Go Niche

QUESTION: How do you travel great distances without even the merest smudge of a carbon footprint?

Answer: Hitchhike.

Okay, you’ve got your perverts, weirdos and plain old bores to contend with, but your eco-conscience will be clean. The driver was going anyway. It won’t cost you a penny, and you don’t have to stand at Newlands Cross with a handwritten sign, either.

Simply log on to www.hitchhikers.org and a world of free travel awaits you.

Visitors to the site can choose to tag along with any number of drivers with, as the home page puts it, “empty spaces in their cars and in need of some laughing [sic] or a serious conversation”.

Lifts are offered across Europe, though very few of the current listings seem to get as far as Ireland.

Still, if someone’s offering to take you from Pisa to Amsterdam for the price of some laughing or a serious conversation, who are you to look a gift horse in the mouth?

If you’re serious about it, www.digihitch.com has details of long-distance lifts going a-begging around the world, including the US, South America and Asia.

Just be careful. As ever when hitching, bring your phone and use it to photograph the car, the number plate and the driver before you get in. Then send it to everybody in your phone book, along with details of where you are going and your expected time of arrival.

Okay, forget it. It’s not going to work. It’ll all go wrong and end up on my conscience. Sod the planet. Take the plane.