Hostel Life in Darwin, Northern Territory

You can tell a Californian when they start talking about medical marijuana; I’m listening to a kid near me at the hostel talk about the 25 max plants right now, and it occurs to me, this is the first Californian I’ve heard in five weeks; one of the rare Americans, even. I did meet those two New Yorkers last week in Broome, but other than that, I’m not sure I’ve even run into another American since I left Sydney.

I called the Katherine Gorge National Park to get information and it took me a full two minutes of conversation to register that the girl on the other end was either American or Canadian. I’ve simply come to expect that everyone I meet is either German or British or Irish. Once in awhile, Australian, but much less so at hostels.

The sum total of Americans I’ve met is two – the New Yorkers. The sum total of the Sydneysiders I’ve met in these northern regions was zero until today and it was a classic case of like attracts like.

I just met a girl from Sydney who had come up here to Darwin for work. By way of greeting, I offered the very awkward, “You’re the first Sydneysider I’ve met up here in the north.” And then to compound it, “You’re a rare breed.”

Turned out she’d been to California once. She’d been to Esalen specifically for a month. She did work study and attended a gestalt-psych workshop.

Hmmm, Esalen work-study, I thought. Maybe that would be a nice way to be job-free in California. Having left the state only five days after I ended my job, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to spend my job-free time there.

Anyway, I started this by telling you how you can identify a Californian. You can identify a backpacker in general in many ways, most often by his or her meal: yogurt for dinner; a hodgepodge of bread and sauce and yogurt and cucumbers; two-minute noodles; and, pasta with tomato sauce.

You would think peanut butter and bread, but since most backpackers are German or British, peanut butter makes little appearance.

You can also identify backpackers by the way they ask someone’s name only after an hour of conversation. I don’t get the food thing – I’m eating muesli, and yogurt, and peanut butter, and salad, thank you – but I do get the name thing. You have so many conversations, at some point you are willing to commit, but it takes awhile.

In the north of WA and in the NT, I’ve met my fair share of folks who’ve been traveling in India and came back to earn some money, or those who want to meet up with friends in Thailand (they were all, say, trimming grapes in Margaret River together).

The ones whose names I end up asking for are those with the flowy pants and the glowy skin, the distinctly I-bought-these-in-Bali burnished gold hoops in their ears. They’re the ones who spent a month on work-study in Esalen.

The Esalen girl got it. I had told her how I’d come to be here and she responded: “So you came looking for space, huh?”

“Exactly,” I said. “Exactly.”

As the trip gets closer to the end than the beginning, I’ve been thinking about this space. I still want it – especially the outdoor kind of space. I have felt healthier and more mobile than ever before. I went looking for the outdoors to see how much I needed in my life and the jury is coming back with an answer. It’s somewhere on the more than a little side of things.

But I think I’m ready to start spending this spacious time with loved ones rather than alone, and am excited that the summer holds just that.