The Cup

I’ve stayed in my fair share of hostels in my day. It’s amazing the variety of unique and often terrible ways that people across the globe have found to satisfy the common requirement of providing a place to sleep for a night. One thing that all have in common however is that they work on ‘backpacker time’.

At any time, day or night, you can knock on a hostel door and have some poor, underpaid unfortunate lead you to a mouldy mattress in a stark cell packed tight with fifteen other poorly-washed vagabonds. Occasionally some hostel manager, in a stoic attempt at decency, will limit opening hours to perhaps eleven at night but rarely without some night watchman to secure those few extra bucks from late night arrivals.

In Bundaberg however I discover an international oddity. Arriving just before 6pm and eager to secure a place with a TV (in order to watch Australia in the World Cup match on at five the following morning) I find myself up against a locked and barred front door. I turn to the second hostel in town to find the same story. Both of these close at 5:30pm. I stand stunned as my brain tries to process this bizarre fact; it’s as if gravity has momentarily stopped working.

I check myself into the local caravan park, thankfully still open. For ten bucks I secure a sight for my car and access to the dunnies, but no TV. I scour the town, ludicrously hoping to find some bar, pub or cafe that will be open and showing the football but to no avail.

Despite having already paid for accommodation once that night, I eventually resort to a motel on the outskirts of town. I find the cheapest one I can, a real dodgy little shit-hole. So dodgy in fact they’ve thrown extra beds into a couple of rooms to make pseudo-dorm rooms. For twenty bucks I get a bed in one of these.

I’d assumed the TV was in a common room but arriving at the room I find that the TV is in fact mounted on the wall. I explain to the little Korean girl, who’d taken my money, that I want to watch the football at 5am and I doubted the others in the room will be impressed. She insists that I wake her up and watch the game in her room with her. Given that she has no idea who’s playing I’m suspicious she may have ulterior motives.

So now I’ve paid twenty bucks for a bed I have no intention of using (the car looks far more appealing) and the prospect of being raped by a slightly scary Korean girl but I’ve got a TV to watch the game on.

When I arrive at the motel at five in the morning, I find a small army of Japanese backpackers on their way out for a day of hard, minimum-wage labor picking tomatoes. As a result my room’s empty and I get to watch the game without prostituting myself to the manager. I just want it noted that I was willing to go that far in support of my country if required.