Jean Spear
It seems trendy to criticise backpackers and their guidebooks these days. With the proliferation of mostly generic guides on the market that cater for the backpacker crowd and an established backpacker circuit, travelling is no longer reserved for the elite. But is it such a bad thing?
Sure, it is amusing that guidebooks are treated with religious fervour by backpackers. They carry their guidebooks like bibles, consulting the good books whenever they need a place to eat, drink or sleep. One gets the impression that they wouldn’t be able to sneeze without permission from a guidebook.
Noses buried in these survival kits (as the Lonely Planet likes to call itself), they become dependent on these books for information, inspiration and insights while they’re on the road, sometimes forgetting the art of spontaneity and adventure that makes travelling in strange places such an experience.
These books, from Footprints to Lonely Planet, The Rough Guides to the Let’s Go series, many critics say, pay scant regard to local customs, create a copy- cat mentality, play to the imaginations of young, wealthy, Western travellers and aren’t always rooted in truth or fact.
But, it is interesting that many of the critics are hardened travellers, have already done the “backpacking thing” years ago and, like reminiscing hippies, hark back to the good old days when a year spent backpacking wasn’t as fashionable as it is today nor the rite of passage it has become.
They have grown out of backpacking, they say with pride. They did it when it was a noble pursuit.
In a recent interview, Alex Garland, author of The Beach, described himself as “technically a backpacker, because a backpack is the most effective way of carrying your things”.
But he also shows, says the interviewer, “that he is not the banana-pancake-eating gap-year pretend-explorer he describes in The Beach”.
Categorising these new travellers into various stereotypes, the critics are somehow immune to the same accusations themselves. Their arguments are littered with “when we” and “remember whens”. They accuse the new generation of travellers of being middle-class youngsters deluded into thinking that they’re independent. And that, by extension, makes the old school of travellers the real pioneers.
The older generation has always prided itself in showing youngsters how much they suffered in their day. Witness Bill Cosby and his exaggerated tales of walking to school. “You kids have it so easy,” he complains, “I had to walk to school in snow up to my shoulders.”
Some critics have the same mentality. They see themselves as the brave explorers of the new world. Now that India, Vietnam and Lebanon are no longer their exclusive territories, they feel somehow threatened. The more people who have similar experiences, the less authentic the country becomes, they lament. But authenticity is a dangerous word, especially for foreigners.
Commercialisation through increased exposure to backpackers has demystified these exotic destin-ations. Tainted by the influx of tourists, they are not the dangerous and exciting places travellers once knew.
Guidebooks have made it all too easy, the critics say, and where is the virtue and the romance in that?
Change is threatening. It may have been unusual, even unheard of, to travel to Nepal, Cambodia or the Amazon in the 1980s and early 1990s, but now it is not such a big deal.
Lamenting for the days of real discovery and exploration is little more than the sign of a broken bravado. It’s easier to dismiss these new travellers as superficial middle-class adventure-seekers than to admit that your dinner conversation may not be held in the same awe it once was.
It seems to be the trend amongst older travellers, as hippies did, to dismiss anything that has mass popular appeal.
But the globe is getting smaller and it is cause for celebration. We cannot pretend to live in isolated cultural pockets.
Guidebooks like the Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide have made places accessible to more than the elite hardcore group of explorers, and especially to women.
Practical guides with useful safety tips help to encourage responsible travelling and give people the opportunity to experience other cultures and learn tolerance, which means they’re more open- minded and informed when they go back home.
At the same time, there is a need for authors of such guidebooks to realise the influence their writings have. They have become the gospel, and like all religious dogmas should treated with scepticism and care.
But instead of seeing them as threatening, perhaps we could celebrate that they open new opportunities for young travellers who would otherwise be daunted by the thought of making it on their own. And they’re guides, a starting point, that’s all. It’s up to the backpacker to do the exploring and create the adventure.