Going Green
April 5th, 2008 by Thomas Maresca
Having driven more than 4500 kilometers around New Zealand in the last month, and having flown several thousand more to get here in the first place, it’s hard not to think about the environmental impact that traveling has. New Zealand already gets 2.4 million tourists a year; now imagine the growth of economies like China’s (New Zealands’s fastest-growing tourism market–new direct flights from Beijing have just begun on Air Zealand). Something has to give.
Obviously, the greening of travel has already begun in a number of ways. Carbon offsets are increasingly common options for travelers, and sustainable ecotourism has been around for quite some time (although generally this is geared towards more upmarket travelers.) Still, these feel like nothing more than baby steps. Is sustainable long-distance travel even possible?
On my wanderings around the North Island, I came across a number of hostels that are addressing this issue on an individual-scale basis. A few of the more interesting places you might want to check out:
Tree House Backpackers Lodge, Kohukohu: They don’t make a big show of it, but the owners of this place have been restoring the forestland around their property for nearly 30 years, long before it was fashionable. You’d think you were staying among natural gardens surrounded by wild native bush, but almost all of it was planted and nurtured by these enterprising and friendly people.
Solscape, Raglan: This hostel/lodge is more upfront about its eco-message. Set high on a hill with lodging ranging from old train carriages to tipis, the owners are striving to make the whole operation as self-sustaining as possible. The tipi area is completely off the grid, generating its own power and water, composting waste, etc.
Mel’s Place, Hicks Bay: This small place along the East Cape is also trying to be as environmentally friendly as possible. The owners, a Maori couple who run fishing charters, practice sustainable fishing and are very articulate about describing the Maori relationship to the land and its resources.
Just a few examples of local-level eco-conscious travel—you have to assume we’re going to be seeing a good deal more of this in the coming years.
Clean Underwear: Or the Secret to Backpacker Ecstasy
July 12th, 2007 by Leif Pettersen
While in Paris, I had an epiphany about a singular form of backpacker ecstasy. There’s an unequalled bliss available to long-haul backpackers that’s entirely drug-free, Pope-approved and, best of all, socially encouraged. I’m speaking of clean underwear.
Laundry is an irritating hassle when you’re on the road. It’s time consuming, boring, every goddamn country has a different, confounding system and it can get expensive, and not just in perennially overpriced towns like Paris.
Prior to Paris, the last time I’d done laundry was way back in Valencia, Spain. I won’t say here how much chronological time had transpired since that event, but I had passed through nine cities in three countries in the interim and needless to say by the time I reached Paris, even homeless people were shrinking away from me.
Back in Valencia there were no self-service launderettes, but the task could not be put off any longer. I got a line on a laundry service from the clerk at my pension that only charged €10(AUD$15.90/GBP£6.75/USD$13.65). This seemed expensive by budget backpacker standards, but after I considered that I would have spent a minimum of six euros to do the laundry on my own, the measly four euros that I was going to pay for the labour seemed totally worth the money.
Then I got the bill. Twenty euros!? “What the fuck?” I said to the smiling laundry lady. Actually, in my most polite, formal Spanish, I explained that she herself had quoted me the ten euro price earlier that day, to which she smugly replied that it was ten euros per load and that I had whites and colours, so that was two loads. My whites consisted of one undershirt and five pairs of ankle socks, hardly a “load”. In any event, I ended up paying more for those two “loads” of laundry than I was paying for my over-priced, private pension room.
So why did I put off my next significant laundry event until Paris? Well, part of the reason was that I had paid twenty fricking euros for the last goddamn load and I was gonna stretch it as far as it would go! Ahem. Additionally, I am not ashamed to admit that there had been a few somewhat malodorous occasions in the interim when I had worn the same ensemble, underwear and all, for three days straight. Gag and judge me if you must, but these things aren’t as unusual as they seem when you’re backpacking and constantly on the move. Days blend together. Over-night bus rides merge into the following day without the thought of a shower. Then you get wasted on cheap sangria that night and the next day is a hungover haze of non-productive confusion. See how easily it can happen?
Furthermore, in my case, endurance clothes wearing is not as revolting as you might think. I have a very unique and blessed body chemistry that makes it nearly impossible for me to generate objectionable body odour. I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. Try as I might, I simply do not stink. In fact, there are certain, possibly insane people in my life who actually prefer the scent that I give off after, say, a two hour juggling workout. They come prancing across the gym, grab me, bury their noses into my chest and snort deeply. Then they go limp with bliss and sigh heavily while their eyes roll back into their heads and a little goo drips out of the sides of their mouths like Homer Simpson at an overturned doughnut truck.
These people are the extreme cases. What I normally get are benign, mildly amazed comments as to how I never seem to smell bad. Keeping the above in mind, theoretically speaking, I could subsist almost indefinitely without washing my clothes if I weren’t spending my days wandering through teeming European cities where chain-smokers abound and every surface in all public places is peed on at least twice a week. Inexorably, even for a pheromone deity like myself, garments suffer a general build-up of funkiness when exposed to this environment and so the dreaded laundry chore must eventually be dealt with.
So, back to Paris.
Wearing only my swimsuit and a “Simpsons” t-shirt that I had been using as a pillowcase in hostels that don’t provide linens, I raced four blocks through the chilly Paris night, carrying a plastic laundry sack the size of a body bag, that contained every scrap clothing I owned.
Gratifyingly, Paris has self-service launderettes, like God intended. The downside is that you practically need to be a mechanical engineer to successfully operate the vast array of equipment contained therein.
To start, there’s the issue of coaxing the soap machine into dispensing a single use packet of detergent. Then you wash your clothes. Then you centrifuge your clothes. Then you dry your clothes until you run out of change or until they are actually dry, whichever comes first. All of the above tasks are controlled from an aging, coin operated programming console in the centre of the room. In order to successfully wash and dry your clothes you need excellent timing, meticulous planning and, if possible, passing fluency in French. Without these prerequisites, you will inevitably have to deal with little surprises like your washing machine starting up across the room while your back is turned, with the door open and no soap in it.
After two obscenity-filled hours and about nine euros - it would have only been six euros if my French reading comprehension skills had been better - I was hurrying through the cold back to my hostel with an armload of pleasantly fragrant, clean clothes.
One of the very few moments when a long-term backpacker feels almost human and respectable is when they triumphantly pack away all of their newly clean clothes and ball up the now empty dirty clothes sack and stuff it into a small side pocket of their backpack, where it will stay for a few days until its inevitable growth requires that it be moved back into the main compartment.
When you have a backpack full of clean clothes, the difference in your appearance, odour, confidence and general outlook on life is astounding. Your wardrobe choice is at its peak and everything is fresh, smooth and free, if ever so briefly, of red wine stains.
For a precious few days, your spirits are as boundless and unsullied as your choice of underwear. Yes, you detest the moment of knuckling down and washing your clothes like you used to loathe cleaning out the gerbil cage when you were a kid, but the end result is the same swollen feeling of accomplishment.
Best of all, you know that at that very moment, you are as far away from having to repeat that hateful task as you can possibly get.
And that, my friends, is backpacker ecstasy.
The Definitive Guide to Hostel Ettiquite
June 7th, 2007 by Leif Pettersen
I’ve been inspired to make another list. Normally, I’m not a list guy. I just don’t do it. I can barely get it together to make a grocery list (e.g. yesterday I forgot mayo and contact lens solution), much less an authoritative, trustworthy list for public consumption. It wasn’t immediately apparent to me why this was, so I decided to give it some thought and make a list of why I don’t usually make lists:
- Too much organization and work
That was it. Is it technically a ‘list’ if there’s just one item or do I have to downgrade it down to an ‘excuse’?
I came to realise that compiling and arranging a comprehensive list is too close to research and, sweet Jesus, do I ever hate research. The only reason I had the strength to do the Tuscany list was because I’d just finished a month on the road and it was all pretty much in my head, or at least somewhere in the 90 pages of notes that were at my immediate disposal, so research was minimal.
Equally, I’ve spent a lot of time in hostels recently, mentally compiling an exhaustive list of hostel pet peeves. So, I thought I’d take a shot at putting together a list of hostel etiquette.
I’m aware that similar lists/discussions have been launched a hundred times on a hundred travel discussion groups, so I hesitated to broach such a stale subject, but you know what? Every day thousands of knobs barge into hostels around the world and commit gross, common sense, hostel etiquette infractions, so clearly a hundred discussions in a hundred discussion groups hasn’t made any difference whatsoever. Someone has to make this information public and hammer the issues home in a no-nonsense, articulate way, both for each new generation of hostel residents and the slow people who year after year fail to learn by the excellent example I set.
My dream would be that hostels around the world would print this list out and make each arriving resident read it, be made to recite it aloud in front of a group of witnesses (right hand raised, left hand on their favourite guidebook) and then sign it in blood just for good measure before they’re even allowed to put down their backpacks. If this practice takes off, the days of me being annoyed will become a thing of the past - at least in hostel situations, train stations are another story…
So, here it is, my comprehensive, research-free list of hostel etiquette to live by or else:
- If your train leaves at 6.30am, pack your shit the night before, not at 5.30am, jackhole.
- If you come in late and the light is off, do not turn it on. If you can’t see where you’re going, T.S. You should have packed a keychain light instead of your curling iron.
- If 10 people are sharing one bathroom, do not take a 45 minute shower at 8am. If it really takes 45 minutes to wash your nasty self, do it in the middle of the afternoon when everyone is out.
- If you snore, alert your roommates and tell them the best way to get you to stop (in my case, get me to roll to my side). If you’re an incurable snorer, go to a hotel.
- Do not have loud sex in the room while everyone is asleep and if you do, don’t get mad and demand “privacy” when the rest of us sit up and bemusedly watch.
- Just because you’re merrily drunk doesn’t mean I’m merrily drunk. This goes double for any time after midnight, because unless I’ve recently told you otherwise, I like sleep more than I like you.
- Is it really necessary to pack all you stuff in 43 individual, crinkly plastic bags? One bag for socks, another bag for underwear, another bag for cotton buds, another bag for your swimsuit, another bag for dirty socks, another bag for dirty underwear… If so, you need to pay particular attention to #1.
- Don’t hit the snooze button on your alarm three times.
- In fact, get a vibrating alarm or use your phone or something. The rest of us didn’t come all the way to Nice to be woken up by someone else’s alarm clock at 7am.
- You are not the center of the universe, I don’t care how long you studied in Paris.
- Do not clean the dried mud out of the soles of your sandals by whacking them on the floor at 6am.
- When you come in from partying at 3am and wake everyone up while you clumsily get ready for bed and then people are too loud for your liking at 9am, keep your effing mouth shut.
- If you walk into the TV room and six people are sitting there intently watching the news, do not change the channel to your favorite Indian soap opera.
- Ditto if, in the example above, the words ‘news’ and ‘Indian soap opera’ are swapped with ‘Spiderman II’ and ‘cricket’.
- Having a half-whisper conversation with your friend all the way across the dorm room at 6am is still disruptive and rude, so don’t try to pretend it isn’t.
- Believe it or not, when you thrash around or heavily drop stuff onto your part of the bunk bed, it disturbs the person sleeping on the other bunk.
- Just because you’ve been there a couple of nights doesn’t mean you can take over the whole room by spreading your shit everywhere.
- Spontaneous farting is only funny under very precise circumstances. It requires exquisite comic timing that most of you don’t have, so better to just save yourself the embarrassment and do the slow release or, better yet, leave the room.
- The dorm is for sleeping and activities that immediately precede or follow sleeping. That’s it. The dorm is not for eating, getting drunk, playing “dorm sports”, doing your laundry, drying your laundry, blasting your mini-stereo (that you brought along because why?), smoking (leaning out the window a little does not count as going outside) or recovering from the flu. If you aren’t sleeping or about to sleep or just waking up, go to the hostel’s common rooms. If there are no common rooms, leave.
- Oh yeah, guitar guys… So, you play the guitar. That’s great. And you’re so devoted to your music (dude) that you couldn’t live without your guitar for a couple months of backpacking and therefore had no choice but to bring it along. Whatever. Two things: Don’t play it in the dorm room and don’t complain how you have to pay extra to bring it onto certain airplanes. And if I may offer this… I’ve been a juggler since I was 12 years old. Juggling is an ingrained part of me. I love it. Yet somehow I’ve gotten through several cumulative years of travel without bringing along my prop bag and practicing in the middle of the hostel. Equally, piano and tuba players seem to survive a few months without their showing-off-in-front-of-girls apparatuses - I mean “music, dude”. I’m just saying…
- If, for whatever reason, you have to completely unpack your bag, my bunk is not among the acceptable places to put your stuff, particularly your moldy flip-flops and your balled-up, dirty clothes.
- Shower every day. You can only skip a day if you didn’t break a sweat or if you’ve been in transit or you’re in the jungles of New Guinea.
- Also, do laundry every couple of weeks. You can get away with washing once a month only if you are not offensive smelling and you packed 15 t-shirts and 23 pair of underwear.
- Unlimited internet access at the hostel is a great thing, isn’t it? That said, if four people are waiting to use it, it’s not OK to linger reading “Joke of the Day”, checking the weather back home or reading agonizingly long blog entries by a hilarious travel writer whose name rhymes with “Knife Lettersen”.
- Just because we left the hostel together in a group and went to the same bar doesn’t mean I’m your babysitter, particularly if you’re a sloppy, dickhead, combative drunk. Furthermore, if we call a taxi, which you know damn well will arrive in two minutes, and you decide to go back into the bar for one last-ditch effort at hooking up with the Essex girl, don’t get pissy if we leave without you. You’re an adult. If you can’t take care of yourself, you shouldn’t be travelling without your mommy.
- Pick up after yourself. Yes, the hostel has a cleaning staff that comes around once a day (if that), but you’re not at home and your long-suffering mother is not around, so don’t leave banana peels and half-empty cans of Coke on the floor and then act surprised when they’re still there a few hours later.
- Finally, and most importantly, before you do anything, ask yourself this question: “Would I mind if someone else did this?” Incidentally, if your answer is “it depends”, that means don’t do it.
Leif Pettersen is currently on the road in Italy updating a guidebook to Tuscany and Umbria. You can read more at his blog, Killing Batteries.