Backpacker hell

I woke frequently during the night from strange dreams that might have been nightmares. I don’t remember any of them now, but there’s still a vague edge of fear and unpleasantness lurking at the back of my mind. No doubt the difficulty I had sleeping was promoted by the fact that this was my first night in a hostel sharing a room with strangers – or rather – strange foreign backpackers.

Every time I woke I noticed that the bed opposite mine was still empty. This might not seem so unusual in normal circumstances but I knew for a fact that the hostel was full so the bed obviously belonged to someone. As darkness turned to light and the early morning commuter traffic started buzzing along the main road outside, I started to wonder in my semi-exhausted state if this mystery roommate would ever turn up.

Finally, at 8am, when I could no longer tolerate the light, burgeoning heat and traffic noise, I sat up and, contemplating the day ahead of me, realised that a bleary set of eyes were regarding me from between the sheets in the bed opposite. I looked over, smiled and waved. The eyes fixed me with an unsteady stare.

“Working or drinking?” I asked, pleased with the directness of my approach in dealing with this strange new soul in my circle of acquaintance.
“Drinking,” the voice, slurring with tiredness and, presumably, over-indulgence, was definitely European in origin, perhaps Mediterranean. “No drink, no drink!” the fellow continued, rather ambiguously, before rolling over and continuing his restless slumber.

I was reminded of my exploits in Sydney a couple of years ago, when I arrived there for the first time. The nights were full of booze and sex and hideously protracted, the days in contrast were spent tossing and turning and moaning in self-pity, the heat of Australia’s midsummer soaking my sheets with sweat, the poison of barely recycled alcohol seeping out of my pores, the cycle of nights of partying and days of self-pity set to continue interminably into the immediate future, with only a barely conceived awareness of the need to get out of the city as soon as possible.

My life was full of cockroaches and DVD’s in twlight rooms, mosquitoes and pies, seductions and sex and lies and the occasional spaced-out trip to the beach to break up this monotony of abuse. Now as I sit here in this leafy Fremantle courtyard observing carefree students going about their days, I feel liberated from that life, and while the self-destructive cycle continues – the cigarettes, the booze, the drugs and the party weekends – I think I may have taken it to another level. Yes, I admit I am a snob and I am slightly appalled by the boozy, vicarious backpacker culture I was reminded of last night. I feel set apart from it. My age and my experience and my inability to engage on an equal level with the hedonistic characters which surround me in the hostel insulates me from them.

However, I contemplate with some enthusiasm the three day “South West Discovery Adventure” I’ll be embarking on early on Saturday morning – it will likely be a weekend spent with twenty teenagers sightseeing by day and going crazy by night. Perhaps after a boozy afternoon with my old friends Grace and Jess (who I’m meeting in a few minutes) I will head back to Perth and get on it with new friends-for-a-night like my mysterious, nameless roommate. Perhaps I will be the one collapsing unconscious into bed at 8am after an indiscrete liaison with a legless young backpacker in a shower cubicle. Who can say? These things happen to the best of us.

I should be so lucky.


It’s now the following morning. A short while ago I wandered starving and hungover in a delightful establishment called Vultures, the courtyard of which is decorated with fences of iron lattice work in the shape of spiders webs complete with foot long spiders. Had I noticed this rather ghastly motif sooner I think I would have given the place a miss, and indeed, I would have been wise to, since despite my hunger I wasn’t able to finish the plate of bacon and eggs which was handed to me a moment ago. It’s difficult to understand how people in the hospitality trade can muck up such a simple dish, but the kitchen staff at Vultures managed to get the egg, bacon, tomato and even the toast wrong.

Am I in a bad mood this morning? Am I ever not in a bad mood these days? Wow, if that’s the kind of question I’m asking myself then I must be in a very bad mood indeed! It would seem there’s a nasty, big cloud hanging over me. Last night I decided to compound my disappointment at my effective rejection by Grace by drinking in earnest with my fellow backpackers in another central Perth nightspot, the name of which I cannot at the moment recall but for the sake of argument let’s call it Skalliwags.

I’d been drinking steadily throughout the afternoon with Jess and Grace and their Fremantle friends (all of whom seem lovely and also very grounded and confident, coming as they do from a small town like Fremantle where everyone knows everyone else) and I’d returned to my hostel in Perth with a vague awareness that I had an itch which needed scratching - something to do with letting off a bit of steam because it had gone badly with Grace, and also something to do with getting myself absolutely fucking obliterated for the same reason.

Fortunately that didn’t happen in the end. While I quickly ingratiated myself with the hostel’s hardcore drinkers (who were of course all easily located in the smoking annexe behind the building) and engaged with them at Skalliwags in some intensive heavyweight boozing, all the while there was a little voice at the back of my mind saying, “Ollie, this isn’t you, what are you doing here?” That voice, largely ignored for the ensuing hours of drinking and dancing, finally got it’s hands on the one braincell which remained functioning at midnight. I trudged home, addled and despondent because another voice was telling me that I should go to Connections and take drugs with my new friend Dave in an attempt to stay up long enough to garner a snog or a shag with some attractive or not so attractive female backpacker or other.

You will probably not be at all surprised to learn, as I was last night, that Connections is a gay club. With a name like that what else could it be? Therefore, given my alcohol-reduced mental capacity, the only snog I would have been in any danger of garnering was with my new friend Dave. Of course, none of this occurred to me at the time. It must be the unique ambience here at Vultures which has enabled me to make that particular connection…

My point being..?

Aside from being a potential danger to oneself, there’s nothing wrong with drinking and dancing and having fun – and I did have fun last night – but slurred conversations in backpacker bars with Irish drunks and alcoholic Aussie migrant workers who I have nothing in common with are a waste of time and money and when am I going to be big enough and wise enough to turn my back on that shit?

I know I’m being rather damning of backpacker culture, but not since Cairns have I encountered this kind of stolid, boring, parochial decadence. It depresses me. It depresses me more that I chose to come here, that I’m stuck here, that I don’t know what I’m doing here in this diabolical backpacker hostel. Yes, I’m in a bad mood, and I know that it’s because I’m disappointed with myself for once again getting sucked into a situation that I abhor.

At the ripe old age of thirty, I’m over it - well, almost, it would seem.

But I’m not just disappointed with myself, I’m disappointed with this shoddy backpacker hostel. This morning I went off to the men’s room to drop the kids off and I had three cubicles to choose from. Great, I thought, choice is always a good thing. I went into the first – Eugh! I don’t think so, that’s nasty! I went into the second – Oh my god, I didn’t think that was even physically possible! Finally, the third – Eek! Whoever did that should be locked up for crimes against humanity! It was urgent so in the end I had to duck back into the first. What a choice to be faced with first thing in the morning! Choice, you see, it’s a good thing, and scum who do not flush the toilet when they’ve finished their business should be rounded up a summarily executed.

I’m loathe to finish this blog on such a petulant and lowbrow note, but rounding it up with a bit of toilet humour almost seems appropriate given the subject matter under discussion. Okay, so we’ve established that I’m in a foul mood this morning – I have a hangover and I feel bad about the way I got it. We’ve also established that I’m now too old to be hanging around in backpacker hostels and I don’t like people who don’t flush the loo. But what is the moral of this story, what can we learn from it..?

I fear it is simply this: I have become a boring old fart.