See new places every day, take great pictures, meet new people and cultures and have fun while traveling. This is how we all imagine the perfect everyday life as a traveler. And if we look at the pictures of travel bloggers on Instagram, then it all looks so easy and great. But what always looks so perfect on Instagram isn’t always the reality, Instagram isn’t the real world.

Of course, traveling is great and I can’t wait to pack my suitcase again. Nevertheless, when I see the pictures online, I wonder: Why is it so easy for others? Why do people have so much fun? But who shares the dark side of life with the whole world? Probably almost no one…

That’s why I want to tell you how life while traveling can sometimes really be:

Living in a hostel

The life in a hostel is not always as great as you always hear. Always being in contact with people, making new friends, exchanging experiences with others… It all sounds so great at first and can be, but unfortunately it’s not always.

The problem is that you’re with strangers 24/7. And of course you don’t get along with everyone so well. And not all your roommates automatically become your best friends. In addition, everyone has their own lifestyle. While one may be a total order fanatic, the other may be a total chaos.

Cleanliness

For many people, it is not a matter of course to wash their dishes after using them. So it can happen that you have to look for clean dishes and cutlery at every meal. Or, in the worst case, you have to take care of other people’s dirt if you can’t find anything clean.
Also on the walls of the shower you will often find the hair of strangers everywhere.

Bathroom

A private bathroom for your room that you only have to share with four people? Doesn’t even sound so bad at first. Four people are significantly less than a whole hostel. The problem, however, is that everyone has to take a shower at some point. And everyone has to go to the toilet at some point. There are quite considerate people who finish their showers after ten minutes. But unfortunately there are also people who block the bathroom for one or two hours. And If you have to leave on time because you have to get a certain bus or train, it can be annoying if you can’t use the bathroom if you want to. Since the shared bathrooms in the hallway are sometimes advantageous…

Smalltalk

No place is better than hostels to meet other travellers and make new contacts. However, in many cases it remains to have talked together at dinner for once. So if you tell someone for the tenth night in a row, where you’ve been traveling to already, where you’ve come from, and what else you’ve planned for your trip, you just don’t feel like having the same conversation anymore.

You’re never alone

If you are not a super rich backpacker and you can afford a single room, then you are probably forced to take a shared room and share a room with strangers.
But every person needs time for himself and wants to be all alone especially when traveling. But even if you should be lucky to be alone in your room during the day, it’s not YOUR room. You are under constant tension that one of your roommates could burst into your room at any moment.

It may also be that you have had a really exhausting day and you just want to eat something quickly and then fall into bed afterwards. But suddenly someone sits down at dinner and wants to talk to you. In itself there is nothing wrong with it, that’s why you are in a Hostel. But especially when you need peace and want to be alone, you are rarely given this luxury.

Sleep

Snoring

There’s a lot of people who snore. Some snore quietly, some louder, and some so loudly that it sounds like five elephants snore at the same time. If you’re unlucky, you’ll have to endure it with such a person for several nights in a row in a room. So while that person has the sleep of their life, after four days without sleep, you feel completely depleted.

Room cards

Room cards are a great invention: for hostel owners as well as for backpackers. Keeping a room card without losing it is much easier than keeping a key.

However, room cards also have a few disadvantages: sometimes they don’t work. Keys, on the other hand, ALWAYS work if you don’t put them on the wrong lock. During the day, it is absolutely no problem to go to the reception and kindly ask someone to make sure that your room card works again. But what if you get snatched from deep sleep at night because you have to go to the bathroom and suddenly you can’t come to your room because the card doesn’t work anymore?
Luckily for me, the reception at this hostel in Melbourne was open 24 hours a day. But what if that had not been the case? Would I have had to wait till 8:00 in the morning and sleep on the dirty floor outside the door?

Naps

What is very simple at home is almost impossible when traveling: Taking a nap. Maybe you had a short night or you just got back from a strenuous hike and just want to fall into bed and rest for a few hours.
But in most cases, this is impossible. You just can’t turn off the light because someone else in your room really needs it. You can’t rest because one of your roommates has a chat on the phone. Or it’s really quiet, but then someone comes in with a thousand pieces of luggage and makes a deafening noise.

Sleeping in

While traveling, you can almost hang up on sleeping in. Because if you are not woken up in the middle of the night because someone is returning from a party or is just arriving, then you will be woken up by noise in the hallway or in the room early in the morning. And if that’s not the case, then the bright sunlight wakes you up because your room doesn’t have curtains in front of the windows.

Homesickness

You break out of your comfort zone at home and your everyday life changes 180 degrees from one day to the next. Even if you’re busy all the time, with people around you get along with very well, you’re sure to get a little homesick at some point. While traveling you start to miss little things like food, a simple hug or your own bed.

Instagram vs. Reality

You google or see another traveler posted a photo of a place on their social media account and find that place breath-taking, or that person posted a great sunset, with lots of colours and everything is glowing and you really want to explore that place. So you’re on your way traveling to this place.
Sometimes (not always!) you will arrive at this place and suddenly everything looks completely different from the pictures on the internet. The water is not sooo turquoise and the sunset is not sooo great and looks like everything else you’ve already seen and you wonder: Why does it look so great in the pictures and not when I’m here? Very simple: Images are edited. Pictures with a better colour quality are simply much better received by people than the quick original photo taken with the mobile phone.

Luggage

I don’t think anyone regularly shares online how exhausting it can be to live out of the suitcase or to transport the heavy bags from one place to another.
Especially if you move from one place to the next every one or two days, you hardly have the opportunity to unpack and clean the bag regularly. At some point it can happen very quickly that everything ends in a big chaos and it takes forever to find a pair of trousers.
Also, buses don’t necessarily stop right outside the door of your hostel, so it may happen that you have to transport your heavy luggage several kilometers to its accommodation and then have to walk the bumpiest roads up and down.

Sweaty and exhausted, you finally arrive at your accommodation after a long drive to pick up the key to your room weakly and exhausted, only to find out that you have to drag up your luggage to the third floor.
Of course you can call an Uber or taxi, but let’s be honest: Which backpacker has so much money that he can invest money in an Uber every few days, if you already have to pay for buses and flights as a means of transport anyway?

Thieves

Thieves lurk all over the world, especially in hostels where you share your room with strangers. So you always have to remember that your valuables are kept safe. And you can’t even put your phone in your back pocket in a huge crowd of people in the middle of the big city.
When you are not in your accommodation, you constantly think about: Did I really lock my safe correctly?
Because the stress that comes to you, should suddenly have your passport or credit card gone, I don’t think anyone would want to put up with that.

Bedbugs

At first I didn’t think about it at all, but then when I heard from other travelers about bedbugs in their beds or borrowed sleeping bags, I also got a bit bummed as soon as I got a new bed for the next night.

But nevertheless the beautiful moments on a journey outweigh. For nothing in this world I would want to undo such a journey or not go back at all.