There comes a time in almost every person’s life where the travel bug bits, and they’re compelled to explore the world outside their usual existence. And if they don’t, it’s probably because they’re happy living in Perth for the rest of their lives – doomed to wait out their dreary, meaningless existence arguing who’s better – North or South of the river, Eagles or Dockers, Hungry Jacks or Chicken Treat – while they continue to steal my oxygen, breeding with each other to spawn dozens of their little fuck trophies, more pond-scum that will go on to eventually spawn with each other too, continuing the world’s biggest country town’s spiraling trend toward a gene pool that resembles an over-flowing sewage sump.
Not that I’m glad I’m gone.
But for most young people, a stretch of extended backpacking-style travel is almost a certainty – a working holiday in Europe after high-school, a backpacker’s tour through South America, teaching English in Japan, ect. And unless Daddy owns an oil-rig and you stay at the Ritz, most young travelers will do a stint staying in a youth hostel. They’re cheap, they organise events like pub crawls, and everyone’s a traveler with their own story. Which basically boils down to them being a cesspool of drunken depravity. Sure, the Slovenian soccer fans will come in at 4am, start yelling at each other and smoking weed, and are so drunk they piss on some Japanese girl’s suitcase – but it makes for a great story! The adventure of traveling is the bizarre and unexpected shit you have to deal with along the way. I’ve stayed in dozens of youth hostels all over the world, and I can safely say I’ve left 75% of them with some sort of hilarious story
Unfortunately, a serious threat to youth hostel culture has emerged over the last 10 years – an insidious force that has maintained it’s vile cover story of being a hostel by wrapping itself in the flag of youth hostel culture, while simultaneously defiling the hard-earned reputation of real youth hostels as being testaments to alcohol-induced debauchery. This new evil even has the gall to use “hostel” in it’s name. I speak ofcourse, of the “Boutique youth hostel”.
Yup - you're a pompous wanker
For those that are new to the term, it’s quite simple: take an ordinary hostel with it’s multi-bed dorms and shared cooking facilities, clean it right up, increase security and basic comfort (nice lounges with a plasma TV, less beds per room for extra space, ect), and charge more to make up the difference. The theory is it’s the best of both worlds – a hostel with a few basic comforts, without going all out and staying in a proper hotel.
Now a boutique youth hostel is a fantastic concept, but then again so is France. And just like France the problem isn’t really with the place itself, but the douche bags that populate it. For some reason the idea of a “classy” hostel drags in the most mediocre human beings to ever crawl out of a birth canal. I’ve bitched previously about the guys in Exeter, but it seems I’d missed the mark, slandering everyone with a Y-chromosome in this quaint little university town. Instead it now appears that it’s just this fucked up hostel I’m staying in – a self-proclaimed “boutique hostel”. And as I said previously, the girls are fine – friendly, talkative, interesting and TRAVELING. But it seems every guy who turns up here instantly decides I’m the most fascinating life-form they’ve ever met and makes convincing me of how interesting they are their SOLE REASON FOR EXISTING.
Guys, I’m genuinely flattered. But please just fuck off.
It almost as if hostels are playing the role of science, hotels that of religion, and boutique hostels are the mutant child of the two known commonly as Intelligent Design. And just like people everyone who believes in I.D, most guys staying in boutique hostels rail against the concept of evolution because they’re still waiting to experience it. The guy in the bunk below me at the moment LOOKS like he might be a part of an undiscovered Australopithecuss tribe he’s got so much back hair. You could hide a fucking goat in there, and it’d die before it ate it’s way out of his back forest.
If only this guy were as adorable as Harry
And while I’m still trying to establish if he’s a Sasquatch, I have established that I shouldn’t ever be left alone in a room with him, or any of the other vacant-faced bottom-feeders that take up space around here. It’s not that they’re genuinely bad people – it just that they’re boring enough to be suicide-inducing. And boring people create drama. Hostel politics can be difficult at the best of times, but get a bunch of people together that are this boring, and they try to fill their empty lives by creating problems. “Dave stole my milk, so I’ll steal his eggs”, “I’ll turn all the lights on in the room at 3am and wake everyone up so they can see my lard ass giggling in the wind as I go to bed – just for a laugh”.
Through a combination of the fucking yeti shaking our bunk to high hell everything he breathes; and the duty-manager stumbling into our room at 2am every night drenched in red wine, falling into a bed and proceeding to snore loud enough to destabilise the building’s foundation – I’ve averaged about 4 hours sleep each night for the last week. And that’s only up from a 3hr average because I went up to London for two nights. So when these same furry fucking drama queens complain to me the next morning about how a teaspoon was left in the kitchen sink, I suddenly find myself trying to restrain the overwhelming compulsion to stab them in the face with a fork and then go on a bizarre homicidal rampage with a jar of peanut-butter and a steam iron.
Trust me - it's happened before
Don’t stay in boutique youth hostels people – don’t support this scourge on the upstanding hostel culture just for a few cheap creature comforts. And I’m going to try and stop myself killing everyone in the entire building with a table spread in one hand and a red-hot electrical appliance in the other.
