Why backpacking?

Hola a todos,
Lots of people ask me how I travel alone to so many places, if I get lonely, why I choose to travel the way I do. I like to shove everything in a backpack and go for as long as I can, wherever I can. As much as I usually dislike cliche quotes, there's one quote in particular from Mark Twain that I enjoy:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It

Traveling, and especially backpacking, is a great way to open your mind to new ways of seeing the world around you. When I toss everything in a 20-pound hiking pack and go on a long bus ride to a tiny hostel somewhere in Latin America, I'm not trying to escape; I'm actually trying to get into the world. It's taken some time, but there are some general truths that I've discovered through this kind of travel.

Hostels are wonderful places. When you find a good one, it's like some kind of marvelous secret and you feel initiated into a special circle. When you stay in the same hostel for a few nights in a row, you get to know other people, the staff, the town. You become an insider, and you can sit around on the back patio talking politics or philosophy or comparing stories and feel like you belong to this place in this moment. You feel at home, like you are fulfilling a special niche in the backpacker ecosystem. You might be traveling alone, but you never feel alone.

The problem is leaving. When others leave, you are reminded that you are on your own, you may feel a little abandoned, and you have to start everything all over again. Creating instant camaraderie with strangers from all over the world is no small feat, but it gets easier with practice.

When you're the one leaving, you have the adrenaline rush that comes with new beginnings and new places, but you sense that you are leaving something behind. You forget to exchange email addresses, you leave things unsaid, you forget all your food in the refrigerator and your soap in the shower.

Backpacking is mobile existentialism. Backpackers are keenly aware that this moment in time will never exist again. The people whose paths cross here will never see each other again, the happy community we create out of nothing cannot last more than a few hours.

Perhaps that is what makes backpacking so special, the keen awareness of every passing moment. Other people don't live like this, other people take their lives for granted. Backpackers take nothing for granted, because what is here in this moment will never return, never repeat, never constitute part of reality again.

For me, backpacking is a refresher course on life. There are basic rules for backpacking that everyone should follow.
- always be friendly
- always clean up after yourself.
- share when you can
- make friends with everyone.
- trust and be trustworthy
- always have a sense of humor
- don't be attached to material things
- create community wherever you can
- go with the flow
- don't judge
- listen a lot

Backpacking is a way of life. It's an awareness of the human condition. It's finding joy in a clean shirt, sunshine, a piece of papaya that a German girl gives you at breakfast. It's cooking a meal with a room full of people from around the world and the simplicity of satisfying the need to eat to stay alive. It's finding common ground, sharing experiences, making friends. Backpacking makes you thankful for every time you laugh. You are thankful for a comfortable chair, a bottle full of water, a sharp kitchen knife, clean-smelling sheets, a new book, a shower.

You notice more details when you backpack. You notice how the fog touches just the tops of the coffee plants on a hillside while the sun is still shining. You notice what sidewalks are made out of in different countries, as well as their height, width, and slipperiness in rain. You notice the flavor of your tap water, the humidity in the air, the scent of different flowers.

Backpacking heightens the senses, creates community, opens dialogues, inspires reflection and personal responsibility, and reminds us what it means to be human, to live together in one place. That is why I backpack.