Every night's a Friday night and every morning's a Monday morning - Contiki

This mantra effectively sums up the Contiki lifestyle – a lifestyle that most of us dream about living when we first hear of it. After experiencing twenty-five nights of drunken debauchery coupled with crack-of-dawn get-up-and-go mornings, I know two things for certain: Firstly, this lifestyle could easily slay the uninitiated wannabe hedonist and secondly, I will never be the same again!

It is truly a fabulous way to live. Every time you rock into a new location, your tour manager gets on the mic and outlines the drinking arrangements for the night: out to a bar or staying in at the local bar with the option of a party theme night which is just more reason to get lawless.

All with cheep booze (read: beer and wine, anything else eats your bank account for afternoon tea!) If you are lucky you might even be able to score a drink before dinner if you can get your suitcase up the mountain of stairs to your dorm before everyone else. This is not a task too easily done when everyone else has the same idea and there truly is a mountain of stairs to climb with your ever heavier suitcase.

Post dinner activities generally begin with room-parties as everyone's personal stash of bottles is infinitely cheaper than the provided watering hole. Headed towards potted, you filter down to shake your liquored booty to dodgy tunes on the dingy basement bar's dance floor. You drink whatever is cheapest at the bar and dance like it is Y2K all over again, grinding indiscriminately against anyone who gets close to you.

The group thins from about midnight and you eventually retreat to find your sleeping bag when your feet protest to being walked upon. You pass out, numerous sheets to the wind on a creeky bunk hoping you're not in someone else's sleeping bag and praying for the world to stop spinning.

Life is bliss! You party hard every night after touring glorious cities by day. Then reality dawns like the brilliant sunlight falling on your face through the curtainless window of your dorm. They didn't say "Friday nights and Sunday mornings", they said "Friday nights and Monday mornings"! There are no sleep-ins, no lazy mornings in bed in this lifestyle, just non-stop up-and-at-'em fun from sunrise to moon-set.

Everyday starts just after sunrise with a mad dash for frustrating freeze or boil showers (lucky dip here as to what you'll get!) Prayers are issued to the suitcase gods so your ever shrinking suitcase will actually close before you need to drag it back down the stair mountain, which seems to have grown tremendously since you bounced up it with your suitcase the evening before.

You have no memory of the bar the night before or how you got bed but someone is sure to show you their paparazzi snaps while you try to eat a breakfast that will hopefully stay down. (Trivia: Contiki can safely afford to supply breakfast on every morning as few people can actually stomach more than fruit juice, fruit and perhaps cereal on an alcohol based system).

Now here the brand of daily activities split. You get coach-bound days where the tour song throbs through your aching head before you pass out hoping not to double bag before the first stop where you may actually eat something. You spend most of the day sleeping on the coach and trying to order fast-food in a foreign way which is most confusing to an alcohol addled brain. The stops every three hours do, however, offer much needed alcohol topping up breaks seeing as you can't actually drink on the coach.

Coach-free days see your dangerously hungover not-fit-for-public-consumption self unleashed upon the unsuspecting locals of your current location. Coach free days are infinitely more torturous when disguised as "health days" because then instead of running around an ancient cobble-stoned European city beneath the blazing summer sun, you partake in more exercise than you would honestly do in a year, hiking or cycling up mountains with the promise of a free lunch as your only incentive to reach the top.

All you want is another drink and your water bottle is probably 50 proof to try and keep your babbalas at bay. Thankfully the bar is always open when you return to your accommodation and another night much like the blurry nights before can begin in much the same way with a pre-dinner drink.

After three weeks of this timetable, I doubt my body clock will ever allow me more than a few hours sleep in a bed, although buses are a completely different story!

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