Darren Lester was forlornly adrift on the road leading out of Bantry. A beanpole-thin backpacker from Gateshead in the north of England, he had picked a rough old day to hitch.
The equinox gales start bothering the west Cork coast at this time of year, and gusts were ripping in off the bay. The rain was slapping about in needling squalls, and the traffic was unpromisingly light at the end of a quiet tourist season.
He'd set out from Killarney that morning and was bound for Cork. But many hours had passed, the weather was deteriorating and he was a study in sodden gloom. "I've been getting too many bloody lifts is my problem," he mumbled, grimly rolling a smoke.
"It's all stop and go: someone brings you five miles and then they leave you off again. I must have had eight or nine lifts to get this far."
Would he not, I asked, have splashed out the £12 on a bus ticket? But Lester was on a tight budget, and he doesn't like buses, anyway.
He had hitched across Europe and only once had a bad experience, when "some geezer in France started coming the perv with me".
"The guidebooks say you shouldn't hitch any more, but it gets you around and there's no timetables," he said. "Ireland is fairly okay for lifts; it's usually the older people who stop, and people in older cars."
He's right about the guidebooks. All the Lonely Planets and Rough Guides warn shrilly against hitch-hiking, in the Republic and everywhere else. Wondering what the official line was, I rang Garda headquarters.
"Just don't blooming well do it, that's our advice," said a spokeswoman. "We think that both giving lifts and taking lifts is an extremely bad idea."
I suppose you never know who's beside you in the car. "You don't, no," she said, "and there have been a lot of incidents in the past, some of them very serious.
"We'd strongly urge people to use the public transport or arrange a lift with someone they know," she added. "We don't have a specific policy as such, but we'd hope people would use their common sense and not hitch-hike."
I am occasionally forced to resort to the thumb myself. Because the bus service snakes only so far down the Beara Peninsula, in west Cork, and because I have an aversion to driving, I haven't much of an option. So I sometimes hitch the 10 or 11 miles from Castletown Bere to Allihies.
It can take two or three lifts, and two or three life stories. Once, a man broke down and wept when he told me how his daughter was killed in a car crash. I've suffered in-depth analysis of operations - "in the end they said they'd go in and take the whole lot out." I've heard a lot of complaints about the weather, and about the farming and the fishing.
Once, I was scared, because the guy was doing 90 miles an hour on the Continental side of the crooked road. "If I go on the batter," I remember him saying, "I'd smoke 120 fags for you in a night, no problem whatsoever."
But mostly it's fine, and often entertaining. Last Sunday was representative of the Beara hitch-hiking experience. It can be an unorthodox corner of the country: my first lift was from a man who told me he lives in a bus. The second was from a very laid-back woman with a Northern drawl, who turned out to be Nell McCafferty. And bless her bones, she went out of her way to get me to my caravan.
Some day soon, though, I'll probably conquer my aversion and get a car.
