Hitchhiker Travels Thousands Of Miles Using Only Beer As Currency

Buy a beer for a stranger in a bar, and you're either trying to score a date or do a good deed. Buy a beer for a stranger while traveling? You could end up traveling 5,000 miles.

That's exactly what Emmanuel "Manny" Marshall did.

Armed with only 120 IPAs, the hitchhiker bummed rides and transportation off strangers just by offering them a beer. He traveled nearly 5,000 miles from his home in Edinburgh to India, stopping in France, Germany, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Greece.

Before you get too excited about this guy's innovative traveling techniques, it was a giant marketing scheme, according to the Evening Times. The Innis & Gunn brewery sponsored the trip, meant to represent the original eighteenth-century IPAs that made the journey from Britain to India.

"I've been hitchhiking for a long time now, but this was definitely my biggest challenge yet," Marshall told The Evening Times. "I was moved by the kindness of the people I met along the way. Language may have been a barrier at times, but this trip showed me that beer is truly a universal tongue."