View through a windscreen showing cars ahead going over a speed bump and winding along a road between tropical shrubbery, with power lines overhead.
Driving down a network of crisscrossing roads.

Despite increasingly heavy traffic on our minor roads, possibly resulting from a crash that had occurred on the Southbound carriageway of the nearby Uriah Butler Highway which was causing drivers to seek a shortcut through the suburbs, we made reasonable time, and were soon in the vicinity of the hashpoint: a mixed-use residential/light commercial estate of the kind that apparently sprung up in places that were, until very late in the 20th century, lands used for sugar cane plantations.

At this point, the maps started to become less and less useful: Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, and Bing Maps completely disagreed as to whether we were driving on Bhagan Trace, Cemetery Street, or Roy Gobin Fifth Avenue, as well as disagreeing on whether we were driving into a cul-de-sac or whether it was possible to loop around at the end to return back to the main roads. It was now almost 17:00 and we were greeted by a large number of cars coming out of the narrow street in the opposite direction to us, going in, and squeezing past us: presumably workers from one of the businesses down here going home for the evening.

Six-lane highway as viewed through a windscreen. Traffic ahead is flowing well but there's a jam underway on the opposite carriageway.
There are highways we’d been recommended to avoid because of the safety situation here, but this one was okay.

My GPS flickered as it tried to make sense of the patchwork of streets, and I asked Ruth to slow down and pull over a couple of times until I was sure that we’d gotten as close as we could, by road. Looking out of my window, I saw the empty lot that I’d scouted from satellite photography, but it was hopelessly overgrown. If the hashpoint was within it, it’d take hours of work and a machete to cut through. The circle of uncertainty jumped around as I tried to finalise the signal without daring to do the obvious thing of holding my phone outside the car window. A handful of locals watched us, the strange white folks sitting in a new car, as I poked at my devices in an effort to check if we were within the circle, or at least if we would be when, imminently, we were forced to park even closer to the side to let a larger vehicle force its way through next to us!

A mess of uncontrolled tropical plants between houses.
Pulled up at the hashpoint.

At the point at which I thought we’d made it, I hit the “save waypoint” at 17:06 button and instructed Ruth to drive on. We turned in the road and I started navigating us to our hotel, only thinking to look at the final location I’d tagged later, when we felt safer. We drove back into Port of Spain avoiding Laventille (another zone we’d been particularly recommended to stay away from) while I resisted the urge to double-check my tracklog, instead focussing on trying to provide solid directions through not-always-signposted streets: we had a wrong turning at one point when we came off the highway at Bamboo Settlement No. 1 (10.627952, -61.429083) but thankfully this was an easy mistake to course-correct from.

View through a windscreen and across a road into an overgrown wilderness between houses, under power lines.
View of the hashpoint again as we turn to go home

It was only when I looked at my tracklog, later, that I discovered that the point I’d tagged was exactly 8.59 metres from the hashpoint, plus or minus a circle of uncertainty of… 9 metres. Amazingly, we’d succeeded without even being certain we’d done so. Having failed to get a silly grin photo at the hashpoint, we sufficed to get one while we drank celebratory Prosecco and ate tapas on the rooftop bar of our hotel, looking down on the beautiful bay and imposing mountains of this beautiful if intimidating island.

Dan and Ruth clink champagne flutes under a dark sky, with city lights visible below them.
Silly drinky grins atop our hotel North of Port of Spain

Tracklog

I didn’t bring my primary GPSr, but my phone keeps a general-purpose tracklog at ~5min/50m intervals, and when I prompt it to. Apologies that this makes my route map look “jumpier” than usual, especially when I’m away from the GZ.

Map showing a zig-zagging route from Piarco airport in West Trinidad South-West to near Chaguanas then North again to the edge of the mountains overlooking Port of Spain.

Achievements

Dan Q earned the Graticule Unlocked Achievement by being the first to reach any hashpoint in the (10, -61) graticule, here, on 2025-01-15.

Footnotes

1 Often, when speaking to locals, they’d ask if it was our first time in Trinidad & Tobago, and on learning that it was, they’d be shocked to hear that we’d opted to drive for ourselves rather than to hire drivers to take us places: it turns out that the roads are in very-variable condition, from wonderfully-maintained highways to rural trails barely-driveable without a 4×4, but locals in both drive with the same kind of assertive and sometimes reckless attitude.

2 tl;dr of driving in Trinidad & Tobago, as somebody who learned to drive in the UK: (1) if you need to get out of anywhere, don’t wait for anybody to yield because they won’t, even if you theoretically have the right of way: instead, force your way out by obstructing others, (2) drive in the middle of the road wherever possible to make it easier to dodge potholes and other hazards, which are clustered near the soft verges, and swing to your own side of the road only at the last second to avoid collisions, and (3) use your horn as often as you like and for any purpose: to indicate that you want to turn, to warn somebody that you’re there, to tell somebody to move, to say hello to a nearby pedestrian you recognise, or in lieu of turning on your headlights at night, for example. The car horn is a universal language, it seems.

× × × × × × × ×