Bedfellow or Bandit?

What is it about traveling that makes us act as if we’re drunk? We step foot in a new country and immediately release the hang-ups, inhibitions, and modesties we’ve acquired from our native land. We do things we would normally never do—like share a bed with a complete stranger.

I was backpacking around Central America when I was faced with the proposition of sharing not just a room, but a bed, with a guy from North Carolina I had just met that day. Now, romantic encounters aside, I would not be caught dead doing this at home. In fact, it would be downright dangerous for a single woman to meet some jokester on a bus and then bed down with him, in a foreign town, with no one apprised of her whereabouts. But alas, I was an intoxicated traveler.

We were on the same bus together, heading into the tourist-heavy Guatemalan city of Antigua. While Bill Clinton and other luminaries have visited this charming, colonial town, most of the backpackers face small, overpriced rooms that aren’t that different from offerings in less famous and less developed Central American towns.

As the big, rickety chicken bus pulled into the station, the North Carolinian (whose name I can’t remember for the life of me) and I started chatting. We were both planning to be in Antigua for a few days and had no idea where we were going to stay; so we decided to look around together. 

Finding a place proved harder than I remembered, having visited the town only a few weeks earlier. It was a weekend, and travelers and Guatemalans alike had descended upon the town, causing prices to soar and vacancies to evaporate. We slogged around the streets, our heavy backpacks becoming more and more burdensome, and our optimistic outlook rapidly dissolving into frustration.

Part of the backpacking culture comes with the unstated ethos that you will never pay more for something than you think you should, or more than the price shown in your guidebook, or more than your friend paid two months earlier. Being alone and a bit older than most backpackers, I didn’t adhere to the backpacker ethos quite as fervently, and was more willing to shell out a few more greenbacks for comfort and cleanliness. My new bunkmate, however, was not. He was insistent on finding a cheap room, I was insistent on finding a clean one, and both of us were currently out of luck.