I WILL never forget the kindly middle-aged couple who, despite a car full of children and luggage, took pity on my friend and I - poverty-stricken, hitchhiking students, standing on the roadside in the pouring rain. They insisted on taking us all the way to our campsite because they hitched when they were young and wanted to return the favour.

Growing up in a lowly populated rural area, with few buses and no trains, I started hitching in my late teens. It was a rite of passage. Once you were old enough to hit the open road - always, of course, with friends and conscious of safety - the world got so much bigger. When I left home, it got bigger still. As a student, I travelled for free all over the UK and enjoyed hitch-hiking holidays on the west coast of Ireland and in Europe.

How times have changed. Perhaps it's due to cut-price travel deals and increasing car ownership, even among students. More likely, it's because we have become less trusting and, with a perceived increase in crime, more fearful. There certainly aren't as many hitch-hikers now.

A fascinating new book, No Such Thing as a Free Ride? A Collection of Hitchers' Tales, takes me back to the days when we could wake up on a Saturday morning with just a few pounds in our pockets, and be visiting friends in Edinburgh by the afternoon.

Apart from it costing nothing, one of the most compelling reasons for hitching was that the journey was so much more interesting. Sometimes we ended up taking a different route and discovering delightful places we would never have come across.

In Ireland, drivers going in the opposite direction would stop and ask if we wanted to go their way. One genial English hippy living on the west coast brought us back to his cottage and invited us to stay.

Another farmer insisted on taking us home to have tea with his family. And we had an eventful trip with an eccentric priest, who stopped to interrogate locals about the history of the area after we feigned some interest as a way of making polite conversation.

We never knew what to expect next. On one uncomfortable lorry journey from Scotland to London we had to stop at a succession of foul-smelling abattoirs and depots, picking up and dropping off meat for McDonald's burgers.

My boyfriend was once given a lift by the famous novelist Malcolm Bradbury. And a friend in Ireland - a dippy art student who didn't own a TV - was chucked out of the car by a well known, and irate, TV presenter, greatly offended after she revealed she had never heard of him.

It is an unwritten rule of hitching that the driver sets the agenda regarding conversation and the music you listen to. One teacher lectured us on the fall of capitalism and evils of western democracy. And a member of the Unitarian Church, or Moonies, talked about his beliefs, although he didn't manage to convert us.

Hitching offered us a privileged glimpse of different lives. But I doubt if I will be encouraging my children to do the same. Looking back, the potential risks now make me shudder - but not half as much as the general erosion of trust and faith in human nature that has helped ensure hitchhiking is now a thing of the past.

* No Such Thing as a Free Ride? A Collection of Hitchers' Tales by Tom and Simon Sykes (Cassell £9.99).