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Backpacker hostels may be cheap – but there’s so much else to love about them | Lamorna Ash
In these temporary communities, each new encounter with someone great and surprising feels like an incredible fluke
Some years back, at the Naughty Squirrel backpackers hostel in Riga (twice winner of best hostel in eastern Europe at the Hoscars), I met a small, dark-haired woman in her late thirties. She was laid out on a bottom bunk, her pregnant stomach rising like a child’s drawing of the sun sinking into the sea. We attended some gigs and free walking tours together and hung out at bars with Australians. I asked what she was doing here, why she had come now. She said she was frightened that having a child would erode her personal identity. She was determined to get in all the life she could before that happened. After we parted ways, she texted me asking for every photograph I had from those few days. I imagined her holding a mewling, grasping baby in her arms as she scrolled through images of this now-lost version of herself: warm and rosy, carefree and alone.
When I was younger, I made an equivalent vow with my future self. To travel alone (in the UK, in Europe, wherever I could afford) at least once a year, so long as I was able. It was a means of guarding against what I worried I would become: settled, impermeable, inflexible. Like everyone else, I’ve lost out on some years. But I’m back at it now. An unspoken clause in my promise concerned where I would stay. It would not count if I secured myself off behind the card-locked door of some hotel room. Hostels or nothing: that was the deal.
Lamorna Ash is the author of Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town
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