Don't forget the...

A half-decent hostel is more than just a stack of beds and a luggage-room. It's the throbbing, sweaty essence of travel, the ecstatic hum of a college dorm, untempered by attendance requirements and impending mid-term exams. Nonetheless, it is an education, an arousal, and for many, an awakening; an introduction to the best and worst aspects of impatient, promiscuous youth.

Even on a quiet night in the bar (or the chill-out room, or the showers on level five), you can see the noses twitching in the pheromone haze. It’s a Guggenheim of body language; a gallery of averted gazes, crossings of the legs, hinted smiles, mirror-honed grins and merciless backs turned on the too-young, the too-drunk, the undesired.

Students from all over the world converge and cohabit and comingle. The schools of Finance, Law and Business dissolve and reunify in Music, Drama, International Relations, the Physics and Philosophy of Sexology. All the guys and girls who never get a look in on campus - the beautiful shy, the ugly drunks, the hopeless romantics, the too-loud, the too-old, the too-much…the untouchables - suddenly find themselves the focus of frenzied hair-twirlings and cheeky whispers between friends.

Why? Why this sudden, sexual utopia amidst the unforgiving tiers of bunk-beds and shared toilets? Is it the alcohol? It certainly plays a part, but there are far greater biological forces at work.

Adventure is not an experience limited only to geographical exploration, and travel, in itself, is not an inherently adventurous undertaking, not in this not-so-Brave New World. But it inspires adventure, physical, emotional and sexual. Travellers are generally an excited, unburdened bunch, glad to be somewhere different, willing to brave a few blind alleys and unsigned roads. Choirboys become cowboys. Nuns turn into nymphs. Morality taken for granted back home is tried before a jury of the senses, interrogated by temptation, cajoled by curiosity, strapped to the bed and gagged by desire.

For many of us, I suspect, the real function of travel is not adventure, but anonymity. Whether on our own, or in a small group of friends, we booked that ticket not only to go somewhere, but to flee the moral and social monotony of life at home, to get away from somewhere. Anonymous, we become less accountable to others and more to ourselves. At home, we're famous. Celebrities, forever paraniod of the paternal papparazzi and fine-tuned friends . The truly bold; those who defy convention and live the traveller's life at home, become infamous. So we buy a ticket. We hop on a plane. We land in the United States of Anonymity or the Island of Invisibility where they confiscate our emotional baggage at customs.

The trick in all this, of course, is to keep that one little idea bouncing away at the back of your brain, long after the sangria has swamped the last of your inhibitions:

Roll it on! That's right. Don't forget the:

Love glove
Willie warmer
Sheath
Raincoat
Cock sock
Johnny bag
Gentleman’s Jerkin

Ie: CONDOM

Even the most beautiful Swedish Gods lose a lot in the light of Hepatitis C and AIDS. Sex is everything, but it's not everything. Pay attention to your own alarm-bells, whatever they are, and survive your Next Big Adventure.