Somewhere around grade 10, my friends and I started hanging around a particular group of guys. They were mostly apprentices who’d dropped out of school and they hung around our local shopping centre when they finished work in the afternoons. We caught the bus there after class and smoked cigarettes on the loading docks in our private school uniforms while these guys tried to source pot and mooch free pizza. They were the type of guys who considered taking a dump on somebody who was passed out at a party as “witty.”

When I stopped going to house parties and got drunk in bars instead, I fell out a little with these guys. I still saw them around, but when I did, I pretended not to know them. But after uni, our circles started overlapping again and I decided to give one of the boy’s house parties another go. Maybe they had grown up, toned down their behaviour and learned not to be so silly?

The party was going well. Nobody had spun a bottle or stuck their hands down my pants, the bathroom didn’t smell like vomit, and the police hadn’t visited. Then around midnight, the boys began passing around glow sticks.

“Are we going to a rave?” I asked.

“Not quite – wait and see,” somebody named Willo winked at me.

Each guy pulled down his jeans, cracked open his glow stick, and rubbed the contents onto his penis. Then they ran in a line down the dark street and shouted out to all the neighbours. Bleary eyed citizens shuffled to their bedroom windows and looked out to see a trail of bobbing wangs lit up and making their way past their rose bushes.

The boys then ran back to our yard and threw themselves one by one into the pool, screaming, “IT BURNS! FUCK, IT BURNS..”

My friend Mark is one of the most important men in my life. A nurse by trade, he has the privilege of fielding all my medical questions (“Okay, so I was in the men’s room at Q Bar, and stuff was happening, and then I fell…”) A mechanic by hobby, he also has the joy of fixing anything that goes wrong with my car. In return, I introduce him to hot chicks who he might be able to convince to sleep with him.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing though.

My friends and I first met Mark at the beginning of Year 11. He was new that year and his parents had sent him to our conservative Anglican school after he’d been busted with a knife too many times at his old place of learning.
“Hey laydeeez..” he drawled, sidling up to us behind the science block at lunchtime, “Where do you girls go to smoke around here?”
“There’s an abandoned house across the street,” we offered, “And we’re having a party this weekend if you wanna come.”

That Friday night, as we passed a bong around my friend Kim’s backyard, Mark burst through the side gate and waved a bottle of Passion Pop above his head. “LET’S GET WASTED!” he suggested, and spun the bottle on the ground hopefully.

“Ew, slow down,” and we rolled our eyes as Mark went around the yard, sussing us out one by one.

Later we reconvened to share our experiences.

“He said I had an arse from heaven,” Kim laughed.

“He didn’t say anything at all to me, just went in for the kill,” I shuddered.

“He followed me into the cubby house,” my friend Bryony admitted, “And when I offered him a cigarette, he leaned over and whispered, I wanna suck you dry.“

“Good god, that’s fucked up!” we agreed unanimously.

However, it was at that moment, in the early hours of the morning, that we realised none of us had seen Mark for quite some time. We searched the house. We searched the yard. We walked up and down the street, calling his name. We found no trace of him, except his shoes ,which lay on top of the BBQ next to his car keys.

“Shit!” Kim’s mum wasn’t happy, “I’ve lost the new kid. The Christians will kill me!”

We sat up for a while wondering what to do. Then we passed out.

I woke up at sunrise to find myself on the couch on the back deck. As I mentally assessed my hangover, I heard a groan from beneath me. Slowly, Mark crawled out from the small space underneath the couch and turned to look at me.

“Hey, gorgeous!” he said.

The single most terrifying experience of my life was not being told I might have cancer.

It was not being followed by a car full of five naked men while walking home from the pub very early one morning, who explained that they were “going to get me.”

It was not having a seizure in the middle of the Hordern Pavillion.

It was not discovering a redback spider sleeping on my pillow.

It was not realising that my fat pants had become my everyday pants.

It was not missing an entire episode of The OC, even though I was sitting on the couch in front of the television, because I was so high on Stilnox that I couldn’t understand the concept of TV.

No.

It was finding a cockroach floating in the toilet bowl of a friend’s house after I had used the bathroom, and drunkenly contemplating the possibility that I had either ingested, or otherwise acquired such a creature and held it inside my body for an indeterminate period of time. After I had vomited and finished having a panic attack, I returned to the kitchen, where my friend asked me whether the cockroach she had attempted to flush earlier that day was still in the toilet bowl.

It was a close one.

When I was twenty years old, and able to ingest large amounts of alcohol, I went to Europe and participated in two Contiki tours. I thought it would be great to see some of the world, broaden my horizons, experience other cultures, meet new kinds of people, etc, etc. Instead, I wound up on a bus with 49 other Aussies who were hell-bent on getting shit-faced and exchanging bodily fluids. It was awesome.

But I digress. What I want to do here is EXPOSE the Contiki Rep. Not the Tour Guide, for she is educated, holds her liquor well, and does not sleep with anybody until the very last night when it doesn’t matter anymore. But her site-based lesser counterparts exhibit no such control.

Contiki Reps are basically over-enthusiastic twenty-somethings from New Zealand and Australia, along with some Brits, attempting to avoid angry ex-girlfriends and boring university degrees by spending 6 months washing dishes in European campsites and shagging whoever happens to stay there.

During our London to Athens tour, I spent a great deal of time observing the Contiki Reps. They were paid badly, had to clean toilets and stayed in terribly isolated areas, yet they were all so chirpy I nearly lost my breakfast on the first few mornings. I studied their eyes carefully as they dished up my spaghetti, and questioned them closely while scraping my plates into the bin. So how many hours of sleep do you usually get in a night? Uh huh.. And when did you last speak to your family? Riiiight.. How often do you get time off? Oh.

It was not unusual to have a quiet meal or a serious conversation interrupted by one of the Reps bursting into the room, bouncing up and down and shouting, “Can I get a WOOOOOO???!!!”
I tossed and turned at night, dreaming uncomfortably of childhood church camps. These people had to be on something. Anything. However, after six weeks of intense study, I was forced to conclude that their perpetual cheer was due only to an excess of free alcohol and casual sex.

In Venice, I was forced to interact closely with one of the Reps, as I was rostered on for “dishie duty” on our second day there. And so, after several rounds of a cocktail known as an “Attitude Adjustment”, kissing somebody called Giancarlo, and vomiting long strings of spaghetti into a public toilet, I grabbed a few hours sleep, woke up early and reported to the campsite kitchen. I told the Contiki Rep on charge that I was experiencing my first hangover of the tour. His eyes misted over as he handed me a tea towel. “I remember my first time,” he reminisced, “You want a shot?”

It was at that moment that I realised all Contiki staff are alcoholics. They are not worldly travellers at all, but seasoned pisskops seeking employment where they can drink on the job. I’ve got no beef with that, but I think everyone should know. Well now you have no excuse – Contiki Reps have been EXPOSED. You heard it here first.