Well given as how all of you keep moaning and bitching about what a wonderful time I’m having I shall enlighten you a little as to the downsides of travelling on your own on the other side of the world!
The food is shit. Most hostels have kitchens, but they’re usually so busy and so badly kept by pikey travellers that you wouldn’t want to boil your laundry in them, let alone cook yourself a meal. Want to use more than one pan to cook a meal? Forget it. There’s always a scrawny Irishman or starving Argentinian trucker hovering over your shoulder wondering why you need to fry your steak in a different pan to the one you’re boiling your potatoes in.
There’s no point in buying milk, vegetables, eggs or butter as you’ll leave before you’ve even made a dent, and they’ll be inedible by the time you get to your next place. Hence, fast food rules - and you end up putting on weight because of the “English diet” as an Aussie girl once nicely put it. Damn I want a good salad.
Other travellers steal, smell, snore, fornicate, fart, watch films on their laptops in the middle of the night, listen to their ipods at stupid volume at four in the morning, and generally act like they’re the only person in the dorm. Bring your ear plugs, eye mask and nose clips.
Making friends is impossible. I’m not the most outgoing of people and it takes me a while to make a connection. At least a couple of days, not a couple of hours. When I do manage it, it’s cut short by mine or their itineraries. It sucks. Even if I did meet my future wife or best man, they’d be moving on to Easter Island or Timbuktu before I’d had the chance to buy them a second drink.
I have no idea what good films, music, plays, fashions are around. I feel culturally isolated from the modern world. If I hear Sex on Fire on New Zealand radio once more, someone is going to lose an organ.
Arriving in a strange city at night with nowhere to stay, no friends, a heavy rucksack on your back and hungry is depressing and lonely. However beautiful the surrounding scenery may be in gorgeous sunshine.
I’m surrounded by kids. Particularly in New Zealand. South America seemed to attract a slightly older, more worldly wise crowd - though all of the above still applied - but down here it’s Kidsville. Last night the guy in the bunk above me had bum fluff and wore braces. I admire he’s doing at his age what it’s taken me 34 years to pluck up the courage to do, but we’re not going to go for a beer and swap life stories. And Australia is going to be worse.
And, yes, I am having a bad day. Yes, I'll get over it. Right now, freezing London, the recession, good friends, my lovely family, a job, money, my own home and the Vic are infinitely preferable to this.
I’m in my hostel in Wellington, sidelight on, nursing a bottle of red wine and listening to Tchaikovsky on my idock. I’m almost daring some spotty twat to come in and ruin my middle-aged period of self-pity. Come on, do it. I dare you. I double dare you!
Bah, humbug.
