The two of us shared a six-bed dorm on the sixth floor of an Auckland hostel. The place featured a lobby-bar, a slot-machine room with a weekly $1000 jackpot, free dinner every night, and the laziest room booking system possible, filling the lowest empy spot first. Along with our own private lounge and kitchen, we had the highest and last-to-be-filled room in the joint, all for $120 a week. It was Paradise Found, and we ate every apple we could.
We crashed for six weeks in those top-floor bunk-beds before we had a single roommate, and he would be our undoing . For free beer, we hosted the hostel's Tuesday Night Trivia (we'd won too many weeks in a row) rigging it to give the bar-tab prize to a variety of British babes. We heckled the Taiwanese prostitutes from the neighboring BJ Bar who hunted for the jackpot in our poker-machine room. We invited locals in to buy us Happy Hour drinks. We guzzled beer Barney Gumble-style straight from the taps. We ran the kitchen on Thursdays, cooking for 100, using a week's worth of food. We turned the bar into an after-hours club, cranking the music and rocking 20-person all-nighters with an open-bar. We even used the computer system to bump our first bunkmates, the 'Swedish Beatles' to another dorm, all without any trouble.
This changed the day we pissed off the irate Israelite who, mysteriously appearing in our room, filed a complaint about, of all things, the noise of our late-night texting. We put the blame squarely on the absentee-manager's illicit Romanian lover and her ignorance of the booking system. Upon the manager's return, Spike and I were swiftly shown the door.
Thrown from the Garden of Eden we bought a white 1984 Mitsubishi L300 we dubbed The Hotel Van Blanc, and hit the road.
