How backpacking opens our minds.
And how it doesn’t.

Traveling to different parts of the world is a great thing. You do not only see many wonderful places and get to know great people, but you also get an idea of what the world is like outside of the little cocoon of your culture. Or at least, you can.

Backpacking is certainly one of the ways to travel that gets you closest to the people and culture you are visiting. Backpackers usually avoid the big fancy hotels and try to travel on the cheap, they eat street food, sleep in bus stations and airports and generally see more of the country than the traditional tourist who just flies in and spends his time at the hotel pool, drink in hand. If you want to experience a country while traveling, you have to go backpacking. You have to sleep where local travelers would sleep, eat where the locals eat after a hard day of work, and travel the same way they do to visit their family on the weekend.

And backpackers take pride in their way of traveling. They don’t call it ‘vacationing’ for a reason, and they don’t like to be compared with ‘normal’ tourists. They are on a ‘trip’, and those trips can easily last several months, if not years. Many backpackers also see themselves as the sensible travelers, the people that care about culture and environment while on the road. And while that is sometimes true, it can also be a straight out lie at other times.

Most backpackers come from a developed Western country. Most countries they visit (if we cut out the ‘Eurotrips’ and Australia) are developing countries with a living standard far below from what they are used to at home. This makes the culture in the guest country a lot more interesting, but it also brings with it the problem of feeling superior towards the local people in some ways. This feeling is pretty automatic and no traveler is free of it. But, while many hotel-pool-tourists would openly admit this, backpackers are mostly in denial about their superiority complex. “We don’t have any prejudices about the people here, if we had we wouldn’t go travel the way we do, would we?” Well, yes you do.

A Frenchman I met in Indonesia told me “I don’t bother learning their language, I don’t have anything to talk about with them anyway, they are so uneducated.” He has been traveling in the region for seven years straight. He probably has a point that his level of education is way higher than the common Indonesian one, but how can that be a reason not wanting to talk to the locals, not wanting to hear their version of life?

Sure, this is an extreme example, but you can find the light version of it almost everywhere. People complain about their drivers who wait for more passengers in the car instead of leaving right away. I met two guys making fun of our driver because he, for them, made excessive use of the horn (which is perfectly normal in Indonesia). Almost everybody I’ve met in Indonesia complained about being talked to on the street, which can definitely be annoying, but most people really just want to have a chat. Of course you can have an opinion about these things. Of course you can be annoyed by all the cultural differences that you don’t like so much, especially on a stressful day. But even if that is true, it is the tone in the voice, the tiny fluke that says ‘I know this better than you’.

This is cultures colliding at its best, and I don’t doubt that Indonesians have the same kind of trouble when they come to Europe or the States for the first time. But I bet they wouldn’t try to tell a local how something has to be done, without having been asked for advice, they certainly wouldn’t think that it is not worth learning a language because nobody who has anything interesting to say speaks it anyways. This is part of the Western superiority complex that is hidden in all of us (if we are Westerners) that can come out so easily, if we intend it or not. Backpacking is a wonderful way of opening your mind and discovering the world, but it’s not enough to just pack your bag and board a plane, you also have to be aware of what you think and how you judge the things around you, every day, every moment. And that can be damn hard.

I have just completed nearly four months of backpacking in Brazil and Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, one of many backpacking trips I have been lucky to have undergone. Like everybody else, I am certainly not free of cultural prejudices and have found myself annoyed as hell on many occasions. But I am also trying hard to work on those.

Read this article and many others about travel and living abroad on my blog at http://sven.gobigemma.com.