“BACKPACKER”

Backpacking is far more than a way of traveling. It’s a way of looking at and discovering the world. It is, to all intents and purposes, a way of life. You can’t truly claim to be ‘a backpacker’, or to go ‘backpacking’, unless you’re already a certain type of person. Backpacking doesn’t teach you independence it hones your independence and makes you more self-sufficient.

It teaches you to survive in an occasionally tough, but always alien environment. And once you’ve figured out how to survive in this strange world, then you can embrace its difference, marvelling at its richness and its unceasing variety. The backpacker knows that the only way to find out about the world is to explore it.

Backpacking is the pursuit of the unique and fleeting moment of beauty. Watching dawn come up over the ocean in an explosion of colour, perhaps, marvelling at the mists as they shift over a mountain range, or being amazed by the long shadow cast by a temple.

Backpacking is catching a glimpse of something strange and exotic, something you know you’d never see at home. It’s seeing something weird and wonderful and not understanding it but realizing that not everything has to be understood to be appreciated.