Give strangers a lift

A small habit that recurs whenever Harry has rented something he can drive: he stops and offers people a free ride. It is not a route from A to B — he is usually going nowhere in particular — and that is the point. The vehicle supplies a reason to talk that doesn’t involve a camera.

Why it works better than approaching people in the street: a stranger with a camera is asking for something, and a stranger with a spare seat is offering something. The exchange starts from the opposite end, and in both demonstrations the conversation lasts as long as the ride does.

It pairs with ride out past the tourist strip, which is about where to point the vehicle. This one is about who to put in it.

How Harry applies it

In Kandy, driving a rented tuk-tuk himself, he spends the run home stopping for people who need one. Three women he picks up assume he must be a Sri Lankan who grew up abroad, because his Sri Lankan friend is doing the talking in Sinhala — and are astonished when they look properly. Another passenger turns out to watch the channel. None of it was arranged and none of it would have happened on foot.

In Jeddah the vehicles are rented electric bikes and the whole afternoon becomes giving strangers rides on the back of them, in a country he had arrived in expecting to find reserved.

Demonstrated in

• Local Girl Shows Me Sri Lanka’s Burj Khalifa 🇱🇰 — free tuk-tuk rides around Kandy, and the best unplanned encounters of the day.
• Inside Saudi Arabia’s Billion Dollar Future City 🇸🇦 — the same instinct on rented bikes along the Jeddah Corniche.