Well, rather than reinventing the wheel, since XML::Simple is written totally in perl, you can just include it by adjusting your @INC to include it, rather than installing it into the normal search path.

Failing that, you should be able to parse similarly to XML::Simple using XML::Parser's neat Tree style.

use XML::Parser;
$p1 = new XML::Parser(Style=> 'Tree');
my $xml = $p1->parsefile('foo.xml');

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper($xml);
[download]

Granted, though, I haven't checked this code yet.. ;-)