Travel Tips

Having Sex in a Hostel

A few helpful suggestions

Fornication noun: fornication; plural noun: fornications sexual intercourse between people not married to each other.

When you stay in cheap and trendy digs, the realization slowly dawns on you: people are having sex in this hostel. After long stretches of living among the beauties of budget accommodation, I have become so accustomed to the sounds of a good hump that the creak of bedsprings and the hushed titters of the young and the amorous are nothing more than late night lullabies.

Just the right sort of hostel on just the right sort of night can become a writhing cauldron of discount booze, spirited hormones, and laissez-faire erotic attitudes.

In such an atmosphere, a touch of extra-curricular sub-umbilicus stimulation is inevitable. Sex, my Mere Reader, is everywhere.

I am writing to the lonesome backpacker, the young man, the young woman; that roaming miscellaneous, who is looking to quell her sexual vexations, but is still hazy on the particulars. I am writing to answer a simple question: how do you go all the way in a hostel?

Please don’t let me be misunderstood. I’m not here to tell you how to persuade a partner to join you in a test of your mattress’s warranty. Your ability to ‘pick up’ will only improve through the old-fashioned and humiliating process of trial and error.

Nor am I going to describe the mechanics of mating. When it comes to the ins and outs, there’s quite literally millions of hours of free pornography coursing through the veins of the internet that will furnish you with a rough approximation of who does what to whom. Besides, it’s damn near impossible to describe sex without resorting to tired baseball references, or cringe worthy words like ‘penetration’ and ‘thrust’.

So let’s agree to stick to where one snogs when sharing a room with anywhere from six to sixteen strangers. How do you become better acquainted with that new friend of yours without half-a-hostel’s worth of freebooters eavesdropping on every thrust?

Oh damn. I’ve gone and said thrust. Forgiveness please.

In a setting populated by notoriously light sleepers and midnight Netflix watchers, your best choice for a semi-private experience is to take your temporary beloved by the hand and whisk them away to the showers. Think of a shower stall as your own private six-square-foot apartment, with a sheet of fogged glass to obscure the obscene.

Showers also allow you to wash off the sweat from that dingy dive bar dance floor, where you most likely met the glistening specimen you are about to denude. Shower stalls are the most sanitary spaces in any semi-respectable hostel. The staff cleans the bathrooms every day: they don’t necessarily remember to scrub that stain off the couch cushions.

Outside of the shower, the alternatives become rather less . . . charming. I have made use of the shower’s less prestigious cousin the toilet stall, but this substitute is only acceptable under spotless circumstances. I’m talking about a miracle toilet, the kind that only comes along once in a blue spoon.

You’re going to need a sturdy lock, with a dry closed lid, and nary a whiff of stink to spoil the situation. Even then you are bound to skin your knee on the toilet paper dispenser, and the slightest imbalance of your bodies is apt to lead to an accidental flush, souring the romantic air.

So let’s call the toilet our last resort.

Don’t frolic on the couch in the common area. This seems like obvious advice, but any horizontal surface starts to look suitable at three in the morning. Aside from the sticky phở stained couch cushions and the funk and spunk of all the other last-ditch lusty idiots who have come before you, there’s also a fair chance that you will be interrupted.

Beyond your own mortification, the sight of your pimply ass miming an artificial full moon is enough to haunt the dreams of any unintended interlopers. It would be a shame to unintentionally spoil some prude’s holiday memories.

Less than enthused by the prospect of intermingling nether regions in waiting areas and washrooms? Must there always be a mattress involved in carnal contortions? If so, you’ll be tempted to turn that triple decker bunk into a nest of sin.

While many hostels don’t have an official rule prohibiting genital intimacy between backpackers in bunkbeds, it is, shall we say, frowned upon. Unless you possess a heretofore unobserved human ability to levitate above the bed frame, you’re sure to produce a series of creaks and squeaks, not to mention the inevitable moans.

These telltale signs of a ripe midnight romp will be poorly received by your roommates, or worse: eagerly overheard. That being said, sex is a daily occurrence in the dormitories of hostel land, and for the most part nobody gets hurt. Make sure you use the bottom bunk, so that you don’t lose your balance in a fit of passion and go tumbling six feet to the floor to lie naked as nature, rolling in agony with a dislocated shoulder until help arrives, hopefully with a sling and a good sense of humor.

If you believe you can beat the system by waiting until your room empties out before knocking your hips into hers or his, all I can say is: good luck. While most of your fellow guests can be counted on to rise and run — off to their museums and Vespa tours — there’s always an idol sloth who lingers through the mid-afternoon. An empty room is never empty for long, so be prepared to halt all indecent activity the second those door hinges purr.

Besides, do you really want to lay about in bed with someone you wooed into your orbit while the two of you were tipsy, only to eventually have stale, sober, awkward eye-contact sex in the full and unforgiving light of day? If that encounter turns out to be anything other than mortifying, then the two of you should marry immediately.

Should all these madcap suggestions fail, then you’ve only one option.

Transform yourself into a whore and mate above your pay grade.

To do this, you’re going to have to tempt that high-born snob who’s staying in a private room, paying four times the price to escape sleeping in a barn stall with the rest of the swine. Since we’re dreaming up fantasies, why not go out into the world and find some lonely occupant of a hotel penthouse?

Normally I scoff at the affluent few who fortify themselves against the lovely local grime behind concierges with curt looks, but I will forgive a night spent in silk sheets so long as you’ve earned that opulence by being one charming son of a bitch. Of course by then you won’t give a damn what I think, strolling back to your hostel with a song on your lips, those fancy stolen soaps stuffed into your pockets — souvenirs of your powers of seduction.

What about threesomes?

Figure it out yourself, you promiscuous bastard. That’s quite beyond my paygrade.

I climbed Kilimanjaro and wrote about it on Globetrotters. Check it out here:

A haunting read about Budapest I highly recommend is Jordhan Robinson’s The Shoes on the Danube.