In the latest episode of VICE’s Culture Club, host Jackson Garrett sits down with Courtney Allan, a hitchhiker who drew a large online following in 2024 after traveling from Southampton, U.K., to South Africa with her friend Timo De Jong. This time, she’s traveling alone. Allan is hitchhiking from China to Cape Town, crossing borders one ride at a time. No buses. No trains. No paid taxis. When no one stops, she sets up her tent and waits.
Allan explains why hitchhiking works for her, even on her own. Speaking from the road while moving through the Middle East, Allan talks about liking the lack of structure and how much control you give up when you rely on strangers. One day ends at someone’s kitchen table. Another stretches into hours of waiting.
Traveling alone has sharpened her gut instinct. Allan talks about how hitchhiking has made her constantly aware of being a woman in unfamiliar places. Safety comes up, as it always does. Allan says she doesn’t really operate off a system. “It’s all in the eyes,” she tells Garrett. Sometimes she checks ID. Sometimes she just trusts the read. She carries pepper spray now, though she admits she has no real sense of how useful it would actually be.
Some stories she’ll never forget. Allan describes the one ride she refused in China, involving a man who called her an “angel” and carried a bright orange poisonous frog as a spiritual companion. After she said no, he stayed parked nearby for half an hour before finally leaving. Another moment came later in Mauritania, during one of the shortest rides of the entire trip, after a man grabbed her, assuming she was for sale, and she demanded to get out of the car. She brushes it off afterward. “And it was a misunderstanding. Again, not dangerous.”
Her most unsettling moment actually didn’t happen on the road at all. It was from the internet. Allan says someone suggested setting up betting odds on her trip. They wanted “to set up a bet… about if I’m going to make it or if I’m going to die,” she says. The appalling message made it clear how simple it is for strangers to detach from the fact that someone’s life is involved.
Allan understands why people fixate on danger, but she doesn’t want that to eclipse everything else. She talks about generosity from strangers, unexpected invitations, and the strange intimacy of relying on people you’ll never see again. When Garrett asks what she hopes people take away from the journey, she puts it plainly: “I just want people to know that this is actually really cool.”
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