The final leg of a big night out turned into a shock long ride home in the undercarriage of a B-double for a 43-year-old caught on Queensland Police bodycam.
As he explained to police in the video below, he’d tried to hitch an early morning ride from Nambucca Heads, NSW, to Coffs Harbour, a distance of about 50km, and planned to get out at a red light.
But after a quick nap in Nambucca Heads, the unsuspecting truck driver, Pardeep Dahiya, kept going north.
It was only when it got light enough that he caught a glimpse of what looked like orange cloth from the side mirror and he pulled over on the Gold Coast to investigate.
What he saw next was a man climbing out from the gate racks stored in the trailer’s underside.
“When I saw that I took two steps back thinking, ‘What is it?’,” Dahiya told ABC News.
“Then he said to me, ‘Sorry. Sorry, man. It’s my mistake. I came in under the trailer’.
“That’s very different for me. It’s very new for me. I can’t imagine anyone getting in underneath the trailer.”
Rather than call police, Dahiya said he instead took pity on the man and gave him some water and offered him a seat inside the truck to ride further north.
But when the conversation dried up, Dahiya revised his decision and called police from a service station at Coomera, on the northern Gold Coast.
In a truly bizarre incident, a truck driver has found a man hidden underneath his B-double while travelling through the Gold Coast.
The 43-year-old stowaway, originally aiming to reach Coffs Harbour, finding himself hundreds of kilometres off course. @izzy_quinlan #9News pic.twitter.com/w28bTyev7D
— 9News Gold Coast (@9NewsGoldCoast) November 20, 2023
Queensland Police fined the man $288 for being part of a vehicle that was not designed to carry people or goods, but gave him a free ride to the Commera railway station for the long ride home.
Queensland Trucking Association CEO Gary Mahon told ABC News that the hitcher was lucky to be alive.
“You’re travelling at somewhere between 90 to 100 kilometres per hour on a fairly consistent basis and it wouldn’t take much of a slip or a lapse in concentration to have fatal consequences,” he said.