Milling around reception was a group of increasingly frustrated travellers waiting for a computer to become available. I didn’t envy them. Most hostels only have a handful of machines, most of which usually pre-date Windows 98. To a younger generation who don’t remember 33.6k, writing an email on a hostel computer feels like you’ve been teleported back to the Stone Age. Frustrating doesn’t come close.

But if you had your own machine, you’re on easy street. Back in 2009, bandwidth was bountiful; few travellers brought their own laptops for fear of them being stolen or destroyed. Smart phones were not the ubiquitous devices they now are. I could write an email, chat on Skype and download 300 on Bit Torrent all at the same time.

Two years later, the explosion in smart phones, and the number of people using them, has completely revolutionised how travellers keep in touch.

Common areas in hostels are now full with people cradling an iPhone in one hand and a beer in the other. Few need directions to the nearest internet cafe, unless they are printing plane tickets. The short, simple emails that smart phones are best equipped to handle are perfect for backpackers. Skype for iPhone and Android makes the mandatory call home quick, easy and cheap. Maps can be downloaded from the hostel and carried around as you explore. You don’t even need a chunky Lonely Planet guidebook; simply download the appropriate city or country app.

Having trouble with the local language? Just download a Spanish/English phrase book. There are even apps now that translate signs in real time using the iPhone’s built-in camera.

Some of the more well-heeled backpackers are now packing iPads. There has been much discussion about whether tablets will carve a profitable niche in the personal device market, but after travelling for four months, I’m convinced that, if nothing else, they are perfect for international travel. iPads aren’t quite there, yet, with a lack of removable memory and decent photo editing software the main pitfalls for most travellers. But they are close.

After two years away, I’m back in Munchen for what my friend Cal once described as Disneyland for Adults, the annual celebration of beer and sitting down for hours drinking it known as Oktoberfest.

There will be three certainties: the weather will be cold, the beer colder and, with every second person owning an iPhone, the wifi intolerably slow.

Ben Oliver is a freelance journalist and former tour guide taking an extended holiday, or mini retirement if you will, across Europe until the money runs out or his girlfriend gets sick of him. Whichever comes first. He also blogs at Five Travel Rules.

I scan the coach, a 51-seat Greyhound, for a distraction. The faces of my fellow trainees look similarly haggard, like we’ve all aged 10 years in 20 days. My eyes rest on Jill. Seated a few seats back, Jill is one of my favourites. The time is 5am, and she is yammering away at top speed, a feat for someone of even her prodigious talking skills. I like Jill, but right now I just wish she would just shut up.

I barely remember which city we are departing this morning, or our destination. We are in Spain, right? Or is France? Did we leave Tours this morning? Are we in Amsterdam tonight? I scarcely remember. The battle between mind and body is being won by the latter and my eyelids begin closing, like curtains on a feature film.

A hand suddenly rests on my shoulders, perhaps a little too forcefully. ”Don’t you even think about it, Ben” is the stern warning from my trainer. I smack my lips and mutter something along the lines of ”never, never” although I’m sure it comes out as gibberish. I shake my head in an attempt to rid myself of the aura of exhaustion now obvious to everyone.

Sleeping on the coach is strictly forbidden and guides caught napping are punished in a variety of ways. Cleaning the coach was a favourite penalty among our trainers and the bus drivers, particularly the latter who got 15 minutes of their life back while we struggled to clean the windows to a factory-grade level of cleanliness.

Sleeping on a real tour also poses a real safety risk, although by the time you reach your second year, most guides will sneak in a cheeky powernap, provided the driver approves.
What you don’t want is powernaps turning into full blown kips; a tour guide once got so drunk the night before departure in Munich, he slept on the coach’s back seat for an entire morning, only waking after the driver drenched him with a bucket of water.

Of course, like the other less-than-sacred rules of tour guiding, the rule of no sleep is only enforceable if you get caught. Much like the supposedly sacrosanct rule of never fraternising with the passengers, a rule bent by some, stretched by others, twisted by most and entirely smashed by a few. In short, it was a rule no one followed to the letter of the law.

I can still hear Jill talking in the background. Or maybe it’s my imagination. I feel like Edward Norton in Fight Club; I’m having odd daydreams of Tyler Durden appearing on the coach and instructing me to remove my teeth with a pair of pliers; I am Ben’s distorted sense of rage.

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Tour guide training has a degree of military precision. Our trainers, in our case spilt evenly between the genders, are the harsh but fair drill sergeants, quick to haul us over the coals for unsatisfactory work but happy to applaud our successes. The type of trainers I’d feared — totalitarian monsters who openly berate and denigrate — are not found here.

Some tour companies still use humiliation as their primary training tool, but many are embracing a more nurturing approach as the attrition rate on tough love training tours is horrendously high, more than half the trainees are usually culled. Of our trip, two out of a group of 26 are kicked off, while another two would be sacked during the course of the season for various indiscretions.

Rising early, we split into four groups to investigate a combination of practical and site information. There is no time to be spent drinking in the details of a city, even if it is Paris. Police station locations? Check. Opening and closing time for the Louvre? Check. Single and carnet prices for the metro, including closing times on weekends? Check.

We blaze through cities in days, some in mere hours; at one point we covered five countries and seven cities in just four days.

After a full day of information gathering, we return to the hostel for dinner, followed by information exchange, bed, repeat. Most exchanges last well into the early hours of the morning; our first information exchange in Paris — a monster of a city to cover in 24 hours — lasted more than four hours, finishing around 3am.

We carry notes everywhere and they multiply like rabbits. I bring a standard black backpack; it overfills within a week and my suitcase soon doubled as a filing cabinet. I buy an additional satchel in Berlin, but that soon fills. Maps and handwritten notes and borrowed notes and cue cards are everywhere. Eventually I learn, and reap, the benefits of organisation. Indexing becomes my dearly beloved friend and ally.

Travel days between cities are filled with reading tour books, note taking and spiel writing, punctuated by pop quizzes and spiel requests, seemingly chosen at random. Typically, a guide would be told: ”Ben, you have five minutes to give me a Bruges spiel”. Cue the mad scrambling of notes as the book on German history you were reading is shelved and your half written, barley legible notes on Bruges are retrieved.

Thankfully, you have a few months before the training trip begins to collect some basic information on each country and city. As Bruges was one of the cities we were due scheduled to visit, on a whim I did a fair bit of research on the Smurfs, created by Belgium artist Peyo; while other trainees were spieling about the golden age of Flemish art, I was regaling passengers about Papa Smurf, Gargamel and the only female in the village, Smurfette.

City spiels — unaided and without notes — are expected to last 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the city. Anything less than an 45 minutes for a city the size of Paris, Berlin and Rome would be considered a disaster. The spiel for the French Riviera, for example, can last up to an hour and a half as your France country spiel (a good 30 minutes) segues into your French Riviera spiel (another 50 minutes), ending with your final approach to Nice (20 minutes at least).

Luckily the French Riviera is such a visual treat, the scenery provides plenty of visual aids as the sights of the coast sail past. From the quaint town of Monton, filled with retired folk and lemon trees, to Monaco and the famous Hotel Paris, Monte Carlo Casino and tales of Grace Kelly, to Eze-Sur-Mer — where Bono and the Edge were married, not too each other is the common tour guide joke — before reaching Cap Ferrat, once a fisherman’s cove and now full of Russian oligarchs and then finally Tina Turner’s holiday home in Villefranche.

By the time you reach the Cote D’Azur’s capital Nice there is barely time to cover the Cours Saleya markets, Place Massena or the Chateau de Nice overlooking the Promenade des Anglais before you reach the hotel.

At the beginning of each day, three trainees are chosen for special duties; GOD, Tom Tom and Oracle. Guide of the Day, given the telling acronym GOD, does everything a guide would be expected to do; morning and safety spiels, accommodation and coach paperwork, country and city spiels and sales. Tom Tom, as the name would suggest, is the map reader, responsible for knowing the location of the coach at a moment’s notice.

The Oracle is the fount of all knowledge. Any contentious or unknown facts are submitted to the Oracle, who is expected to report his findings to the coach the following day.

Some tests devised by our trainer’s border on sociopathic. In Vienna, a city most of us had never visited, we were systematically dropped around the city, without a map and told to find our way to a point in the city centre. Other tests are designed to ensure the demon drink won’t impair your guiding. After a night of quaffing red wine on the Seine in Paris, a slightly inebriated trainee was ordered to lead us home. Turning to me, he whispered somewhat manically, ”Mate, do you know where the hell we are?” Shrugging, I replied I didn’t know how much help I would be. What should have been a 30-minute metro ride lasted more than two hours, at which point our trainer took over.

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It’s now been 36 hours since we left Tours in north-west France, and I open my eyes to unfamiliar surroundings. It’s late afternoon, and with the sun’s warmth beginning to wane, I push myself into a seated position, pluck out my earphone speakers and attempt to get my bearings.

I’m clearly in a park, as the grass beneath and afternoon sunshine can testify. As I wipe the last bits of sleep from my eyes and my post-sleep fog clears I wonder where the hell am I?

I survey the landscape for clues; to my right is a pathway, leading to antique metal gates connected by two stone columns and beyond that a canal — a vital clue.The list of possible cities can now be trimmed to a handful. Am in Venice? Perhaps Bruges? It’s only when I reach the gates, which clearly state ”Vondelpark”, do I realise where I am.

Opened in 1865, Vondelpark is Amsterdam’s best open space, and a favoured locale for tourists to experiment with the sort of drug paraphernalia which would normally get them arrested back home. Anything and everything goes here, even al fresco sex, which has been legalised since September 2008. Provided lovers account for their ”rubbish”, are not in the vicinity of any playgrounds and restrict their shenanigans to evening hours, then game on.

Unfortunately for me, all this knowledge is purely theoretical. Drugs are strictly forbidden during the training trip and I’m too exhausted to muster any enthusiasm for sex.

We are week three into a five week Blitzkrieg tour of Europe, covering 33 cities and eight countries — later expanded to nine after I was chosen for Greek Island training — and I’m beginning to feel the strain. Like many around me, I’m wondering if it’s all worth it.

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Fast forward 17 days later and I am far from tired. In fact, I am positively euphoric, standing atop one of the tallest mountains in Switzerland, marvelling at the snow-capped splendour of the Aletsch glacier. I am atop Jungfrau, or the Young Virgin, in the Swiss Alps and the high altitude’s thin air and weeks of neglected exercise ensure the view is, literally, breathtaking.

Jungfrau earns the unique distinction of being home to the world’s tallest railway, post office and toilet. Jungfrau lies to the left of two other mountains, the Eiger and the Monch and legend says the Monch, or the monk, guards the virtue of the young lady from the predatory intentions of the Eiger, the ogre or old man.

Advertising brochures call Jungfrau the Top of Europe and that’s exactly how I feel. The weeks leading up to this moment have been a maelstrom of activity, full of tears and laughter, compounded by sleepless nights and countless assignments.

We white water rafted in Interlaken, got trapped in an elevator for four hours in Berlin and ate our body weight in schnitzel in Vienna, served skewered on swords. We toured a château in Tours, got hopelessly lost in Venice and obscenely drunk in Florence.

There have been moments of heartache, doubt, adventure, hilarity, absurdity and embarrassment. While becoming increasingly agitated with my group in Barcelona, I began barking orders while reading from my notepad — and smacked straight into a lamp pole.

In Madrid, I was lucky to escape serious injury after flipping my bike end-over-end after mistaking the rear brake handles for the front brakes. That night a trainee, allegedly speaking better Spanish than us, ordered Rueda de Queso in a tapas bar, only to be flabbergasted when the waiter produced exactly that: a thin wheel of cheese cut into triangular, pizza-like slices. We laughed until tears ran down our cheeks while the trainee shelled out 20 euros.

In Bruges, I made sure to try the city’s three great staples – chocolates, waffles and beer. What I didn’t do was space out my consumption and five minutes later, after sprinting back to the coach to ensure I wasn’t left behind, I emptied the contents of my stomach on the floor.

In Interlaken, we earned the distinction of being the first group in years to flip our ”unflippable” raft a shameful 30 seconds after entering the river. Our actions cost the lead rafter on the trip dearly; drinking copious amounts of beer from a decidedly unhygienic boot was the prescribed penalty.

It’s been nearly five weeks since we departed London on this remarkable trip and now, standing 3454m above sea level, surrounded by snow, the crisp alpine air and people once strangers now firmest of friends, I can answer my previous question without hesitation. It was so worth it.

Ben Oliver spent a season working as a Busaboat tour leader in Europe. He’s soon to head off on another big trip: this time 12 months travelling the globe with his girlfriend, so expect to see him return to Back in a Bit as a regular…

And today we have the most joyful of pictures and a story, from Crikey reader — and ‘DJ, rapper and shoe shopper’ — Jess Hopcraft.

Warsaw, Poland

Shot using: Some crappy digital camera

Jess writes: Snow. Not a foreign concept, although Hollywood would have me believe the king of Siam had issues grasping it. But living in a country that is mainly desert and living in a city that has four seasons in one day — which although very “cool” is never really very cold — means that I, at the ripe age of 24, had never actually seen this “frozen water”. Minus viewings of Ice Age with my niece and many a white Christmas rom-com.

When I googled the weather in Warsaw on the day I was set to leave, I saw an unfamiliar cartoon picture next to a very scary singular number. Did I need special pants? Would my five euro vintage boots be ruined? Could I freeze to death? Awoken on the train by a sudden jolt, I pulled back the curtains and got what was to be my first glance. Empty fields and small houses with a noticeable but not complete white covering. It didn’t exactly look inviting, but from the heated carriage it had a certain romantic quality. I smiled  and clapped my hands like a small child on a theme park ride.

I was more warmed by my dear friends who looked at me with sweet encouragement when I had expected subtle embarrassment. When we got off the train my questions were all answered. Yes, I needed special pants. I believe they call them warm pants. Yes, my five euro boots would indeed be ruined. Ruined and wet the whole four days. And no, you will not freeze to death Jess. For in Poland there is a special potion that when consumed keeps you toasty warm. Vodka.

It was after this introduction to Warsaw’s finest that my memory gets a little “snowy”. Leaving a bar with our new Polish friends (who’s utter surprise and shock at my snow virginity was adorable) we came to a large roundabout that was scattered with piles of last night’s small snow fall. I couldn’t contain my excitement and we all knew that it was time. My first and still to this day only snowball
fight. Picking up piles of snow within my gloved hands, I threw it with laughter that some may have described as joyous but most probably thought sinister.

I didn’t realise there was a technique in packing the balls and making them hard before throwing them. At least not until one hit my head and I was sure for a second that other things were getting thrown into the mix of our late night war. We drunkenly owned the streets with our raucous behaviour trying not to slip in the pretty white that was fast becoming dirty slush. I don’t remember the crisp cold air just the pain from laughing so hard and the cold snow smacking me in the ear.

We moved on to a bar nearby. It was here that my friend Vanessa reached into her bag for her wallet and pulled out a rather crumbly, cold, wet pile of ammunition. “Were you saving it for later?” I asked, puzzled at this being an item that one doesn’t usually pull from a handbag. She looked at me angrily and together we attempted to salvage the items of her bag. Phone. Passport. Wallet. Camera. All harmed by what seemed like such an innocent element.

It was sitting drinking tea the next day and nursing a severe welcome to Warsaw hangover that I was contemplating my fleeting introduction. Vanessa sat next to the heater desperately separating the pages of her passport to dry. My boots sat sadly next to her, two toned by the horrendous damp, my ear still a little achy. For such a light, bright romantic thing, snow sure can do a lot of damage.

I will wander the streets of Melbourne this winter and be satisfied with the surrounding cool coming from the people not the sky, only reminded of my time in Warsaw when a drunk hooligan throws a McDonald’s cup at my head.

Have you got an amazing travel snap (jpeg format, s’il vous plait) and story you’d like to share on ‘Slide Night’? You don’t have to be a professional and it doesn’t have to be “exotic”. Just send it through to ajamieson@crikey.com.au