13. An Ambulance and an Ogre

13: AN AMBULANCE AND AN OGRE

The last episode felt like an ending.

But the trip moves on.

Weeks later. Hundreds of miles south. The road unspools fast—Poland into Germany, Leipzig to Munich.

South again. Austria in the rain. A couple who designed buildings throughout central Europe. They drop me in Budapest, where I stay alone in their gutted apartment between bare walls and power tools strewn on the floors. The whole place smelled like sawdust and wine.

And then—Serbia.

I move fast because something’s calling. I stayed in Poland a long time, and now I need to sprint all the way to Macedonia. The gathering, timed to the full moon. And every time I look up, the moon has grown.

I know the coordinates.

And I know I’m cutting it close.

The road isn’t endless anymore. It’s a stopwatch. I’m sprinting against the moon.

I’ve never really traveled with other people.

Okay—there were family vacations. But that doesn’t count. That was like being part of one shapeless glob.

We were the Wrights.

You know in Spirited Away, that bathhouse monster, that was our family, sloshing through national parks and Cracker Barrels.

But now I travel alone.

There’s something magical about being alone on the road. It’s just you and the world.

But throw in a companion, and a strange thing happens. A little social forcefield forms around you. It’s no longer you and the world. It’s us and them.

And that’s not how I like to learn.

So I stayed solo.

Until I didn’t.

And when I finally let someone in, the road threw us into the back of an ambulance.

And, later, into a house that felt straight out of a fairy tale. The kind where you hope the ogre is friendly.

Welcome to Go and Find Out. I’m Jonny Wright.

This is a story of losing yourself in the world.

I left my home, my job, and the USA in order to learn the old-fashioned way: with first-hand experience.

In these episodes, I ask big questions about life, not from an armchair but from roadsides and mountaintops, from temple halls and dance halls.

Join me as I hitchhike around the world, embrace the unexpected, and let go, one step at a time.

If you’ve ever thought about living a life outside the box, keep listening.

Because it’s never too late to begin your next adventure.

You don’t need to hitchhike around the world. The adventure is right in front of you.

Let’s go and find out.

The van drops me in an Aldi parking lot, and I step onto Serbian land for the first time.

Novi Belgrade.

Soviet-era tenement blocks rise like concrete ziggurats. Rusted gray, glowing gold in the late sun. The Polish pyramids had nothing on these.

The avenues are wide enough to lose yourself. I feel like a mouse crossing the tiled floor of one huge kitchen.

Oppressive, yes—but golden hour has a way of softening the edges. Even ruins shine if the light’s just right.

Her name was Beyza.

After some wandering and a wrong turn or two, I reach her building—a blocky tenement tucked behind a green courtyard and a metal playground. I ring the buzzer just after sunset.

Beyza opens the door.

The word that comes to mind is “meek.”

Not weak. Meek. Like warm milk. Comforting, slightly weird, definitely overlooked, but exactly right when you need it.

She’s Turkish, short, newly awarded her MD, and looks too young to be a doctor.

I shower. She lays out chicken, bread, and salad on a plastic tablecloth.

She’s been in Serbia a month, finishing an internship before heading back to Türkiye.

She sings songs in seven languages. Maybe more. When I ask how many, she just laughs.

“Oof... I don’t think I’ve ever counted.”

It was both the music and the language that drew her in:

“I was so interested in learning the language, English, so I started listening a lot of English songs and imitate those singers' accents.”

We walk by the river afterward, past half-sunken restaurant barges and the hiss of summer speakers. Her voice is quiet, but it carries.

The moon nudged higher—my silent reminder to keep moving.

The days in Belgrade are for walking.

The evenings—for singing along to our favorite songs.

We play ping pong with locals at the neighborhood table.

Platonic is underrated. If you keep scanning every friendship for sparks, you miss a much steadier light.

We sit on the old castle wall eating milk and cookies as the city turns blue beneath us.

I fall into that trap more than I’d like to admit. But with Beyza, there was no suspicion, no second agenda.

Beyza later said: “I remember we went to the big church, and then we just had a tour of the whole city. It was very nice, I remember.”

Those couple days were peaceful. I don’t even know why. Something in the chemistry—no need to impress.

Beyza’s small voice would give over to long silences.

Silences for birds, or for letting an Orthodox chapel wash over us with its dark, echoing hush.

So Beyza and I lived in this quiet, funny bubble—two foreigners gathering clues to Serbia, and to each other.

The second evening, she asks:

“Before you left, I asked you, ‘oh you’re gonna hitchhike, can I join you?’ I didn’t think too much, because that’s an experience, and that’s something that you can do with the right people, so I didn’t want to do it alone. I thought you were experienced and had done it before, so I thought that was a good thing to do with you.”

She’s never hitchhiked before.

As you probably guessed, hitchhiking’s a very different game as a woman. I know a few women who hitchhike solo—some have great experiences, but others… not so much. Sadly, it’s not as safe.

But going together? Safer. And honestly, I want to share this thing with her.

Still, I have my hesitations.

First: responsibility. I can barely take care of myself on the road. Adding someone else to the mix? Ummm too much.

Second: energy. Normally, when I’m not in someone’s car, I’m letting my face droop and recharging. Traveling with someone means being social all day long. And I don’t want to turn into Mr. Hyde by 3pm and scare her off.

But you don’t know until you try.

I say okay.

We’ve got one day to get to Skopje—me, chasing my coordinates to the Macedonian hills. Beyza, just curious how this thing would work.

“I’d already been to Skopje at that time, so I wasn’t excited about Skopje, but I was very excited about hitchhiking.”

The first steps in hitchhiking are always the same:

1. Get to the edge of the city

2. Find cardboard

“I remember we took a bus to go to the highway I think, close to highway.”

We keep our eyes peeled. No luck.

“And then, I remember we searched for, um, cardboard, is that the right word?”

We wander through a neighborhood, poking behind buildings. Still nothing.

I’m supposed to be the expert. The cardboard king.

And yet, here I am: cardboardless in a cardboard-rich world.

We give in and ask a pair of mechanics. The first one shrugs. The second one roots around and pulls out a decent piece.

We’re off to the races.

We lay the cardboard on the pavement, crouch down, and scrawl three big letters:

N-I-S.

Nis: the Serbian paradise.

After twenty minutes in the sun, a Hyundai pulls up. Two brothers: Marko and Dusan. One a travel photographer, the other a visual artist.

They tell us about their latest project—recreating hundred-year-old urban photography using drones and rotoscoping.

“You guys had a lot of things to talk about, so it was very like entertaining for me to listen to those movie/music talks.”

They buy us cookies and coffee at a gas station.

Then drop us halfway to our destination.

Back at the roadside, we wait.

And then—something roars into view.

A full-blown ambulance. Brand new. Still shiny from the factory.

The driver speaks only Serbian, but waves us in. Not to the cab—no, no.

To the back. With the gurney. And all the bright blue buttons.

I’ve never been in an ambulance before. But I’ve definitely fantasized about it.

The blue buttons blink like candy I’m not supposed to eat.

Growing up in suburbia, any vehicle with backward-facing seats and custom controls held sacred power.

And now? Serbia has delivered.

I even have a doctor by my side.

If Beyza hadn’t been there, I probably would’ve pressed every single one just to see what happened. Sirens? Morphine drip? Ejector seat?

Beyza and I giggle half the ride. Second half?

My doctor falls asleep.

Later I asked if she’d been in an ambulance since:

“No, yeah I stay at the hospital. They bring me the patients.”

Beyza lightened the act of travel.

I was supposed to be the one who knew what they were doing. She was relying on me to guide us to Skopje.

And in a strange way, that freed me.

I had to be the strong one. And it’s so much easier to play that role for someone else than for yourself.

I had more confidence we’d make it that day than I usually do when I’m alone—because the confidence wasn’t for me.

It was for her.

Funny how that works.

You look over at the person beside you and ask:

What kind of journey are they having?

If it’s a good one, you take it on as your own.

If it’s not, you try to lift it, even just a little.

And in that merge, in that shared world—you don’t have to do nearly as much of the mental work you do when you’re alone.

My eyes were being opened.

The ambulance drops us not far from the Macedonian border.

We get another ride:

“One couple took us, they were quite old I think, they were in their 60s, maybe 70s, and they were from Albania. They spoke zero English. I think they knew some Turkish, or we had some common words in Albanian and Turkish, so that’s how we communicated. So zero English, little bit of Turkish, little bit of Albanian.”

We cross the border on foot, show our passports, and hitch a bit down the road so the guards don’t stare too hard.

The traffic’s hot, loud, and repetitive.

Beyza and I pass the time making up songs and dances.

And then—

Our driver is a bulky guy in his fifties.

Aleksandar.

A Macedonian traffic cop.

And not just any cop—he trains other cops. Runs the whole traffic enforcement training in Skopje.

At first, I think: well, at least we’ll be safe. This guy literally teaches people how to drive.

But then I reach for my seatbelt.

And Aleksandar grabs my arm.

“Come on, you’re in Macedonia!” he shouts.

He won’t let me buckle.

I keep trying, thinking maybe it’s some sort of weird test.

Nope. Dead serious.

That’s when I learn a critical truth:

At the intersection of cultural norms and professional standards, cultural norms win every time.

But the lesson isn’t over yet.

Aleksandar has to drop off a document on his way into Skopje.

He parks the car on an uphill slope, leaves the engine off, and gets out.

We stay inside.

At first, I think I’m imagining things. The landscape outside seems to be… moving?

Then it’s just moving—it’s accelerating.

We’re rolling backward.

Aleksandar left the car in neutral.

No emergency brake.

From fifty yards off, he sees us start to pick up speed and begins to sprint toward us.

I lunge for the handbrake.

The car shudders to a stop.

So that’s what happens when the head of Macedonian traffic safety is your ride.

Imagine being trained by this guy: ‘Rule number one: never wear a seatbelt. Rule number two: brakes are optional.’

Next time, I’ll just call an ambulance.

You remember Hande, my president with the pink hair? She’s also had some experience with Balkan drivers:

“During my hitchhike in Balkans I was really scared of the drivers the way that they drive, and I’m from Turkey so I know I’m not someone to judge I know, but still I think people in Turkey don’t look at their phones while they’re driving, and in Balkans I was so surprised that the drivers drive so fast and on such narrow roads without looking at the road, like they’re on their phones, like scrolling through whatever tiktoks they’re watching. And I was very scared that we’re gonna crash into the car that is coming. Quite often after a while a strange comfort grabbed me from all over the place, like ok it’s gonna be fine, they know what they’re doing, that’s how they roll around here.”

Yeah. Somehow… you get used to it.

Once we make it into the city and say goodbye to Aleksandar at a red light, we’re famished. We drag ourselves to a grocery store and carry our loot to the banks of the Vardar River that runs through the city center.

It’s been a good day.

“Yeah, we, we didn’t wait too much, I remember. Like, the whole process, we didn’t wait more than ten minutes I think, each time we were waiting somewhere, people just easily picked us up. Hitchhiking with you, on my mind, was not something hard; it was a very fun thing to do.”

Skopje makes every attempt to be grand.

The results would have to go by another descriptor.

Grand it is not.

It’s a fake old city. Blatantly fake. Outrageously fake.

Its neoclassical buildings in the city squares are neo-neo-neo classical.

Fountains and Grecian figures stand thirty feet tall—and look less than thirty years old.

The whole place feels like a mythological theme park designed by someone who just skimmed the Wikipedia entry on Alexander the Great.

But we aren’t staying long.

That night we’re staying with a man named Chris.

A sort of ogre in his own cave.

And I mean that with affection and gratitude.

“Oh no, yeah, I remember. I mean he was a good guy, but the house! The house. It was the dirtiest house I’ve ever been to, I think. I don’t know if you remember, but the kitchen, all those dishes, dirty dishes. And the whole house, yeah it was a very interesting and a dirty experience to me.”

We find the burly Balkan man on his couch watching Serbian news in a darkened living room crammed with books and clothes. A whole apartment’s worth of stuff arranged in piles throughout the room. A table for eating buried under T-shirts. A livestream setup by a dusty window. The microphone looks lonely.

We brought him beers. He offers us food.

I open the fridge and see uncovered plates and pans of half-eaten meals, like some archaeological dig of dinner.

So we decline the food and sit near Chris.

I used to work for a hoarder back in college—arranging and rearranging entire rooms of lamps and vacuums. We’d swap all the lamps with all the vacuums, and a week later, move everything back to where it was.

So I’ve developed a tolerance for clutter. But this is something else.

Still, I remind myself: cleanliness is cultural. It isn’t absolute.

People don’t always live how they choose.

They live how they’re able.

I’m not uncomfortable for myself. I’m uncomfortable for Beyza.

I don’t want her feeling trapped in this weird, musty cave.

Chris wants to talk—but not so much with us as at us.

He’s looking for validation of his perspective, and that perspectives are hard to validate because it’s really hard to understand.

By the time he cracks his second beer, I’m fully lost.

He gives me these knowing smiles, like clearly the two of us have it all figured out. And I have no idea what “it” is.

I give my most serious “I see what you did there” look.

Then, the moment he takes a breath, Beyza and I scurry off to bed.

The loft above the ogre’s cave—our hidden turret.

We walk up the creaky staircase, wondering what mess we’ll find.

It turns out to be a different world up there, unexpectedly cheery.

All low-slanted ceilings and pale wood, with gables letting in fresh air.

It even has a poster of Kiki’s Delivery Service, like a talisman left behind by another wanderer.

“Oh, I remember the poster on his wall. The upstairs was not that bad. The downstairs were messy, but the upstairs were not that bad. I remember a poster of Kiki’s Delivery Service. I really liked that one.”

I feel like Beyza might need support, but the dynamic turns out to be less one-sided than I expected.

We sit on the bed like kids hiding out from the ogre, trading stories until we drift off.

We remind each other what had happened that day, then went further—into old memories.

We’ve found the perfect fort for such a conversation.

That night, a lightbulb comes on.

In that attic, I realized the road doesn’t have to be forever solo. With the right person, it stays alive—and somehow safer.

Beyza was a shelter. Maybe I was too, for her. For one night, we held up the same small roof.

The next day, we said our goodbye.

I didn’t know what to say to Beyza—by now, something like a sister.

I didn’t want to say goodbye.

“Why not come to the gathering for a day or two?”

But Beyza was firm.

We hugged, and went our separate ways.

Beyza graduated from my hitchhiking academy with flying colors.

She was going to try hitchhiking north into Kosovo.

As it turns out, maybe I graduated her prematurely. She didn’t go far before throwing up her hands and taking a bus.

I, on the other hand, was going west of the city—out into the forest to find an infamous gathering.

I went in search of bread.

And, of course… cardboard.

Later, I heard how that time affected her:

“Before my Serbia trip, I’d never written songs by myself. I’ve always wanted to write my own songs, but… At that time you were writing your own songs, you were producing them, you were releasing them, it was so inspiring to hear. After Serbia I started like writing my own songs. I never released anything. It was the things I experienced there and later that gave me a lot of inspiration to play with my guitar and write what I experienced.”

To me, this is the best possible outcome of those few days.

That I could play even a small part in someone’s creative life.

Here’s a bit of one of Beyza’s songs:

“In the middle of nowhere

Lost in my thoughts

Hands in my pockets

Waiting for the summer

Travels on my mind

I’m not the same person I am

Wish I could take back the time

To the morning next to you

Without all my worries

Become 24 again”

Well. It’s a new day, and a new adventure.

I’ve got my GPS coordinates, and it’s time to track them down.

I turn toward the woods, toward a map made of rumor and intuition.

Beyza turns north.

The moon is nearly full. The whisper grows louder. I’m almost there.

And this is the last moment—before the wilderness opens.

That’s it for this episode of Go and Find Out. Thanks for spending this time with me—seriously. It means a lot that you’re here, listening to this story.

I’d love to hear from you—thoughts, stories, weird travel tips, whatever’s on your mind. Drop me a line at goandfindoutpod@gmail.com, and I’ll do my best to write you back.

This show is created by me, Jonny Wright, with music by me and this week, a song by Beyza. The Balkan music you heard is played by Boris Todorovic and recorded by Tomlija.

If you’re enjoying the ride, follow along so new episodes come straight to you every other Thursday. And hey—if you’ve got a second, leaving a quick review or rating really helps spread the word.

But more than anything, I hope this episode sparked something—however small.

A question, a dream, a reminder that your life is still unfolding.

The only real adventure we have is right now.