“It’s really that millisecond. If it takes too long, and your face kind-of drops, it’s almost impossible to get a ride. You have to get a ride before that.”
Sascha Grabow knows exactly how to hitch a ride.
If he didn’t, his travels might have ended long ago. Instead, Grabow – a German adventurer in his fifties – has spent decades trying to visit every one of the United Nation’s 193 member states.
He says he reached that marker in 2016, checking off Somalia as the last UN-recognized country on his list, but that didn’t end the journey. He is now on a mission to visit “every province of every country.”
The Northwest Territories was the only Canadian province or territory he hadn’t reached.
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That’s how Shirley Coumont came to discover that the hitch-hiker she just picked up by the side of the road in Enterprise was not your ordinary Highway 1 traveller.
Grabow can now scratch the NWT off his to-do list. Coumont brought him to Yellowknife and he even added Cabin Radio to his repertoire, a destination we’re pretty sure nobody else on the world travel leaderboard has so far visited. (Yes, there’s a leaderboard.)
He has made a living as a tennis coach, among various other jobs on continents around the world. He has published a book of Burmese poetry alongside a friend he met while there. And he had the cash to pull off a flight north into the Arctic while in the NWT.
But for the most part, he travels as frugally as possible. That’s where the hitch-hiking comes in, and he sleeps wherever he can find a roof.
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“It makes you very calm inside,” he said of his lifelong travel quest.
“Sometimes I think I’m trying to do all these things where each one of them is completely understandable and normal. But the sum total? When you do that, then people look at you and they think, ‘Wow, this is strange. This is weird.’
“But maybe all the other people, they’re actually doing the funny thing.”
To learn more about what motivated Coumont to pick up Grabow in Enterprise, why Grabow finds himself here and how he lives his life, listen to Cabin Talks.
Get the podcast on Spotify, Apple and a range of other platforms.
