Mobile phones, free wifi, Facebook, Instagram – and all that – have ruined backpacking.
I did the SE Asia thing in 2003 and it was magical. We met strangers over beer and cigarettes and had all sorts of random conversations. You booked a bus to the next place in the local travel agent. I’ve still never figured out how the tickets worked; how the bus company back in Pnomh Penh knew that someone in Sihanoukville* had bought a ticket.
I’ve been back a bunch of times since, and now it’s just kids on their phones.
A couple of years ago I sat behind a pair of Swedish girls on a beach in Koh Tao: sunset over idyllic beach ahead, cheap cocktail in hand, beanbag-under-bum, yet I watched the two of them just cycle through the social media apps on their phones checking for updates. It was all I could do to not ask them why they’d bothered coming away. It was tragic and it made me sad.
(*An unbelievable paradise in 2003. A total shit-hole now.)
> Mobile phones, free wifi, Facebook, Instagram – and all that – have ruined backpacking.
It's one of those arrogant, old fart things to say and you wouldn't understand it unless you'd lived it but it's 100% true.
EDIT - what's also contributed to this is AirAsia. Now you can have breakfast in Hanoi and lunch in Phuket on the same day for just 50 bucks of travel costs.
Back then you'd fly for 10x more or taking several days of gruelling overland travel and it's those moments that add the kind of character to trips that's now hard to obtain.
That is a factor, but I was 27 when I did my "champagne backpacking". I was no starry-eyed 18 year old, although of course my eyes are considerably less starry now at 42 than they were at 27...
> (*An unbelievable paradise in 2003. A total shit-hole now.)
seconded. $1 a night room, free ganja in the bars if you bought (granted an overpriced) beer. Swimming in the sea at night with the phosphorescence all around you, hearing the dolphins under water.
Was back there in 2011, had changed completely and from an account of a friend who lives in Cambodia has just got worse and worse.
I did the SE Asia thing in 2003 and it was magical. We met strangers over beer and cigarettes and had all sorts of random conversations. You booked a bus to the next place in the local travel agent. I’ve still never figured out how the tickets worked; how the bus company back in Pnomh Penh knew that someone in Sihanoukville* had bought a ticket.
I’ve been back a bunch of times since, and now it’s just kids on their phones.
A couple of years ago I sat behind a pair of Swedish girls on a beach in Koh Tao: sunset over idyllic beach ahead, cheap cocktail in hand, beanbag-under-bum, yet I watched the two of them just cycle through the social media apps on their phones checking for updates. It was all I could do to not ask them why they’d bothered coming away. It was tragic and it made me sad.
(*An unbelievable paradise in 2003. A total shit-hole now.)