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.
After writing the last post about hitchhiking to Montreal to see TOOL, I got to thinking. How could I be so obsessed with a band and a genre of music so much eight years ago, and yet now when I listen to the same band I feel overwhelmed. Overwhelmed in a bad way. Like the music that represented my life and feelings so perfectly years ago, is now way too heavy and NEGATIVE for me.
I think we all intuitively realize on some level that music aligns you with whatever its VIBE is – whether it’s angst, lovestruck-ness, happy go lucky, sadness – but we rarely take a minute to consciously think about it. For instance, when someone just breaks up with you, you might listen or relate to songs about lost love, feeling down, broken hearts. Or it’s possible you would listen to heavy aggressive music because that’s how you feel. Or maybe you try to listen to happy music to cheer yourself up – to try to get out of that slump.
Day 2 on the road. Dylan and I officially consider ourselves hardened road veterans. With an early start thanks to the sketchy House of Nazareth, we catch our first ride before 8am: an old, bright orange VW van. I didn’t know hitchhiking could be so cliche. Dylan sat in the back seat, a slippery vinyl ledge with no seatbelt, and I sat up front. After our introductions, the twenty-something driver started talking about music. “Hey, do you guys know reggae punk? You gotta check this out.” The remainder of the two hour ride, he would alternate between telling us about a new genre of music he had discovered (psychedelic blues, Icelandic ska) and playing a few songs on his stereo for us. Dylan fell asleep in the back so I was left on conversation duty. Nearing the end of the ride, I ventured to asked him if he liked TOOL. “Naw, too loud. They’re just plain metal. But hey, you gotta check out this new underground African-jazz-metal trio I found from New York…”
This is part one in a true series called Montreal Rock City.
The question you gotta ask yourself is how badly do you wanna see the greatest fucking rock and roll show in the fucking earth, right? We’re talking Gene and Paul live, yo. We’re talking about the most voluptuous women hanging out in the audience. I’m talking big breasteses in tight dressteses. We’re talkin’ ‘bout people passing around joints in the audience. I’m talking about fucking Detroit rock city. Shake your wee wee.
– Scalper in the movie Detroit Rock City
The Scene
I’m seventeen. It’s the summer after graduating high school. A rough summer of alcoholic hazes and sleepless nights. I sometimes get headaches when I don’t drink. The august heat makes my shitty job of cleaning car interiors even more hellish. I tell by boss that if I have to scrape one more dead bird from under the hood of a Pontiac Aztec, I’ll quit.
As most experienced outdoor enthusiasts know, it’s usually some combination of two elements that put us into the most dangerous situations: 1) underestimating the proposed adventure and 2) overestimating one’s own abilities. Which brings me to this story.
Below, a video of me in Northern Thailand, half-drunk on rice wine and trying deep fried bugs at the local market.
I love eating weird stuff. Love it.
Kangaroos. Caribou. Big bugs. Beating snake hearts. One of my favorite things about traveling is trying strange new foods — foods that the locals will eat usually to gross out a foreigner — that’s the stuff I seek out. It makes life more interesting and helps get me out of my travel routines.
