Mzanzitravel Magazine Issue 10

Local Travel
Karoo. Small world indeed.
The Urban Dictionary defines the word ‘backpacker’ in several ways related to hiphop
music. But it also carries another lengthy definition, the first part of which reads:
“Backpackers are a very loose subculture of travellers who carry all their stuff with them
in a backpack. Typically they are driven by a sense of adventure, and as such are always
trying to find somewhere beautiful, completely off the beaten track. They often travel as
cheaply as they can to maximise the time they can spend on the road, accepting squalid
accommodation or sharing rooms if it will save them any money. Most are in their twenties
or early thirties, and almost all are between 18 and 40 though older and younger people
aren’t unheard-of. People go backpacking for all sorts of reasons but will almost always
take offense if it is implied that they are ‘on holiday’; backpackers typically consider travel
a separate, more serious engagement, all about broadening the mind, experiencing
other cultures and trying to satisfy what is often a deep-seated and more often than not
insatiable wanderlust”.
A brief history of backpacking
So where did it all start? In pop culture the mind’s eye tends to jump to the neo-hippie
trance-music party scene that has lined the beaches of Goa, India since the 1970s. Or to
something like that mystical Thailand island where wayward backpackers from all over the
world established themselves in a commune in the book and movie, The Beach. In reality
there have always been travellers around the world who travelled light and cheaply like
today’s backpackers and suffered an incurable wanderlust. But they were once far and
in between.
Some of the earliest ‘backpackers’ were adventurous young men, and perhaps one or two
brave women who flouted convention, who in the 1700s and 1800s would board sailing
ships from Europe for Asia, the New World and the colonies, to countries like India, China,
South Africa, Australia, or the Americas in search of unknown places, new cultures,
adventure and perhaps also their fortune. As travelling became more popular and more
accessible to ordinary people around the world, it was the conventional version – tour
groups, buses, air travel, expensive hotels, package deals and so on – that took off in
the 20th Century. Travellers seldom strayed off the routes most travelled or away from
the destinations and sites that most people chose to visit, based on the advice of travel
magazines, tourism brochures and travel agents.
or inaccessible but ‘exotic’ places like Istanbul in Turkey, Marrakesh in Morocco,
Kathmandu in Nepal, Goa in India, to Mexico and South America, and into various
parts of Africa. Of course the booming drug culture around marijuana, hashish
and psychedelic drugs like LSD, tied to the explosion of the music scene with
groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones all played a part in further fuelling
alternative lifestyles, and with it the desire for alternative travel that had little
respect for old-fashioned limitations, taboos and boundaries.
In the late 1970s, with various countries falling off the backpackers’ map due
to reasons caused by politics or wars, the beaches of Goa in India became the
favoured destination. Hippies or neo-hippies, students and dropouts, artists and
musicians flocked here, setting up tents or shacks in the forests or on the beaches.
They sat on the beaches, meditated, mingled with the locals, surfed and swam,
and soon a whole new party scene sprung up: electronic psychedelic trance
music and dance. In the years that followed young people from all over the world
Today one can literally travel
with the clothes on your back, and
a purse and smartphone in your
pocket.
descended on Goa. Today their successors still travel here, living in cheap lodges
and communal homes, immersing themselves in the miles of beachside trance
parties that never stop. In the meantime backpacking around the rest of the world
also boomed and became a whole new tourism industry of its own.
But its proliferation since the 1980s has not only made it the established and
preferred mode of travel for young people worldwide today, but also changed
its nature from those heady early hippie days. In the earlier years backpackers
relied on word of mouth to find out which destinations were best. Then, in 1973
some entrepreneurial Australians who had set up the Lonely Planet publishing
enterprise, published their first ever guidebook ‘Across Asia on the Cheap’. It
rapidly became the backpackers’ bible, and more guides to other parts of the world
quickly followed.
But then in 1955, according to Katie Tobias in her article ‘History of Backpacking’ on
Nomadsworld.com, a group of university students from England set off in the footsteps
of Marco Polo along the route he had followed some 700 years earlier – the Silk Route to
Asia. Having documented their journey, word of the students’ overland adventure spread,
and soon the so-called Hippie Hashish Trail from Europe to India became something of
a must-do for many free-spirited young people in the early 1960s. Young people unable
to afford expensive air travel, latched on to overland travel via cheap local transport,
hitchhiking and walking trails, using motorcycles or buying cheap vans in which to travel
and live. There may have been some vague correlation of certain aspects between them
and the nomadic Bedouins of the Sahara or the wandering Roma (gypsies) of Europe, but
these young travellers were quickly developing into a very distinct nomadic sub-culture of
their own.
Soon these initial routes expanded and multiplied, and took young travellers – mostly
students and hippies - from North America, the UK and Europe to previously off-limits
From the 1980s onwards, the typical backpacker would carry a rucksack with
clothes and personal items, a good but heavy camera, phone cards for phone
calls home, a Walkman or Discman for music (remember those?) and their Lonely
Planet guide book – quite a bit to carry. Then came the technological revolution of
the 2000s, and since then all of those items are rolled up into one razor-thin little
smart phone. Today one can literally travel with the clothes on your back, and a
purse and smartphone in your pocket.
Favoured SA destinations
Just about every person embarking on a backpacking adventure, has a sojourn
in South Africa on their bucket list. The country offers the best of different worlds.
On the one hand it has good infrastructure: modern highways for easy travel, good
and cheap public transport systems, excellent lodges and camping sites in most
54 |ISSUE 10|www.mzanzitravel.co.za | MZANZITRAVEL
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