The relative death of backpacking

While backpacking is still a thing for some people I have noticed that there has been a real decline in this wonderful activity in the past 20 years or so.

When I first started traveling it seemed as though backpacking for months or even a year or so to be a right of passage of sorts for people that were in their early 20's. There were some grizzled older folks that would do it as well and at least with all the groups I ended up with, there was no age discrimination that I discovered or participated in. Now I am one of the older travelers and while I do engage in budget travel, the "true backpacking" for the most part doesn't exist anymore and it is really understandable why that is.

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When i first started backpacking in the early naughts, things were very different than they are not, as you would expect. The internet existed but not everything was driven by it. Smartphones didn't exist yet and very few people even bothered with simcards or phone plans once overseas because they were often more trouble than they were worth.

I arrived in Singapore late one night and had a plan to travel through Malaysia, then to Thailand, and was going to go through Laos and Vietnam as well. There was still some level of fear about Cambodia back in those days so I had opted to skip that.

My total duration of stay was 28 days and needless to say, my ambitious travel plans didn't happen like I had planned. I met up with some people in Singapore almost immediately and we decided as a group to travel on to Malaysia together. When we would arrive somewhere, we were at the mercy of the bus as to where that would be. Then as a team we would figure out how to get to a part of town that had a bunch of cheap guesthouses. We worked together with our Lonely Planet maps and even though we failed quite frequently, part of the adventure was figuring out how to get to our destination as cheaply as possible.

Then we would get some rooms just wherever and probably get something to eat, a few beers, and then discuss what we were going to do in the lobby or hangout area of the hostel. It was there that we would end up meeting even more people and exchange information with one another about things we had just experience in the past 48 hours or so.

There wasn't any extensive online research to be done and for the most part, nobody bothered to try. Not just every place had a website and if review websites did exist at all, they certainly weren't well-known.

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These days I don't think anyone just rocks up to a city and figures out where they are going to stay by walking around. Instead massive booking companies like HostelWorld would kind of make those decisions for you. The people that are traveling like this today are really missing out on a big part of what made travelling so much of an adventure back 20 years ago. The unknown was the adventure, and you were forced to meet people and speak to strangers along the way. A lot of my friends were made by doing exactly that and some of them I still keep in touch with to this day and made an effort to meet them at some point later as well.

These days, I am kind of too old to feel comfortable in a hostel, so normally I will opt to stay in cheaper hotels or guesthouses and unfortunately, I also book them online ahead of time.

The days of just walking around in an area that you heard about from a fellow traveler are kind of behind us. These days it seems like people go to a specific destination and will book a taxi using an app and arrive right at the door of exactly where they are meant to go to. For these people, they miss out on a lot of the off the beaten path stuff and they are also subjected to market manipulation by whoever the big players in the game happen to be.

A large part of what remains of the backpacking industry is basically a monopoly of giant party hostel chains that incorrectly try to give youths a unique experience that mostly involves getting very close to alcohol poisoning. I have no problem with drinking but I've seen these places and they specialize in sexuality and taking as much of their guests money as possible by keeping them hammered drunk all day, every day.

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Slumber Party and Booze and Snooze are two of the big hostel operations that kind of "ruined" backpacking in my mind. I did plenty of drinking when I was backpacking, but it wasn't my primary focus. These sorts of operations keep their customers in house and sort of discourage people wandering out on their own to explore. They arrange tours and events and pub crawls and all of it seems very regimented. It almost seems like a bit of a cult when you are somewhere and see a bus turn up with everyone wearing matching shirts as they go from bar to bar drinking shots and basically acting like loons.

I'm trying to not be a grumpy old man here and if that's your thing then go for it but on the flip side these people are not even seeing most of what an area has to offer by staying inside the network whose sole purpose seems to be relieving you of as much of your money as possible by keeping you drunk all the time. This is likely illegal in western countries but I don't really have any idea.

These days when I see people with a backpack I kind of immediately think that they are wasting their time having that equipment because if they are in the party hostel network, they are never going to do anywhere that a backpack is actually necessary for. They may as well make their travel easier by just using a rolling suitcase. I have also noticed that most of the "backpackers" today seem to be carrying all of their worldly possessions with them where as with true backpacking the entire point was to bring as little with you as possible.

Gone are the days where you would just get dropped off on a particular street in a city and then you and your "teammates" that you just met, perhaps on the bus to get there, now branch out and work to find accommodation. Now when I see people with backpacks they almost always have their phones out as they are being directed straight to a place that they probably booked many weeks before they even got here.

To those folks I say have a great time. I don't think that it would be possible to roll like we did 20 years ago and often immigration for a lot of countries require proof of accommodation booking as a condition for your visa.

I don't like that this has happened but I guess I should just consider myself lucky that I got to experience it before they changed it all. For those that are traveling today, I suppose ignorance is bliss and well, since for a lot of the younger people out there they have always had smart phones, they probably wouldn't really enjoy just getting out there and walking around until they figure it out somehow.