With wet, muddy tent strewn across the back seats of our car, we made our way towards the suburb or Balmain, just outside central Sydney. My old university friend, Andrew, and his wife, Mel, had very kindly offered to put us up for a night or two. The timing couldn’t have been better as we’re just been subjected to Sydney’s largest rainfall in a hundred years. In a tent.

Driving central Sydney is a bit of a nightmare for one reason: the toll roads. Having lived and driven through a great many cities, city driving doesn’t faze us in the slightest. After Rome, and to a lesser degree, Dubai, nothing rocks us. Except Sydney’s bloody toll roads. Driving along the toll road is easy enough. But you just try paying them. Firstly, there are no cash booths, it’s all electronic tags. Which is fine if you have one. As with every other tourist in town, if you haven’t made arrangements before you drive through your first toll (and how can you, if you don’t know they exist?) you have to call or pay online after you’ve driven the stretch of road. We had AUD$10 credit only on our mobile phone; which ran out as we were waiting fifteen minutes in a phone-queue to pay the AUD$2 toll. We tried online and, not only is the tolls website deliberatly convoluted, but our friendly internet cafe had not paid his bills and so each page took a couple of minutes to load*.

Worse still, when we got to Balmain I got a call from Andrew. They’d been held-up on holiday and so wouldn’t be back in Sydney until tomorrow. Oh, oh! We certainly couldn’t find the desire to return to a campsite, so instead started to hunt-out a backpackers hostel. Difficulty is, with a car to park, anywhere in the downtown area was definitely out: the car park fees would probably cost more than the budget accommodation. We found the only hostel in Balmain and made a beeline for it.

From the outside, it looked like a closed-down shop front on the high street. Squiffy was convinced that the place must’ve shut down a long while ago, but we rang the doorbell anyway. No answer. Ho hum, we walked away. Fifty paces later a shout came from behind and we turned to see our hosteller shouting us back to her door. After a bit of tooing-and-froing at the door–she wanted to know how much we had to pay and we wanted to know how much her rooms cost–we convinced her to show us a room before we talked about price. We were lead upstairs to a veritable rabbit warren of corridors that must have stretched out over three shop fronts and continued back from the high street for some distance. It wouldn’t be unfair to describe this place as a doss house. There were two or three communal kitchen/sitting areas and all of them was full of near-horizontal, lounging long-term backpackers and their associated mess. We were shown one of the four-bed dorm rooms, in which only one girl resided but nonetheless had slept in every bunk and dispersed her belongings across every level surface — including the floor. Seeing our faces, the young manager asked me “have you ever stayed in a backpackers before?”. “Many times. Globally”, was my best tongue-bitten answer, when I really wanted to say: “Many times. Globally. But never one this bad.”

Needless to say that we made our polite excuses and left. We found a more expensive, but still cheap by city standards, “International Guest House” and plonked ourselves there instead.

* This is not the first time that I’ve told an internet cafe that I won’t pay for shoddy service. I find it remarkable that every other punter just accepts terrible internet service. A certain someone close to me paid-up in an African internet cafe whilst simultaneously told the cashier that “it didn’t work, I couldn’t load a single page”. This was moments after I had told the feller that his internet didn’t work so I wasn’t paying. Squiffy got her money back in full. It was at this point everyone in the cafe perked-up and also started to complain that they hadn’t been able to load a single page either. Is this me being unreasonable? Would you pay for a hotel room that you can’t get into or a hire car that doesn’t start?