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My backpack already weighed twenty five kilos - but I had to pack my hair straighteners. Twenty four hours later, checking in at a hotel reception with a cardboard table I would begrudge every kilo. After checking in, I wheezed up a sixty step spiral staircase and when I finally reached the bedroom I collapsed like a beached turtle onto a bed riddled with bloodstains and trembling with fleas. Still, my hair be sleek and my muscles would soon rival Popeye.

I was nineteen with a year of university and few extra pounds under my belt. My flatmate Rachel and I blew our overdrafts on budget flights to Paris and interrailing passes. Our meticulous planning - on spreadsheets - created a tour from Amsterdam via Paris to Luxembourg City and Brugge. Three weeks of backpacking on the skinniest of shoestrings taught us more than a year of seminars. Our spreadsheets and Lonely Planet bible were quickly ditched for word-of-mouth recommendations; the first being that a bike chain to lock up rucksacks is more worthy a necessity than four-inch wedges.

Transport

Even budget Ryanair and Easyjet flights are too gross a luxury when you’re on a spaghetti-thin shoestring. We flew with AirWales. It was a jumpy moth of a plane, boneshaking, with a deafening engine hum. Still, it’s quicker than hitchhiking and gave our grannies fewer sleepless nights.

RailEurope changed their eight zone train ticket options last year – now interrailers choose between single-country rail passes or a global ticket. Shave pennies off your bill by purchasing a “Benelux” pass which gels Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg as a single ‘country.’ Full European timetables are available to buy at UK travel agents; pre-sketching your route is advisable but pre-booking is rarely necessary.

Accommodation

Our hostel choices came in three varieties: The dull. The bad. And the shocking.

Luxembourg City Hostel lodged in a gorge near the old town quarters is the IKEA of the hostel world. Clean cut, streamlined and a touch plastic - it’s a safe base but doesn't have much character. Rooms are spacious and bathrooms spotless, but during our three-night stay, social interaction rarely extended beyond a stiff handshake and game of German Monopoly.

The Snuffel Inn, Brugge is a topsy-turvy spot crammed with shoulder-to-shoulder bunks and plastic sheets. Rooms are accessible via a spindly circular staircase in the reception-bar which doubles as a breakfast room. It’s easy to ignore the bluebottles that hum around the milk jugs and cereal trays – the walls are acid bright, decor quirky and guests quirkier. At night, hoards cram into the snug reception and dance to live didgeridoo players before latching onto a local bar crawl.

Bob’s Hostel in the heart of Amsterdam is colourful: To the left is a blue cinema and to the right, a string of red-lit windows. Hair straighteners are not necessary, nor any other form of bodily hygiene – shower cubicles are designed around gas chambers and toilets are unrelentingly sour. Boiled egg breakfasts are taken in a crack den-like reception room; a dark underground hovel of stale air and sluggish smokers who are slowly melding into the woodwork. Bob’s isn’t for the fainthearted (nor the high-maintenance), but in some circles, it’s becoming a cult.

Take word-of-mouth recommendations on the road and check hostelworld reviews to decide what accommodation style suits you.

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