This was published 1 year ago
Twenty years on since my backpacking days, backpackers haven't changed
By Ben Groundwater
Backpackers today are having the same conversations with each other the previous generations had.Credit: iStock
The girl next to me is tucking into a big Styrofoam container of mango sticky rice, drizzled with condensed milk. Motorbikes and tuk-tuks zip past a few metres away, belching fumes into the warm evening air. Crowds push through the market nearby.
"What is there to do in Laos?" she asks the girl next to her. "I'm just hanging around here till my money runs out, then I'll have to go home. But I could maybe do Laos first."
I'm not trying to be a creepy eavesdropper – we're all sharing the same rickety metal table, three strangers plonked onto the only spare seats, you can't help but overhear everyone else's conversations. My tablemates are both young foreigners, one Australian, one Dutch, swapping tips on South-East Asia, trading stories, figuring out their next moves.
In Chiang Mai, young travellers now want to get the perfect shot among the pigeons at the city gates.Credit: iStock
They're having, in other words, the same conversation all travellers have. The same conversation we've been having since people first picked up backpacks and booked tickets overseas. The same conversation that has taken place in every hostel and street-food market and tacky bar across the world.
Where have you been? Where are you going? These conversations write themselves.
And I have to tell you: I love it. It's all the same, and I love it.
I haven't been on the banana pancake trail in a while. Before the COVID-19 pandemic I was living in Spain, and mostly keeping my travels to Europe. Then there was that two-year halt on overseas travel. Then life just got in the way. It's probably been five years or so since I hung out in South-East Asia and just soaked it all in.
And now here I am in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, and the backpackers have returned too. They're everywhere around me, and they're instantly recognisable.
They're all still wearing the same clothes they used to: the baggy elephant-print pants that no Thai person has every worn in their entire lives; the cheap Beer Chang singlets or the "Same same but different" T-shirts. They have a few more tattoos these days, but that's about the only difference.
They're still hanging out in the same places, too: street-food markets, hostel lounges, Australian and English theme bars with pool tables and cheap beer. I walked past a place called Downunder Pub & Bistro one afternoon and thought, huh, as if you would. That night it was packed.
The travellers are still a mix of nationalities and personalities: Canadians with flags on their backpacks, groups of English lads who all look and sound like Jack from White Lotus, Australians being way too loud and obvious.
As a reformed backpacker, someone who used to do all this stuff like 20 years ago or more (God that's depressing), I have a feeling you're supposed to sneer at everything I'm seeing in Chiang Mai today. You're expected to shake your head at the lack of imagination in the modern-day budget traveller, to point out that you did it first and now it's boring.
But that is absolutely not my reaction. Totally the opposite.
It warms the cockles of my old and now responsibility-weighed heart to see that backpacking – in South-East Asia at least – is exactly the same as it ever was. I am one million per cent jealous of the two girls at my table talking about where they're going to go next, how they're going to spend their money until it runs out and they have to go home and get a job for a while before they can travel again.
I also don't kid myself into thinking that people my age invented backpacking. We weren't the first to wear cheap singlets and Thai fisherman pants and ride in tuk-tuks and drink the last of our money away. They were doing that in the 80s, and 70s, and probably even the 60s.
It really doesn't matter if someone else has done it before. If you haven't done it, that makes it special, that makes it exciting. Backpacking doesn't need to change.
Still, I'm sure there is plenty that has been altered in the modern-day experience. There's social media, which now drives so many decisions and even alters behaviour. Everyone wants that one photo (I've seen Instagram shoots happening at the city gates in Chiang Mai, where travellers walk through flocks of pigeons, I guess hoping to stir them up and get a shot of flapping wings and smiling faces and ancient splendour).
Everything is recorded now too; everything you do on your travels, everyone you meet. Every wild night out is logged forever on multiple devices. You probably have to be more careful of what you get up to.
Internet access also means that all of that information we used to swap on the travellers' grapevine is at your fingertips now. You can just google it.
And yet still, you overhear those classic conversations – where have you been, where are you going. And still, everyone wears the same clothes and goes to the same venues and does the same old things.
You love to see it.
Email: b.groundwater@traveller.com.au
Instagram: instagram.com/bengroundwater
Twitter: twitter.com/bengroundwater
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