Hostel Livin'

We arrive! Backpacker-chic.

I reached a milestone the other day. A benchmark. A highpoint. A goal, of sorts, that I didn’t know I had. I became the dude in the hostel passed out on the couch with legs and arms askew and drool running down the side of his face while people came and went and either wondered how tired a person would have to be in order to sleep through the current commotion in the present stifling heat or simply smiled the knowing smile. 

“Epic,” Jeff Bridges’s voice keeps saying in my mind. 

Not really. But it definitely was a long proverbial way from the fluffy pillows and daily hot showers that my soft feet and I enjoyed before starting this rabbit-hunt.

Joy and I had just reached Mendoza, Argentina after riding the night-bus from Santiago, Chile – to where we had gotten after riding the day-bus from Curico – and, of course, spending the requisite hours on either end sitting on floors in crowded, hot bus stations. It was five-thirty in the morning, and thanks to a two-hour 2am customs and immigration stop, we were exhausted. Fortunately, Joy had emailed ahead to Mendoza and found a friendly hostel with a friendly couch. We showed up, rang the timbre by the locked security gate, introduced ourselves to the extremely nice guy manning the night-desk, followed him to the hostel’s sala de estar, dropped our backpacks on the floor, and collapsed onto the couch – where we woke four hours later to a crowded hostel and quickly wiped the drool off of our respective faces and tried to mash down our bus/couch hair.

Not our couch, but probably just as comfy.

It’s early March, and we had been in five countries and some 15-odd hostels before this one, but this was the first time I had managed to pass out in the lobby. I’ve seen it done plenty of times, especially by surfers – who, by the way, look in real life exactly the way they do in the movies: really blond, really tan, and really barefoot as they really carry those surfboards everywhere – and I’ve often marveled at their ability to relax to couch-drooling levels. In fact, it seems like everywhere we’ve been there has been someone passed out somewhere – except maybe in Mancora, where the surfers at our hostel were from Argentina, and were very loud – All. Night. Long.

Breakfast table, sans Nescafe

Hostel-living in general has been a new experience for me. Joy is pretty familiar with it; of course, she doesn’t have to battle the same kinds of “stick-in-the-ass” issues that I do (for example: she just warned me not to lean too close to her armpits). But I’m getting more used to it. (Meaningless side-note: even though I am failing miserably at learning this new language, my currently ever-translating mind really hates the use of “getting” and “used to” in the previous sentence, and wants to change it to “…I am becoming more accustomed to…”; however, I think such an edit might run counter to the larger “stickless-ass” point I‘m trying to make, so I’m going to leave it as-is; just don’t ask me to translate it). Every hostel we’ve been to has been a little different from the others, but they’ve all served desayuno (breakfast) – some better than others, and some with that dreadfully rotten creation that is Nescafe – and the people have all been very nice, both the people running the hostels and the other guests.

Hostels aren’t like the Holiday Inns and Ho-Jo’s I had grown accustomed to, where everyone else’s stick matches the one I used to have, and we’ve met a lot of very interesting people, although I’m sure I haven’t met near as many as I should have by now. Unlike my friend, Jon (shit- I mean “my brother-in-law”. It’s like I have a whole new family!), who can walk into any room and immediately become friends with everybody in it, I can usually leave a room two hours after entering it without anyone even knowing I was there. But the ones I have managed to talk to have been great. The natural camaraderie that exists in hostels that are generally full of other travelers makes breakfast conversations easy – even when there are three or four different languages involved – and interesting, especially when you meet someone who has just come from your next destination. And staying in these places has definitely exposed us to more of the language and culture than if we were always just holed up at a Hilton.

Another advantage of hostel-living is that there is usually good advice to be had regarding places to eat, hiking trails, and other inexpensive activities – not to mention the sage and invaluable advice on how to get to or from the bus station without getting mugged, pick-pocketed, or purse-snatched, and without Joy having to break a nail from punching someone who tries any of those things in the nose. And most of the hostels we’ve stayed at have been extremely helpful about storing our backpacks before or after late or early bus rides so that we don’t have to lug them around with us while we kill time (an ever-present part of backpacking – and another good reason to leave your stick at home), which to me is one of the most valuable services they provide.

Dorm beds and lockers

Price has also been a large factor in our decision to stay in hostels. Here, too, we likely share common ground with other budget travelers. Besides being such a better traveling experience than staying in hotels, it’s so much more economically feasible. Most hostels offer dorm room beds with a shared bathroom that are probably the best way to save money, but in the interest of full-disclosure, I should reveal that at my request we have stayed in private rooms everywhere we’ve been. Joy used to argue this point more vigorously in the beach towns with dorm-rooms full of half-naked surfers than she does now.

One hostel's tattered book exchange

Something else I have learned during this hostel-living journey is the value of used book exchanges. Most of the hostels have had them, in some form or another, which is a really good thing because it is not a pretty sight when Joy runs out of books to read. She starts reading entire menus from front to back before ordering a cup of coffee. She reads the shampoo bottle, the conditioner bottle, the soap wrapper, and the toothpaste tube, all while brushing her teeth – usually leaving toothpaste foam on the bathroom mirror, the faucet, the sink, and on the back of the toilet (don’t ask me). She starts picking up old newspapers out of the gutters and old candy bar wrappers out of the trash-can just to see what they might say. All quite endearing qualities, and her voracious appetite for reading is extraordinary, and very admirable, but everything just seems to flow so much more smoothly if there are enough new books around, something that the hostels are very helpful with.

Like couches. Those temporary beds for road-weary travelers who need a place to fall while their bodies catch up to the new turn of the earth’s axis, their minds try to remember which planet they’re on, and while the drool makes its slow journey from the corners of their mouths, down their cheeks, and drips off of one earlobe or the other. Epic.