Amsterdam - Day Twenty Six

It takes a while to get from Munich to Amsterdam by rail, but it was worth it because I was heading there to meet some mates from my Cardiff days. Avvon, Dan, Byron and Rusty were flying to the Dam as a farewell weekend for Ryan, who's heading back to Australia soon, and it seemed silly not to join them when I've got an interRail ticket burning a hole in my pocket.

Arrived in Amsterdam's Centraal Station at about 6.30pm, and headed straight for a payphone. Bizarrely though, all I got from all five of their mobiles was answerphones, and a huge connection fee for each attempted call. I blew nearly ten euros, then gave up and found some internet access.

No emails from the boys. Not a sausage. 'This is strange', I thought to myself, stranded in a busy city on a saturday night, with no accommodation booked (I was going to crash with the guys at the airport Hilton, where Avvon had sorted staff rates for our rooms) and my bags weighing me down. I tried calling all five phones again: nothing. I hadn't travelled for ten hours for this.

After an hour or so, there seemed to be nothing for it but to check into a hostel and dump my stuff. 7.30pm on a saturday night isn't the optimum time for finding a room though, and three full hostels later I jumped at the chance to pay twice my normal hostel rate for the smelliest, most minging 30 bed dorm I have ever seen. I nodded a hello to a collection of crusty hippies in the corner, threw on a clean t-shirt and put Plan B into action.

Plan B will not go down in history as one of the finest examples of strategy. It basically consisted of me power-walking around the centre of Amsterdam, looking in the windows of bars and coffeeshops in the hope I might spot one of the guys. Astonishingly, it didn't work.

I had forgotten how seedy Amsterdam can feel on a saturday night; with crowds of drunken Englishmen leering sleazily at the girls in their neon bikinis in narrow UV lit windows, and dodgy characters sidling up to you from dark alleyways to offer you harder stuff than they sell in the coffeeshops.

I gave the call centre one final, desperate try, and found - against the odds - a new email from Byron. They had all left their phones switched off in the hotel, apart from Rusty, who had a new number. Sheesh.

Ten minutes later we were reunited in Dam square with lots of hugs and backslapping. We ended up having a relatively tame night on the town - a few beers and a space cake shared mainly by me and Dan which had no effect on me whatsoever, despite the fact that I ignored the instructions and ate about three times more than it advised.

Avvon was feeling unwell, so Dan and I went back with him to the Hilton (having gratefully retrieved my stuff from the hostel of doom). We had rooms in the main Hilton for sunday night, but had to catch a train to the airport for tonight's stay.

Two sets of guards told us to go to the wrong platform, from where we watched our train pull away without us. In the hour wait for the next train, the space cake finally kicked in (with a vengeance) and Dan and I became giggling idiots. Eventually made it back to the Hilton where we collapsed gratefully into bed - hopefully sunday night would go a little more according to plan.