Backpacking - Just an extended holiday or a lifestyle.

Backpacking - Just an extended holiday or a lifestyle.

Well as most of you know I love to travel! It's my biggest hobby and I'm always wondering how I can make a career out of this. Lots of people saying I should try write a book, other people ask me for advice on travelling and booking flights and then others saying I should become a private travel agent or even a guide who takes people backpacking!! So not quite sure what this blog will be. A bit of everything I guess. It will be my story. Any exciting things that have happened, where I'm at, what I'm doing. Maybe it will be travel advice for people or maybe it will be an interesting story. Maybe it will be boring and you'll stop reading after the first paragraph. I'm no Tony Wheeler and nor will I try to be but all advice about what and how I write is welcome! Some people I've met keep a travel journal or diary. I never have, never have the time, so I guess this will just be a public diary! Read it if you want. Don't if don't want to. If you do read it please click like or leave a comment saying whats wrong with it otherwise.

Everyone seems to travel for different reasons. Often its the drunken round-the-world trip that brings you from London - Asia - Australia - NZ - USA and home again within a year. Others do the Irish thing in Australia where they only seem to meet people they know from home, drink for most of the year in Irish bars and come home again. Then you meet the hardcore backpackers in random countries who look down on people who tread the beaten backpacker track. You hear them complaining about the drunk backpackers, or the ones who only do round the world trips, or only hang out with people from their own country. One guy I met in the Ukraine once said he was so over places like Latvia. That tourism wrecked it. After this, him and a number of people in the hostel preceded to go visit some random graveyard to see the grave of some dead poet I've never heard of. Fun times!! One time we walked into a hostel room in Te Anau. You could see the guy in the room was a hardcore hiker. All the gear. Got chatting to him he was asking had we been on any hikes yet and we said no. His reply was he'd ONLY been on a few two or three day hikes and wasn't too interested in chatting to us after that. You meet the people who only go to museums and old buildings thinking thats what everyone should be doing and your wasting your time going to the bars and not seeing the old culture or history! Or you meet the people who've been travelling for a few years and think they're better than the ones who've only been away for a few months. You see the Swedish hanging out in the islands of thailand and indonesia, the canadians in byron bay, the argentinians in NZ, germans and dutch in norway, new zealand and all over east coast of oz, and the Irish all over the ozzy cites, israelis in Goa and Koh Phangan, and the australians following the festival route around Europe and ending up in London. Everyone has a different trend on where they go, what they do and how they do it. And everyones into something different I guess. So I guess I want to try it all. Not just do the regular Irish thing but not look down on what everyone else is doing either.

For some backpacking is about waking up in the morning with no plan. No accomodation booked or transport planned and just seeing where you end up. Eat when your hungry, sleep when your tired and go where you want. For a lot of people the uncertainty of this is absurd. For most backpackers this is the highlight. Make the plan up as you go. I remember in a place called Sihanoukville a great little beach town in the south of Cambodia. If we asked someone the time. They'd look at their wrist(where there was no watch) and then at the sky. And reply with its daytime, or night time. When backpacking, time doesn't really matter. You do what you want when you want. I love the flexibility of this. I also enjoy the flexibility of meeting cool new people whenever I want. Imagine been at home and sitting down next to a stranger or a group of strangers in a restaurant and asking can you join them. Or even been on a bus or train in your home country and start chatting to the person next to you. When backpacking this is the norm, usually its other backpackers you decide to talk to. The beauty of this is meeting all sorts of new and interesting people. Some of these randomers have turned out to be life long best friends that I've kept in touch with since. Others I may never see again but ended up having a good nite out with or a few nights out.

So people ask me why do I travel? Why did I go to certain places? For many reasons. Every new person I meet has a story. They've been to a new place or seen something different and word of mouth spreads about where to go. More often than not someone suggests this small little beach town somewhere random with good night life and not too many tourists and is cheap, a few years later this becomes Lagos in Portugal or Koh Phangan and has thousands of people arriving!! I want to see the world, meet the people, see the scenery and the different cultures. I try not to look down on anyone for the type of travelling they do although I really don't understand doing solely the package holiday thing or the sticking to the Irish bars of Sydney and Melbourne. I like to get off the beaten track at some points and go to places nobody else goes, but then I like to get right back on it and drink in the backpacker bars for a few days or go to beach parties in thailand or hang out on Koh Sahn road, or stay in Queenstown or Lagos and never leave! I love to try the food, meet the locals but actually prefer meeting other backpackers as well. Plenty of times I've made good friends with other backpackers and then gone to visit them in their own countries. I love to see the scenery, I love to party, I love to see the famous things and to try new things all the time. To be honest the most boring part of it for me is museums and old buildings. Its not my thing. Some of my favourite places are favourite just from the people I've met whether they are local or the people on the journey with me.

A lot of people say to me: Steve, when are you going to settle down get a real job, get a house etc. In other words stop been a bum. I keep saying next year. I love the life been homeless, unemployed and free!! Since I've been young I've had this addiction to travelling. Since I've been finished school 9 years ago I've been off every couple of months and pretty much non stop since I finished Uni in 2006. I remember when I was 15, in history class, myself and Damien started talking about this world trip we'd do when we finished Uni. Travelling overland across Russia to Asia and Singapore, around Australia, North to South America and then Cape Town to London. All overland. Back then it was a dream. But a dream we said we'd definitely do. And I'm still living that dream. Damien has also done a lot of it in separate trips. He did Africa where as I skipped it. He tried getting across Russia but got deported 100km in!! Ended up flying to China instead. Perhaps I'll stop next yr, come home, get a "real" job or go back to Uni, perhaps I'll end up staying in Argentina for the rest of my life. Who knows!

A friend told me about this guy called Tim Ferris. I read his book within a few hours. A few things in this struck my mind. One question is people asking him: "What do you do?". His reply is this: Assuming you can find me (hard to do), and depending on when you ask me (I’d prefer you didn’t), I could be racing motorcycles in Europe, scuba diving off a private island in Panama, resting under a palm tree between kickboxing sessions in Thailand, or dancing tango in Buenos Aires. The beauty is, I’m not a multimillionaire, nor do I particularly care to be.

I remember a few months into my overland trip to Singapore and I met a girl called Danni. Everyone used to ask each other what they do back home. Her reply was: "I do this!!" I thought it was quite funny at the time. I had just left college and my job teaching computer programming. That was 3 years ago. I've forgotten it all now. Now I pretty much answer the Q the same as her.

Another quote from the book is this: "People don’t want to be millionaires — they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy. Ski chalets, butlers, and exotic travel often enter the picture. Perhaps rubbing cocoa butter on your belly in a hammock while you listen to waves rhythmically lapping against the deck of your thatched-roof bungalow? Sounds nice. $1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows."

For me this is so true. I know this truly sounds conceited but I'm living the life of a millionaire without actually been one. People think I have all this money to travel which I don't. I work minimum wage jobs every now and then to save enough to travel, or to get the benifits of the stuff that costs a lot. Things are a lot cheaper in other countries and the kindness and generosity of others I've met allows me to live like a millionaire. Stay in five star hotels, sky-dive, scuba dive off tropical islands, rent private islands, have your own little beach huts or exotic hotel rooms, eat fresh lobster and drink good wines, drink that coffee that the millionaire in the bucket list was talking about that costs thousands, party at the multi million euro penthouse on new yrs eve in Kuala lumpur with a 360 degree view of the city, snowboarding for free in a number of resorts, live in a multi-million dollar house in NZ, fly first class across the atlantic and get into the cockpit for the landing into JFK, drink any drink I want for free every night in portugal, go to top clubs in Barcelona, thai and swedish massages on tropical beaches, VIP passes to clubs in NY, 20 euros passes for three days at the grand prix with a jamaroqui conert included, drink for free with the owners of a multi million dollar boat complex in Missouri, sail around San Diego bay with a movie director on a private yacht full of brazilian chicks. This and more all sounds like the life of a millionaire but its all due to friends I've made and the kindness of strangers. I pay my own way all the time and if someone does a favor for me I try to repay them back. Its strange how something that could be so little to you could mean so much to someone else and vice versa. And most of those things are due to a few of you friends on facebook so thank you!!

I'm not trying to show off by saying this. I want to try let people know how they can do it too. I love to give advice to people where to go, what to see, how to get it for cheap! Give them contacts to meet up when they get there. Money isn't really the issue. If you have a small bit saved then you can keep going and just work odd jobs along the way. I think time is the biggest issue for a lot of people.

I like to go away with no definite plan. Lately a few people have been asking me how the planning is going for my trip. I like to know a lot about where I'm going and what to see but I never plan much in advance. I like to go with a one way ticket and just go with the flow. See what happens. I could end up anywhere. At the end of the day your never really much further than 24 hours away from home and if something goes wrong or I get homesick I just hop on the next cheap flight home. So basically starting in San Diego after a few days in NY and heading south through mexico, central america and south america overland on buses or whatever means of overland transport I can. I'd like to get to Ushuaia in south of Argentina and possibly the Antarctica if money permits. After that who knows.

Most of my facebook friends are people I've met from travelling and some of you still travel so most of my status messages say where I am. I'm not trying to show off where I am just it usually ends up that I get to bump into people that I've seen in other places due to this. One time I was leaving NZ and flying to Indonesia. I put this up as my status message. Then Adrian who I'd lived with in San Diego 4 yrs previously sent me and email saying he was in Malaysia and would come down and meet me. This was a four hour flight away. He didn't even wait to find out where in indo I was going to or wait for an email back. He flew down and a few days later we met up and travelled for three weeks. Another time I see on facebook that Neil (a guy I'd met in Boston and ended up on a bus to Canada with after a drunken night out) was passing through Bangkok airport same time I was so we met up for a few drinks. These type of things happen all the time due to facebook, which is quite handy.

So in conclusion. I'll be updating my trip on facebook and blogspot. Let me know what you think if you read it. Come join me if you want.