By Henry Worsley
Hostels are different places for different people; the start points for an adventure, inbetweens, sometimes, for the more unfortunate wanderers, dead-ends. They attract a motley ensemble of young and old, fresh-faced and weary, vagabonds, romantics, hobos, digital nomads, wannabe Indiana-Joneses and conspiracy theorists. You might think of one of those dingy Dutch paintings from the early seventeenth century – a pub scene in muddy chiaroscuro, those boggle-eyed men hunched around a solitary candle, drinking flat beer and gambling. That, I suppose, is the older version of the modern hostel: the inn, the pensione miserabile – the cheapest place in town to stop-off, eat, and catch a couple of winks.
You get to know people in this environment fast, without any buttoned-down formality. Once I stayed in a hostel in the far north of Sweden, the last stop on the train line heading for Narvik and the Arctic Ocean. It was mid-August, yet barely ten degrees celsius, and the few people at the hostel mostly sat inside, looking out the small windows at the lifeless tundra or the passing freight trains (‘one in a thousand carriages is gold-plated, you know’). Here in the far north of the world people seemed a little more shy, forced into introversion by their surroundings – but as soon as you stepped into the sauna, a low, red and white clapboard shed in the garden, that front was quickly dropped. I met one quiet, spindly German guy in the dormitory, the sort who tries not to look you in the eyes too often; a few minutes later in the sauna, I met him again, but this time reclined, bollocks out, sipping beer and staring straight at me: ‘close ze döör behind you, ’ he said, then lay back, sighing, a sweaty Scandi version of Dejeuner sur l’herbe.
There’s the stereotypical backpacker, too – plenty of them in any hostel between John O’ Groats and Cape Town, you know the drill: oversized sweatshirt, bleached hair, needs a shave, loves showing you how many stamps he’s got in his passport (yeah, yeah, you know I quit the nine-to-five ten years ago, and since then, just been roller skating across the whole of Asia, man.’) I remember one dude – and ‘dude’ was the only word to describe him – who pulled out his guitar on the veranda of a hostel, tuned her up, took a deep breath, and started to sing a heartfelt rendition of Ed Sheeran’s Shape Of You. He started to tear up by the chorus, all the Dutch backpackers staring on, tears in their eyes too – ‘fuck, man, that was beautiful.’
But then the backpackers have their polar opposites: the suitcasers, the non-nomads, the down, out and gloomy loners. These are often men, most likely in their mid-to-late-forties, scraggly, tired-looking, skinny and strange. There was one in my dorm in Turin, during mid-winter, when the wind blows harshly from the Alps, windows are frosted, cobblestone streets frozen over. He was a nice enough guy, but would spend all his time hunched in the corner, chain-smoking, blaring music into the early hours. The wallpaper smelled like my grandfather’s living room, pensive and tobacco-stained. Soon after I’d introduced myself, he started to tell me his life story, why he was now here for a few months, now there. He spoke perfect Italian, French, Spanish, English and Romanian (his native language). ‘I was a rich man, but my wife left me, and took all my money with her’. Ah. That old chestnut.
Sometimes, though, you meet the real enigmas, those characters from a hostel that you never forget. Picture this: a hot, still evening in the mountains straddling the border between Albania and Greece; ten or so travellers are sitting around a long oak table, trees heavy with violet figs overhead. A man of medium build, fifty or sixty years-old, emerges from the gathering dusk. He sits down with the group; he is handsome, or at least he used to be; he has deep-set eyes and the same furrowed brow Clint Eastwood always shot at the audience in Spaghetti Westerns. Out of the corner of his mouth he chews and smokes on something.
‘Howdie’.
He literally says howdie, like a fucking cowboy. He is a cowboy, it turns out – from Wyoming. Grew up somewhere near the foot of the Rockies, has a ranch out there: ‘Well, listen here, out there is about as much the middle of nowhere as nowhere can get.’
Conversation dies down as we all sit, a little gobsmacked, and listen to his soft Midwest narration, telling us about his life, his adventures for the next however many minutes.
‘Mmm, yes, well I was once going down the Kaawngo Reever (Congo River) in a kayak – why the hell I decided to do that stupid shit God only knows – and I was getting reeeaal scared, ‘cos all these folks was standing on the shore shouting “we go eat you, white boy! We go eat you right up!”
Somehow this meandered into another tale about Nicaragua.
‘Well, thing you gotta know about goin’ round Neekaragwa is that just about everyone is trying to kill you, so you gotta have a big fat Colt ‘45 sticking out your pants – you know, one of those big motherfuckers!’
He went on, and on, and on, right until we all started heading bedwards. For all we knew, he might have made it all up – frankly, who cares if he made it all up? He was a great storyteller, and that’s one of the most wonderful things you can hope to find on a hot Summer’s night on the road.
‘Goodnight y’all,’ he said, vanishing into the darkness.
When I woke up the next morning he had disappeared. No one from the night before had seen him leave. Someone else at the table had taken a puff of whatever he was smoking: ‘mate, I slept a good sixteen hours – saw mushrooms and shapes and shit. Whoa.’
I never saw him again.
