Project Hitchhiker | travels, stories and adventures in lifestyle design
welcome to my blog
Project Hitchhiker is the online creative outlet of Mike H.
Mike’s adventures have taken him across 3 continents, including driving a motorcycle for 6 months across Southeast Asia, hitchhiking across Canada and Japan, and walking 1000 miles along the coastline of Nova Scotia.
Mike’s passions are music, travel and motorcycles (in that order).
Mike’s dislikes include writing about himself in the third person.
This site is a collection of his travels, stories and adventures in lifestyle design.
In the Four Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris talks about his simple, yet unconventional strategies for winning the Chinese National Kickboxing championship with relatively little kickboxing experience. How knowing the finer points of the rules and focusing on their weaknesses led him to win first prize in the tournament, simultaneously pissing off the whole of China. My mom was doing this Four Hour Workweek stuff — using existing rules and structures to her advantage, outsourcing her workload — before Tim Ferris joined his Highschool wrestling team. Back when he was still wearing tighty whities and Spiderman pajamas.
My friend Josh recently wrote a blog post about learning Spanish — what has been working, and what hasn’t — and asked for strategies from his readers. When I sat down to write a comment, I realized I had too much to say for just a short paragraph, so here it is. These are strategies that have helped me (and people who I have recognized as effective second language learners) pick up a new language quicker than average — not because we are smarter, but simply because we focus on time-efficient and effective strategies.
Life would have been just fine without Motorcycles.
I might have bought a reasonably priced sedan or hatchback, got a “real job,” had 2.3 kids and lived happily ever after. Things would have been more, well, predictable. I mean, I used to cringe when I walked past guys wearing Harley Davidson jackets and leather chaps, or guys decked out in full racing leathers. Victims of an under-developed fashion sense, I’d say to myself. And here I am two years later on the peripherals of the club. Now when I pass these guys on my motorbike, we exchange the biker’s salute and chat about our travels in Tim Horton’s parking lots and truck stop restaurants (I wonder: how many people who drive Camaros or pickup trucks wave to each other as they drive by as a sign of respect? I would wager it’s not a high number). Though that’s not to say I’ll ever wear leather chaps.
Last month I moved into my house in this small Eastern Labrador town of about 500. It will be my home for the next 10 months. In a CBC newscast in 2007, the town was referred to as “the End of the Earth.” A slight exaggeration — it is, at the very least, the end of the road: the Trans-Labrador Highway (a sometimes-paved, mostly gravel windy road that starts at the Quebec-Labrador border) ends here. The other night, a colleague and I watched for an hour as the green and yellow northern lights danced across the sky for us. Aside from the cold (which for the record, I hate), I’m falling in love with the place.
