Return

There's nothing quite like your last day in a hostel. Not the last day before you move to another hostel in some other city, but the last day in a hostel of your trip. Game’s over, you have to head home. It always seems to work out that you meet the most people and the coolest people then – they’ve only just arrived and you're already packing your bags. You’ve got a long trip and the even more arduous slipping back into monotony ahead, while they get to spend the next week drinking sangria on the roof. It’s quite tempting to simply miss your flight, pick up a job at a local hostel washing sheets and to continue to live the dream. Which would be the quickest way to kill the vibe. The fact that everything is so spontaneous is what makes the whole experience seem magical. To introduce routine would just be blasphemy. And it’s interesting to note that all of my stays in various hostels throughout Europe kind of blend into one profound experience in the end.

In my conversation with a fellow Aussie traveler today, we observed that the only people who will actually listen to your travel stories are your fellow travelers. The people at home tend to glaze over when you start recounting adventures from the road.

So if you can’t talk in detail about your travels unless you’re actually traveling, it makes a good case for the phenomenon that traveling is really existence on another plane. Backpacking, to be more specific. Nowhere else in the world can you meet such a disparate group of people all united for the same purpose. Nowhere else can you break the barriers of social limits enough to chat up everyone who walks by you after you’ve had a few glasses of sangria.

The thing is, the beauty of it all, you can feel sorrow for leaving just as you’ve met some nice people. But the truth is that you can repeat the same feeling of kinship by association at any hostel in any city of the world on any given day. It’s an endless parade of interim friends just waiting for you to strike up a conversation. Always the same few introductory questions – where are you from, where have you been, how long have you been here, where are you going next? All associated with your travel. It’s not what do you do or who are your parents or who are you dating. It’s tell me where you’ve been – and tell me about it. Is it somewhere I’d want to go? Should I go there tomorrow?

And it takes all kinds – people who’ve quit their jobs to travel, people who travel because they’ve quit their jobs. 18 year old students, 25 year old girls moving away from home and looking for a job and an apartment, 60 year old retirees. Couples. Groups of friends. Solo travelers. People who just don’t have a normal existence. They live by a different set of rules. Going to any decent hostel at one point feels like coming home. Right, climb up to the top bunk in the dark because everyone is sleeping in the room. Wake up just early enough to not miss the free breakfast. It’s nirvana. It’s bohemian. And you never want it to end, but it’s able to exist solely because it has to at some point.