It's the rustling of plastic bags that really begins to grate. You're lying there in the half-dark, trying to sleep in a sticky, non-air-conditioned room, when someone comes in and starts to rustle.
It's the unwritten, sod's law of dorm-room accommodation that everyone seems to keep their most valuable possessions in plastic bags. And you can guarantee that they'll need to get to those possessions in the middle of the night, when everyone else in the room is trying to sleep, when the scrape of plastic on plastic sounds like chainsaws roaring in a forest.
This happened a few months back, at a hostel in Sicily. It was night number one, night number one of a week getting back in touch with my dorm-room roots. I don't get the chance to do the hostel thing too much any more, but this was a week in which I was flying solo and doing it on the cheap.
Night one was at Hostel Taormina, a super-friendly, family-run place on the island's east coast.
Some fancy hotels will offer you a coffee on arrival, or a cold fruit juice, or maybe a glass of champagne. Francesco, who runs Hostel Taormina, swung around in his swivel chair as I tramped into the little reception room and gave me a smile: "You must be Ben! Let's have a beer!"
And so the two of us grabbed a few cold tins from the hostel fridge and knocked back the nectar while he scanned my passport and tried to find my booking.
After having been softened by recent hotel experience, everything here was just a bit … rough. I got into my room to find that there were already plenty of people in my room: five others, to be exact, who were all asleep on their bunks, despite the fact it was 5pm.
I was trying to be politely quiet, even though it was 5pm, as I swung my backpack into a locker and then grabbed some linen and made my bed. I dashed out of the room as quick as I could to have another beer with Francesco.
It wasn't until later in the night, however, that the full annoyance of dorm accommodation hit home.
Rustle, rustle, rustle. Scrape. Bump. Rustle.
It was about 2am, it was dark, it was hot, and someone was sorting through their collection of plastic bags.
I was lying there on my haphazardly made bed, thinking to myself: a week? I've got to do this for a whole week? I have to share a very basic room with a bunch of strangers and their plastic bags for a week?
And I did. But there's a strange thing that happened after night number one, and continued to happen over nights two, three, four and so on: it got easier. It became more enjoyable. It became more comfortable. And by night number seven I've come to realise something that I always knew back in my hardcore backpacking days: this is normal.
You can get used to anything when you travel. And you will. You might hate the idea of staying in a dorm rooms, or shudder at the thought of going camping. You might worry about visiting a developing country, or even travelling on a bus.
But humans are adaptable. You get used to all of this stuff. And you start to enjoy it.
Every time I go camping I spend the first night thinking to myself: why? Why did I leave a perfectly good house in order to sleep under leaky canvas and use showers that make you hold a button down to enjoy their barely-warm averageness?
But then a day goes past, and another, and you stop obsessing over cleanliness, you stop dreaming of a solid, waterproof roof, and you just have fun.
I spent three straight months camping in East Africa once. The first night in a fairly questionable Kenyan campsite I seriously pondered the wisdom of what I'd done. Three months later, when my group had made it all the way to Cape Town, we were ready to turn around and do it all over again.
Same goes for anyone who's ever landed in India. At first it's horrifying: the noise, the crowds, the smells, the pollution. But after a couple of days it's just normal. (OK, there will always be at least one sight on every single day in India that will stop you dead in your tracks. But the overall experience is normal.)
Any amount of perceived travel hardship, or griminess, or weirdness – give it a few days, and it will become normal. And when you get home you'll even find you miss it, the same way that right now I miss having beers in Taormina with Francesco.
Although I'll never pine for the late-night rustle of a plastic bag.
