Walk Like a Girl is a true story about a one woman’s journey to find herself and her place in the world. She hikes through Georgia, Nepal and India while dealing with personal heartbreak. Here is an extract from her time in Georgia.

Walk Like a Girl
By Claudia Esnouf
Published by Sparsile Books

If we were going to hitchhike, we had to do it properly. We headed to the nearest petrol station with our backpacks to find scrap pieces of cardboard and felt-tip pens to write out our destination. As I set out to write MESTIA, Andy caught my wrist. 

‘Er, wait.’ He hesitated. ‘I think they write differently here.’ 

‘What do you mean? They’ll be able to read the same.’ 

‘No, I mean they have a different script. Squiggly letters.’ 

It took asking several different people before finding a man who could vaguely understand English. I watched as Andy tried to pry him for directions for Mestia. The man looked incredulously at us when he realised we were trying to hitchhike there. 

I imagined two foreigners in Edinburgh asking someone if they could hitchhike on Princes Street. They’d probably be escorted to a holding cell. 

Handily, he wrote out our destinations in Georgian on a piece of discarded cardboard. The Cyrillic script looked like a Comic Sans font from Microsoft Word. A few people lingered around the petrol station and watched us as we gathered our positions. 

‘Great, now we have an audience,’ muttered Andy. 

I clutched the piece of cardboard. We stood millimetres from the deafening highway; our bodies pressed against the dented road barriers that did little to protect us from the steep drop to the gorge below. Cars beeped, trucks blared their horns, people gestured out of their windows. 

‘What do we do now?’ I yelled at Andy. 

We could barely hear each other amidst the traffic racket. 

‘Stick your thumb out.’ 

‘I mean, that’s pretty dodgy. It’s quite forward and a bit embarrassing, really. I don’t know, maybe we should just pay for a bus. We don’t even really know where we’re going.’ 

‘Stick your thumb out!’ 

‘Why don’t you do it?’ 

‘You’re a girl; they’ll pick us up faster.’ 

‘You mean you want them to pick me up in the hopes they can have sex with me?’ 

‘Antonia, just stick your fucking thumb out!’ 

—– 

An hour later, we were standing in the same spot, puzzled at the lack of Georgian hospitality we’d read such great things about. 

Our small audience watched us lazily, amused. A man sitting in his car across the road was looking at us, shaking his head and fingers, and I shot him a defiant glare. He sighed and waved his hands and then parked his car on the side of the highway. He quickly ran across the two large lanes towards us. 

He was yelling at us in Georgian, and I backed into Andy, terrified we were somehow insulting him or his country. When he realised we spoke English, he exasperatedly tried to find the words. 

‘No…No Mestia. Impossible!’ he said. 

We argued, pointing at our maps and phones. It was possible, surely. 

He wouldn’t even look at our maps. Andy realised that arguing in English was getting him nowhere and began gesticulating, pointing fingers and using some invented sign language. 

Finally, the penny dropped. 

‘I think he’s telling us we’re hitchhiking the wrong way,’ I said. I pointed to my right. ‘Mestia that way. Yes?’ 

‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ He sounded delighted, patting us both on the back. 

Sheepishly, we grabbed our bags and crossed the road. 

I heard laughter and looked back, watching the audience at the gas station cheering. On the other side of the road, I stuck my thumb out again. In moments we were in a van, rattling away at the back. 

—–

The hitchhike experience took us through the hills for hours on end. We sat in the back of a van where the men in the front sat drinking beer, then were squished in the back of a car where about eight family members were already sitting like sardines. A baby sat on my lap while another child held my hand without a word. 

There was a father and son, where the son practised his English; and a lone lorry driver from Azerbaijan, who stopped at the side of the road and made us follow him up a hill so he could show us a holy cave. 

Our last ride to Mestia was a car that seemed to date back to the sixteenth century. It looked like a patchwork quilt, made up of different parts and seemingly held together by string. It rattled up the hill, creaking around every precarious corner, cliffs plunging down for several kilometres into dark crevasses. We were driving up the Caucasus Mountains. I shut my eyes, but that made me more carsick, so I tried to focus on the broken road in front. 

Andy wasn’t doing much better. The car was meant to fit five people at most, but we were nine, squished in and moving around every corner together. It felt like we were very slowly rumbling around Everest, past base camp and up to the peak. 

Suddenly there was a huge bang. The driver yelled. The car screeched to a stop. We all gasped, lurching into focus. Our driver climbed out and after much screaming, people climbing out on top of each other, we managed to slide out and saw a huge rock that had fallen from the mountain and dented the car roof. 

‘Lucky it wasn’t the windscreen,’ said Andy, who’d gone a further shade of white. 

I gulped. 

The driver, who seemed to have only just registered us all standing there, yelled at us to get back into the car, as he wiped his brow, issued a prayer and adjusted the wooden orthodox cross back onto the windscreen. Tension released and we heard nervous laughter. Some of the passengers clapped our backs, talking to us in fast, bubbly Georgian, and we nodded along in shock. 

Walk Like a Girl by Claudia Esnouf is published by Sparsile Books, priced £10.99.