be better, backpackers!
you're not better than tourists. post-vietnam
A few weeks ago I experienced sights and sounds that I won’t ever forget. I sped across the northern part of Vietnam at 50km/h on the back of a motorcycle for four days, honking through blind turns and unpaved road, digesting views that would be insulted by their photographs (as beautiful as they are):
One part of my trip struck me as distinctly distasteful. As we checked into our homestay on day 3, a fellow backpacker descended into argument with the manager. The manager was sorting our group into lone travelers and pairs, as the homestay provided some single beds and some double beds. My fellow backpacker had occupied a double bed alone and waited for the manager to point this out before becoming offended at his “tone.” Mistranslations all around, but they maintained that it was his “attitude” that was the problem.
Needless to say, this was coded. Myself and a few others pointed out that just because English is the man’s second language doesn’t mean that he was being rude. As he spoke Vietnamese to one of his employees a few minutes later, the manager maintained the same tone, because, well, that’s how the language sounds to Westerners. (I am primarily speaking to this from my experience in Chinese and how it can sound especially rough to native English speakers, depending on the dialect).
Eventually, the backpacker paid extra for a private room — the equivalent of an extra few pounds for them. I didn’t see much of them the rest of the night.
As much of an exception that this run-in might be (I don’t think it is), I am more than happy to use this story as an excuse to discuss problems emblematic to backpacker communities. I will caveat that I speak from my personal experience — but that experience spans at least 50 different hostels, across at least 3-4 months of travel (mostly solo), in both Europe and Southeast Asia. I’m also writing this now as more backpackers are subscribed to this Substack.
Backpackers commit many of the same sins that they openly find disdainful of tourists (not wanting to interact with local culture, sticking with “touristy things,” etc), enabled by a “holier-than-thou” ethos that is, honestly, reflective of its very white and very European makeup.
Yeah, sweeping, I know. I welcome disagreement and want to stress this is not a personal attack on any backpacker who happens to be white and European, but more a criticism of the culture that a dominantly white and European community can unknowingly enable.
A few points here.
Discourse around Asian tourists
When I solo travel, I frequently end up partnering with random groups of backpackers to explore places that align with our common interests — this is the magic of backpacking. Often a common topic of discussion is past travel experiences. Several times, I’ve heard remarks about (especially Chinese, but generally) Asian travelers that are upsetting. They are often referred to by their ostensible obsession with taking photos and their tendency to “scramble” to get to viewpoints and then leave soon after. These remarks typically imply an innuendo of these “tourists” as uninformed, rushed, and unappreciative of their surroundings. In worst cases I hear rhetoric about these tourists that is reflective of American/European anti-immigration rhetoric (I wrote about this rhetoric here while in Athens, but TDLR: lots of racialized, animalistic rhetoric like ‘swarm’ or ‘flood’ that could be reflective of an English language barrier but is a bit too targeted to be systematically innocuous). Again, not commenting on intentionality here — that’s not the point.
There are a few reasons these comments frustrate me, often more than I let on:
To be able to “slow travel” and appreciate a place fully over a longer period of time is somewhat of a uniquely European phenomenon. The idea of traveling in Southeast Asia over 6-12 months is most intertwined with European/Global North culture. Every single Asian traveler I’ve met is there only for a few weeks at most. Of course in that case it is natural to scramble! To choose a philosophy of travel that appreciates process over outcome is not a moral or enlightened decision — it’s more often a privileged one.
I know plenty of people who like to travel in the way described above, and I’m sure many other backpackers do as well. Backpacking is still a niche community; as much as it is more financially accessible, it is in other ways more restrictive (age, physical fitness, etc.). I’m willing to bet many backpackers have social proximity to “tourists” from their own communities, so it’s upsetting to hear these specific tourists singled out.
Claims of true immersion and “getting the local experience” fall flat when you view tourists from this area of the world with more disdain than the tourism-facing locals (tour guides, private drivers, hostel workers, etc.) — more informed cultural understanding explains behavior like this pretty easily.
We go off the beaten path! (not really)
This just isn’t true for most of backpacking.
There are functional reasons for this. For example, this characteristic is vanishing by presumption — as soon as backpacker culture names something as “off the beaten path” it ceases to be so. “Hidden gems” go viral on social media the more “hidden” they are, which is a depressingly ironic equalizer in the popularity of tourist destinations. This is, of course, to the chagrin of every single local who just wants to live their lives uninterrupted by annoying travelers. Yes, I’m being cynical — but necessarily so, for the purpose of argument.
Additionally, the longer that backpackers travel, you are first “more of a backpacker” (lol), but second, the more that spontaneity enters your travel decisions. On the advice of a fellow backpacker, you might take a detour somewhere else “off the beaten path,” because you haven’t booked your return flight yet so why not. You grow to rely on this advice because there’s no way you can prepare ahead of time for 6 months of travel, which would be exhausting. There’s an undeniable magic to traveling in this way, and I’m not trying to poke holes in this for the purpose of making it “unfun” — I love doing it.
But this “off the beaten path” travel has become a proxy for spontaneous travel instead of locally immersive travel, but too often it is mistaken as locally immersive and culturally sensitive travel. To see why these two are definitionally incompatible:
Spontaneity sometimes functions as an excuse to not do your research, to enter a community without adequate prerequisite knowledge of customs, culture, and traditions. To take Southeast Asia in a simplistic, broad sweep: do you really think that an area of the world with an 80 BILLION USD travel market is going to risk hospitality to tell you off for violating a cultural norm? There is every reason to leave us backpackers blissfully unaware, just as there is every reason to leave us tourists blissfully unaware.
Locally immersive, un-touristy travel requires research, both in preparation for an experience and also in engaging with local communities throughout your stay. Too often this is substituted by the advice of other travelers, which makes backpacking a self-fulfilling prophecy/paradox — “I go off the beaten path because I talk to people who also go off the beaten path. . .” Or, talking to your hostel manager is seen as sufficient. More on why this is sadly not “off the beaten path” in a bit.
Hostels - the ultimate enabler
Backpacking culture has hostels to thank as its nexus for engagement. Hostels make solo travel fun, because they create space for backpackers to meet fellow backpackers and explore the world together. It’s all very romanticized and dreamy, and to a certain extent, appropriately so — you’re not really a “backpacker” unless you cheap out at hostels.
However, I believe that hostels share a healthy portion of the blame in promoting or otherwise greenlighting every single one of the issues I discuss above.
First, hostels are very aware that their audience is very white and European. Many hostels facilitate a drinking and bar crawl culture that feels familiar, but boxes out, for example, folks from Muslim-majority countries for whom drinking is not a cultural phenomenon. I was personally very surprised to see the amount of drinking in hostels, and I come into the experience from US college.
Second, hostels know that backpackers rely on them for “local” and “off the beaten path” experiences. The idea goes that especially if the hostel is run by locals (which has become a branding tactic for many hostels), getting recommendations from the hostel is going to lead to the corresponding experience.
Let’s not fool ourselves. I’m willing to bet that hostels make most their money not from housing backpackers, but from cutting deals with tour and experience providers. When a hostel hands you a list of recommended tours and deals and bucket-list items, most of them are probably commissioned. This is not a race to the top — instead, it’s a competition where the victors are simply most able to pay off hostels to advertise their experience.
This isn’t local immersion, folks. It looks more like the exact same institutionalized tourism that backpackers tend to “avoid at all costs.” Oftentimes, experience operators will organize between hostels — which scales up their profits even more and cuts out “local” experiences even further.
These two realities blunt immersion. Here in Southeast Asia, I oftentimes find myself learning more about European culture than the culture of the actual place I’m visiting, because I’m with Europeans most the time. I love learning about other cultures but the backpacker-principle of traveling somewhere to experience uniquely that place and space is violated almost immediately, in almost every instance.
Hostels are a competitive market — especially in Southeast Asia, you are spoilt for choice. Free market forces would dictate that if backpackers truly had motivations to immerse, the services that hostels provide would reflect such a motivation (eg. quick-learn boot camps to educate on culture/customs, at the bare minimum). Instead, much like ESG in corporatism, hostel managers are pushed to present a facade of “local experience” in the knowledge that they will pass the eye test of spontaneous backpackers.
So what’s the actual difference? Why backpack? What recourse is there?
I’m not claiming that backpacking is identically sinful as tourism. A few differences:
A younger, cheaper community. Easier to meet people in your age range and experience the world together, try stupid things, take risks.
An interest in the process of travel rather than the outcome. This is generally true as a result of (in my view) the privilege of time, as I argue above.
More “sustainable.” Creates less disruption to local communities than high-flying tourism and huge villas + resorts, etc.
The one experience I have had that is closest to backpacking in its more enlightened and idealistic form was the Camino, which I wrote about here. I feel ok talking about it because it’s definitely not a “hidden gem.” But notably,
more diverse than other backpacking experiences (still with its blind spots)
lots of Spanish locals do the Camino, which makes immersion more possible
lots of stops in villages instead of just the big touristy cities, where people only speak Spanish
you’re literally walking the whole way, so spontaneity is compatible with immersion in a way that is less true of other backpacking
the religious context makes it more appreciable/acceptable to locals, although there are obviously still tensions
Maybe this was all exceedingly obvious to you. Great!
But this is a conversation that should happen, and I don’t see it happening enough. It would certainly make my backpacking experience better to know that the people around me were willing to have conversations like these at the appropriate times — which is not ‘never.’