What is Backpacking? Budget- and Deep Travel Combined

One Planet Journey’s Greta Corso gives you the complete picture of everything related to the art of backpacking travel. What is backpacking, how do you travel that way, and what can you expect in terms of personal development? Is it more than budget travel? Can it help you immerse yourself in the destination? Get the best tips for successful backpacking, including accommodation, transport, food, and how to do it in a low-impact way.

Backpacking Defined

What is backpacking? Does it mean strapping your life to your back and chasing sunsets? To some extent, yes, but it goes deeper than that. It’s raw, gritty, and unapologetically independent. A personal rebellion against the glossy veneer of packaged holidays. Previously dismissed as the low-cost option for independent wanderers, the budget aspect has now become a rite of passage. Backpacking strips travel to its bare essentials. Cheap lodgings, rickety buses, and meals eaten cross-legged on the floor. You find the extraordinary in the ordinary, believing the best stories often come from the road less polished.

If you don’t know it, you should.

Being a backpacker means packing a backpack, maybe two. The minimalist philosophy implies travelling light, and bringing few clothes and material things. However, it’s perfectly complemented by the possibility of having the space to fill up on memories. The practical and flexible nature of the backpacking travel style, also has the benefit of saving you money, which is why people equate it to budget travel.

The Essence of Backpacking 

Sometimes when I’m on a bus, train, in the middle seat of an aeroplane, or on the stern of a boat, I look around and feel a distinct connection. I don’t know the people I see, and we might not have the same final destination. Yet I sense there is a commonality. We are backpackers and we travel because, as an old Italian saying goes, the grass grows under our feet, and when it is too high, it tickles us so that we get moving.

And yes, one of the main reasons you take up backpacking is the desire to not forsake big trips because of limited budgets. You also discover, from the first trip, that you get to know travellers on a personal level. It is deep travel – a new, immersive, authentic reality, by which you will love to be overwhelmed.

Get lost in the maze of streets in megacities. Sleep in the houses of locals and play with their children. Walk in the rain that beats on your head as you chose to save money and leave in the low season. Take night buses so as not to miss a minute of days dedicated to exploration. Because every moment reveals something about the world, and yourself.

Local Immersion Through Extended Stays 

Backpackers spend hours searching for the perfect flight, not only for price reductions but also because of a love for organising the trip itself. It allows you to leave even before taking off. We dream by reading articles and leafing through Lonely Planet guides, looking for destinations in people’s Instagram stories and watching YouTube videos. The itinerary usually fills up so that a few days of travel would not be enough. So you combine all available holiday time and plan for longer stays, at least 3/4 weeks, the minimum to savour the flavour of a place. With the same budget with which a tourist would stay away for a week, a backpack traveller extends to a month. 

And so, between a low budget and the desire to immerse yourself in the world, we leave. The amount of hours it takes us to reach our destination, and how many modes of transport it requires, matters little, as it’s part of the experience. While travelling, you make the most beautiful acquaintances. Ask the waiter at a bar or the driver of a bus for directions, seek the help of a shopkeeper to understand if it is the right way to your hostel, and share taxis with other travellers.

Accommodation for Backpacking Travel

For backpackers, the choice of where to sleep often falls between a hostel and a homestay.

Hostel 

The hostel has shared bathrooms and mixed dorms divided by gender. Sometimes they have lockers with padlocks and common places to eat or spend the evening. There are many types of hostels, including ones with private rooms and an en-suite bathroom. This is a perfect alternative if you’re interested in meeting people with whom to exchange travel tips, share emotions, or simply chat. Your mind opens up more than you could have imagined.

Homestay

Homestays, on the other hand, are better if you want to feel at home. These are rooms locals rent for the night in their homes. Often, breakfast comes included and you can share meals together with the host for a communal feeling, or eat apart. This accommodation form allows you to see what happens inside people’s houses, an authentic immersion in the everyday life of a local family, and become part of that reality yourself.

Ubud Homestay Experience

It happened to me on my last trip to Asia, specifically to Indonesia, when I did a homestay in Ubud. Thanks to the many books and films written about the power and intensity of a spiritual place like Ubud, I opted for total immersion. To get to the two-storey building where I stayed, the road passed through the village temple. After my daily breakfast with Sanur and Lina, the 5- and 7-year-old children of the house, I went out for a walk through those magical streets of the temple.

It gave me a sense of peace to breathe in the sacredness early in the morning. Also to see the ladies intent on preparing baskets of flowers, bread and candies for temple offerings. Or those who prayed amid the smell of incense. During the days I frequented the house of Sanur and Lina, I felt I belonged there, an experience I would recommend to everyone. Not to mention the takeaway breakfast they prepared for me on the last day before I moved to another city. The children had made drawings to remember them by, but of course, I would never forget them.

Budget-Friendly Travel Tips 

Travelling on budget involves sacrifices, or so say those who don’t see the positives. Sometimes you have to share a bathroom or sleeping quarters with others, for example, in the night buses that cross Asia. But as much as alone time is important, sharing things and moments with other people creates a beautiful energy.

Aside from accommodation, budget travel also means public transportation. To save money, book buses, which are not always on time and naturally you never know who ends up in the seat next to you. Maybe a lady who has a live chicken to bring home for dinner. The smell will not be the best, but perhaps she invites you to a meal.

Night buses, which take you from one part of the country to another, have clean sheets even if the bathrooms are remarkably small. Now and then, passengers have a guitar with them and sing a lullaby for everyone.

Trains don’t always have seats for all during long journeys, but normally they are the mode of choice, especially in Europe due to the extensive network. You recognise those like you by the huge backpacks, by the hands holding pen and travel diaries, and by the eyes full of wonder peering out the windows.

Street Food – The Tasty Budget Choice 

Another way to save money is to eat street food or in small and family-run restaurants. Fine dining establishments are also worth trying when you visit a country, as they are part of the culinary culture. However, if you want to know the habits of the locals, you can’t miss the street food. Where I come from, Sicily, eating on the street is cheap, and allows you to savour the true tastes of my land: Arancini, Stigghiola, Panelle, and Pani câ meusa. And the plus is that those who prepare these delicacies are always locals.

By saving money, travelling tightly, using a shared bathroom or eating standing up, I don’t see sacrifices but the possibility of helping the local economy and to connect with people and their culture. In the end, it brings authentic and meaningful interactions.

Environmental Consciousness and Low-Impact Travel 

To walk, take a bike or use a kayak to explore a place is not only about the pleasures of slow travel. It also means exercising a degree of kindness towards the planet on which we depend, and which we should love. 

I toured the Halong Bay lagoon in Vietnam in a two-seater kayak. You can share this experience with a friend or a traveller like you. You paddle among the green rocks, covered with a mixture of algae and moss, then stop for a swim, away from the cruise ships. Savour the sound of nature: the cruising of the water under your oar, the birds flying at low altitude. The sun pelts you with its rays, but not by too much, as you feel a light breeze due to the speed of your paddling.

Why not take a bike and go around the entire area of the ancient temples of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka? Stop at the ones that inspire you the most, without the need for car parking every time. Just put your bike nearby and explore as you like. Moreover, in Sri Lanka, you visit temples barefoot. It will be a novel sensation to walk and cycle all day minus your shoes, collecting all the energy that the earth infuses in you.

Walking is the preferred method of getting around for backpackers. No matter your pace, the important thing is to be present and not miss any detail, no flower, shop, object, person or ritual that passes by. To walk means putting yourself in the shoes of those you meet. It could be through the city streets, in a forest, running along the seafront, climbing a mountain and enjoying the dawn of a new day.

Engaging with Local Communities and Social Initiatives 

A most popular travel mode for backpackers is to work remotely or volunteer with NGOs. You can decide to imprint an entire trip in this way, or parts of it, like one week out of four. 

Working while travelling, unless you have a remote job, may seem complex, but there are online platforms that connect you with stakeholders of all kinds, looking for digital nomads. There are the most disparate jobs: from yoga teacher to pet sitter, social media manager, receptionist for a hostel, and so on.

Volunteering is like a journey within a journey. It allows you to deepen certain topics and themes and also to put down deep roots in a place, becoming part of a larger project. Examples include ocean conservation or the control of protected species, such as turtles and sharks. Perhaps try teaching English at schools in remote places; help out in centres that focus on people with mental problems, or, if you have the right skills, construct schools and hospitals. All unforgettable experiences that will have a positive impact on yourself and the destinations where you have volunteered.

Personal Development Through Backpacking 

Life sometimes traps us in uncomfortable and difficult situations. The people around you change, autumns pass and summers fly by. While challenging, you grow and learn rather than ignoring the problems or running away. Travel is such an area where often it is a matter of changing your point of view to solve stressful issues that come up. Once you return, you are not the same person who left. You will have grown and learned new things about yourself and the world.

Adapt and Become Stronger 

Backpacking means learning to adapt to all kinds of climatic environments, for example, being in hygienic situations different from those at home. Are you ok with sleeping in tents on the beach or boats in the middle of some archipelago in the Indian Ocean? Can you take eating spicy or only vegetarian food?

Rely on your qualities and maybe discover new ones. Making yourself understood with gestures when you are looking for directions and no one speaks English, finding a ride when the bus drops you off at the wrong stop, and swimming faster when the ocean current is too strong. Climb those stairs on the cliff despite suffering from vertigo because you have to see the rock graffiti above you. Challenge yourself.

Backpacking is also accepting your limits. While you will add many new skills to your repertoire, you must learn to stop when it gets too much. Understand how far you can go, and be ok with avoiding certain things, and slowing down. We don’t have to be reckless, sleep anywhere and with anyone, explore the most remote places and experience the craziest things. Backpacking is about discovering our true selves, with all our qualities and our defects, and trip after trip, transforming ourselves a little to become our best version.

Life is not grocery shopping. Sometimes you are in for a bumpy ride. I wish you to meet wonderful people and make beautiful and lasting friendships, but also to get lost in the world and ask for help from the locals. Experience unexpected events and walk free. Feel the earth below and the rain above you, and realise that your life could easily fit all in one backpack. Less is more.

Have you done any backpacking? Where did you go and for how long? Let us know in the comment section! Subscribe to our newsletter and benefit from travel guides, sustainable tourism and luxury travel tips, insightful interviews, and inspirational places to visit. One Planet Journey – The World’s First Deep Travel Magazine.