I had looked over the maps and found the highway that looked like it cut closely to where we wanted to go, the Mati Temple. We took a bus to the edge of town, a dusty strip of car repair shops and dirt parking lots, and began to try to hitch a ride.

We stood on the road for about fifteen minutes, when a man on a motorbike puttered alongside us, grinning. He was in a jumpsuit and a bag full of soupy noodles hung precariously in his left hand. We talked for a few minutes, nothing particular, then we told him where we were going. He grinned, clearly excited to have met us.

“Oh, this is not the right road. There’s a road down there that you want to take,” he said, pointing.

“Are you sure?” I tried to reason with him. “The map indicated…”

But he cut me off. “Nope. You have to go back that way.” He paused for a minute. “I’m working at this gas station up here. I’ll see if I can get the company car and get you going in the right direction. If not, you want to go to this intersection and then turn left and go until you start to see the signs.” He instructed us, shaking our hands and smiling more before disappearing into traffic.

We walked up to the intersection he had suggested, and, as we made the left he had told us to make, he swung out of nowhere, hollering at us from his truck.

As we threw our bags into his truck, he told us he was a local Hui Muslim. When he had been in Qingdao, one of China’s large coastal cities, he had lost his wallet and his I.D. card and a foreigner had given him some money so that he could return home.

He drove us a few miles to a spot where we could pick up a ride, a sign pointing to the Mati Temple forty miles away. He did not take us more than a few miles, but it was the gesture that meant something. He smiled, turned his truck around and then, again disappeared.

We never made it to the Mati Temple. It began pouring before we got there. And our hitching experience was half-failure, since the gas station attendant only took us a few miles. Yet still, this is why we had wanted to hitchhike, so that we could meet good folks in China. In that way, this hitch was a success.