The changing face of backpacking

Back in February I spent several days doing a road trip around Tasmania where I spent most nights staying in hostels ranging from the pretty crummy through to one that was flasher than some hotels I’ve been to.  What struck me at all of these places, though, was just how much technology has changed the way that backpackers travel in the last decade.

When I first started backpacking in 1998, one of the things I remember (other than how incredibly naive I was about … well … pretty much everything) was just how little I took with me in the way of technology.  From memory the only things in my pack requiring power were a small(ish) film camera and a Sony Walkman.  Actually it wasn’t even a Sony – it was some cheaper knock-off brand.

I had copied a couple of my favourite CDs onto tape, as well as making a few mix tapes (remember those?) with my favourite songs, but for space reasons I had to limit myself to no more than half a dozen cassettes.  Having to sum up all my musical memories into a few songs seems almost laughable these days, but that’s the way it was.  Fortunately those tapes have disappeared somewhere along the line, as I suspect my music choices may not have stood the test of time terribly well…

I’d owned a mobile phone at home (I think it even had that newfangled SMS capability…) but global roaming wasn’t widely available and even if it had been, there’s no way my budget could have afforded it.  Being an early adopter (the polite phrase for ‘geek’), I’d had an email address with Hotmail since shortly after it launched a couple of years earlier, but many of my friends and family didn’t have one at all.

Laptops were heavy, underpowered and stupidly expensive – not to mention rather pointless, as wi-fi (never mind cellular data) didn’t exist and the web was still in its infancy.  Online flight booking sites?  Thorntree or other travel forums?  Blogs?  Google?  Nope.  Most travel companies themselves didn’t even have a web presence.  All of my trip research for the first few years came from guide books, free magazines (like TNT in the UK) and talking to fellow travellers.

Internet access on the road varied from patchy (a few internet cafes in large modern cities) to non-existent (I checked my email once in six weeks while travelling through eastern Africa at the end of 1999, on an ancient computer with a flaky dial-up connection somewhere in Dar es Salaam).  Combined with the lack of mobile phone service, I had virtually no contact with the ‘outside world’ for that month and a half – it could have been taken over by aliens and I honestly wouldn’t have known.

Fast forward a decade and how the backpacking landscape has changed.  Stick your head into any hostel common room and there’s a good chance the technology on display costs more than your total trip budget.  Flashpacking has become the norm rather than the exception in many places.  There’ll be a couple of people tapping away on notebooks, writing their next blog post (hi!), watching pirated copies of Family Guy or updating their Facebook status.

A few people will be chilling out listening to their ipods, some will be on their mobiles texting friends back home, while still others will be sitting around a digital camera laughing at the day’s photos.  Over the next year or two I’m expecting to see Kindles and iPads making an appearance in place of the traditional paper guidebooks and novels.  And if you look really hard, you might even see a few strangers actually talking to each other over a beer as well.  But you’re probably going to have to really look.

Being an amateur travel blogger myself these days, it’s pretty hard for me to take the moral high ground here – so I’m not even going to try.  There’s no doubt that in many ways technology has made backpacking (and travelling of all types) so much easier than it was even ten years ago.

Rather than spending hours trying to find a pay phone to call ahead and book one of the three hostels listed in the Lonely Planet (and then discovering that you don’t share a common language with the person at the other end), you can spend 15 minutes on the forums and Trip Advisor, shoot off a few emails or pick up your mobile, and have your accommodation sorted without leaving the comfort of your over-stuffed hostel armchair.  Researching your trip has become almost mundane thanks to Google, and arranging to catch up with friends and acquaintances on the road has gone from being a decidedly hit or miss affair requiring all of the planets to align to requiring only a quick Twitter update.

I’m not one of those travellers who believes that everything has to be difficult to be worthwhile – I’d much rather spend my time having a beer watching the sun set over a new city than humping my pack up and down back streets for hours trying to find somewhere to sleep.  Similarly, for those of us for whom travelling provides an income stream as well as satisfying an addiction, there’s no avoiding technology and the need to allocate time to using it.  Relaxation time is important too – those episodes of Family Guy can be just the ticket when you’re totally shattered after being on the road for the last few weeks.

The issue I do have, though, is that it’s just become too easy to use technology to avoid the best bit of travelling – meeting new and interesting people, whether that be in your hostel dorm room, the middle of a crowded marketplace, under the stars or wherever.  Technology can provide both infinite distractions and ultimate isolation from your surroundings, both physically and mentally, if you let it.

It’s not hard to justify choosing to write another email or check out your next destination on the web for a couple of hours rather than exploring the place you’re actually in.  If you’re wandering the streets with your earphones in listening to Michael Buble (heaven help you…) rather than the sounds of the city, with one hand on your phone waiting for the next text message from home to arrive, you’re hardly fully engaged with where you are.

Most long term travellers seem to get this, in one form or another.  Those who are only travelling for a few days or weeks – ironically, probably the ones who stand to gain the most from switching off from ‘home’ for a while – seem to struggle more with it.  The secret, I think, is in knowing when to hit the power button and head for the street.

Just as I’m about to do right now…

[Photo courtesy of Jef Bettens]