Backpacking Misunderstood

I have, in a previously unpublished essay written this:

I’d backpacked in Australia for most of Year 25 (2008-2009). I’d opened myself to many cultural and aesthetic experiences that I’d never had, unlike any I’d had as a student.

The time was largely one of self-indulgence. In my opinion, backpacking is the ultimate experience of escape from the confines of the responsibilities of adulthood, a brief moment of prolonged adolescence. Take a handful of travelers, harking from different countries, most of who are in their early-to-mid 20’s, put them all together by communal situation in hostels scattered in every city, working odd jobs, wearing clothes inside out so as to save money on laundry, pooling funds together to cook simple meals-ready-to-eat in the kitchenette, depending on each other for friendship and casual romance, spending nights partying on the balcony. It is essentially, a co-dependent environment, a community-by-chance. I had realized a dream and reclaimed the essence of my youth.

Backpacking to me, is more than a lifestyle, it is a form of an unplanned community.



Later, I expanded on these thoughts:

In Europe and Australia I’ve felt more accepted in my chosen wandering, at least while I am still in my 20s. Back home in the United States I feel as though there is some stigma to it. At my last appointment with my head shrink, he spent 45 minutes lecturing me about taking responsibility, moving ahead with what I want to do with my life, and other clichés. Another irony in that while my family and friends are supportive of my choices, I seem to find the least support from my doctor.

I recall a scene in Pulp Fiction, where the John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson characters are having an argument over the virtue of Jackson’s proposed living as a nomad. Travolta says it’s the textbook definition of being a bum. Jackson, in his defense, calls it “walking the earth.”




The attitude that I call the backpacking stigma could not be more pervasive as it is in a subtle appearance in the media. As an American, I feel that I have crossed the Rubicon.

Dateline, It’s September 2010, I’ve newly turned 27, and Tim and I are continuing our conversation on the streets of Utrecht.

Tim and I discussed the ongoing case (or saga) of Joran Van der Sloot, the young Dutchman long-suspected in the disappearance of Alabama High School Senior Natalee Holloway in Aruba, in 2005. Van der sloot had just reemerged in the headlines in June, under arrest in Lima, as the alleged murderer of Peruvian girl Stefany Flores. The killing occurred five years to the day of Holloway’s vanishing.

I mentioned that I had been listening to a lot of chatter about the case among American media commentators. It seemed as though they were bearing as much scrutiny to the fact of Van Der Sloot’s spending the last few years traveling the world, as they were to the alleged murders themselves.

Take the incipid Nancy Grace, for example. It is quite obvious she doesn't understand the first clue about the backpacking culture.

GRACE: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold on! What was he doing in Peru? Why was he there? Why doesn`t he have a job? Why isn`t he in school? Why isn`t he doing anything constructive? All I got from you just then was he likes to be at casinos and resorts. But what`s he doing there? Is he there for a job interview? What is he doing out in the wee hours of the morning on a Sunday night? What time was it? And why was he in Peru, Rafael? Do we even know?


Tim didn’t agree with my assessment. It is naive to claim that he is just being condemned for traveling. After all, he reasoned, look what he’s done while traveling—gambling binges and trafficking in Thai girls tobe used as sex workers. That’s the real lifestyle he’s led. He is being judged, solely on the merits of his being a fuck-up and a murderer.

Still, I told him, I wasn’t denying that the responsibility for his allegedly murdering two girls rests on him, alone. The fact remains that the rhetoric of American commentators seems to possess a subtle dig at what they misunderstand, or are genuinely ignorant about the youthful traveling lifestyle that is widely associated with Europe and Australia.

To be continued…