The first thing to remember when travelling is that nothing goes exactly according to plan. This realisation will probably dawn on you late at night, in a strange town, when you arrive at your hostel to find they closed the door two hours ago. By that time, of course, it will be too late.

I can remember when it happened to me. I was sitting with my friend Marika outside Valencia airport at 1 o’ clock in the morning; it was drizzling with rain, and the roads were ominously empty. Up until this point, we had seemed to do everything right – we had booked searched through plenty of hostels and booked in advance using HostelBookers.com, we had checked to see that it was central and open late at night, and we had made sure that there was a transfer bus between the airport and the town centre. Unfortunately, we hadn’t bargained for the plane arriving two hours late and missing the last transfer by a matter of minutes.

“So what are we going to do now?” asked Marika. She had downed most of the complementary bottle of wine shoved at us by a placatory air hostess on the flight, and she didn’t seem too worried by the situation.
“Well,” I said slowly, “I suppose we could get a taxi.”
Marika looked round. “There aren’t any,” she concluded positively. “But I think I’ve got a map somewhere in here…”
The search through her bag produced a broken umbrella, a duty free bottle of gin and a crumpled map of Valencia.
“Look,” she said, pointing at a network of streets that led from the airport to our hostel. “It’s easy. Should only take us twenty minutes to walk there.”

It took us two hours. Barely sheltered by the broken umbrella, clutching the soggy map and swigging from the duty free gin bottle, we wound our way along the alleyways of Valencia. At one point we were accosted by a group of fifteen-year-olds, who, for some inexplicable reason, were carrying a box of megaphones. They insisted on accompanying us for half an hour, announcing our progress by tannoy and proposing marriage to us in the intervals. That’s the sort of surreal thing that happens surprisingly often when you’re travelling in Europe.

We arrived at our hostel at 3am to find a party going full-swing in the lobby. There was birthday cake scattered around the floor, men wearing strange bird-like masks wielding maracas, and flamenco dancers weaving their way around the detritus.
“We definitely chose the right hostel, then,” said Marika, before the dancers pulled us in to their circle.
Yes, things rarely go to plan when you’re travelling – but most of them time, that’s a good thing.