On August 6, traffic police from the Litang Brigade of Hunan Provincial Expressway Police stopped at the provincial checkpoint at Jinyushi Toll Station. They noticed a young foreign man and woman carrying backpacks walking on foot through the toll station. It turned out the two foreign “backpackers” were planning to “travel the world on a budget”! The police patiently used simple English and body language to inform them of the dangers of walking on highways, as well as China’s laws and regulations prohibiting pedestrians on expressways, and helped them contact a bus traveling from Guiyang to Shanghai.
At around 1 p.m. that day, police officers on duty from the Litang Brigade were stationed at the square of Jinyushi Toll Station when they spotted a young foreign man and woman carrying backpacks walking on foot through the toll station. “Hello, can I help you?” the officers approached and asked in English. The pair stopped, looked at the officers, and pointed eastward, indicating they wanted to continue heading east.
The officers guided the two to the duty booth and communicated with them using simple English and body language. At this point, they took out their passports from their backpacks and wrote on a piece of paper in Chinese: “We want to go to Shanghai.” It turned out they were a post-90s Russian couple who had made plans to travel the world together. They were adopting a method of “hiking, taking free rides, and hitching free boats,” carrying both a world map and a map of China. When they got lost, they would ask passersby for directions. The young man told the officers they had set off from Beijing, with their current destination being Shanghai. From there, they planned to fly to Manila. So, they had been traveling along the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao Expressway and then transferred to the Shanghai-Kunming Expressway to reach Shanghai, relying on the help of others to get free rides along the way. “We took a free ride at the Changsha bus station and passed through here. The driver was about to exit the highway up ahead. Seeing the police here, they asked us to come over and hoped to get your help.”
The on-duty police officers explained to them the dangers of walking on highways and China’s laws and regulations prohibiting pedestrians on expressways. They seemed to understand and nodded repeatedly. With the officers’ help, they found a bus driver willing to take them to Shanghai for free. Before boarding the bus, the couple tightly held the officers’ hands and repeatedly said, “Thank you！Thank you！”
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