Backpackers: that breed
There is a moment of the trip in tow of your backpack in which you feel all this suddenly, like a light, perhaps between hangover and hangover. The rest of your trip will be drunken conversations between bunks, trying to unbutton a garment on a beach poorly lit by the same moon that they will be seeing in your house and that makes you nostalgic, exotic dirt, kebabs that save your life, fights to the death with internet connections rationed by satan and a succession of punctures and ladies who fall asleep on your shoulder on journeys of more than 10 hours. It is the best moment of your life because you tell yourself every morning that it is the best moment of your life . The good news is that if you've been a backpacker once, you'll always be a backpacker. Just try to keep doing the same things when you get back home. The things a backpacker does:
MAKES THE BACKPACK
It is what defines the backpacker. He makes it and he breaks it . A backpack can be just a backpack, a container devoid of soul in which the Tupperware, the notes, some ibuprofen and other everyday things that we will never look at with tenderness go. That is an urban and spammy backpack in which we will only look at a moment at the end of its useful existence, that moment before it bounces back in the container. But a backpacker's backpack is something else. It is an extension of your body that you no longer notice, it is your home, the portable closet where everything you have in the world is removed, as in a recipe from you. It is a synthesis of your now , a well thought out place where you know that what is left will weigh you down and what you lack is because it cannot fit you, it is the territory and it is the map.
MAKES FLEET FRIENDS
Look how big the Taj Mahal is and how the Danube seemed impossible to forget. But the way in which you are going to measure your trip in the end is not going to have to do with the orography or with the megalomaniac civil works that appear in the guides. The stages of your backpacking odyssey are marked by the guys who have traveled a little part of the way with you. For you, San Cristobal de las Casas will always be that handful of nights when you got together with guitarists from Jalisco and Jaipur the crazy Belgians you had to sleep with in an abandoned cabin from the outskirts And besides, there are going to be a couple of conversations that are going to change your point of view and that will remain in your head with more consistency than the ashlars of any of those cathedrals that are mixed in your memory.
EAT THE BEST YOU HAVE TASTE IN YOUR LIFE
The best thing you've ever tasted in your life you eat at least once or twice a week. It's a roast pork sandwich at the gates of a baseball stadium in Holguín or one of herring at the stall behind the Rijksmuseum. It is a collection of Chinese dishes that you do not know what they are and a Thai menu that will have you sweating the spicy all afternoon and that still compensates. Backpacking extends the excitement of friendship to what you eat.
YOU DRESS AS YOU WANT
It's not exactly what you want, because the number of clean changes in the bottom of your backpack is finite and that of washing machines in the Sahara as well. But at least you won't worry about the image you give in a long time. This is not necessarily positive for the aesthetic ecosystem of your host place, but it is an infallible indication of how much fun you are having: the length of the short is inversely proportional to your happiness.
SLEEP BADLY
There are beds in your path capable of counteracting any proportion of exhaustion that you bring with you, infamous springs and foam rubbers and symphonies of snoring with a Germanic efficiency in making your eyes look like an owl during the middle of the night. The backpacker's bed is just an uncomfortable procedure, like a customs officer or a bubbling stomach after trying one of those local dishes that know how to dance tap dance. But who cares about that reverse massage of the backpacker's bunks and sofas when you have all the trees in the world at your disposal to choose your nap.
LEARN GEOGRAPHY
“If today is Tuesday, this is Belgium” , the phrase that portrays the spirit of some organized trips has its equivalent in those who travel on their own: “if I have this hangover, I neither know nor care”.
GIVES Tenderness
The superpower of having you and your backpack wanted to be adopted everywhere is not an ability to be used lightly and without giving anything in return. sing them something no matter how bad you sing
CHANGE THE WORLD
Juan Bonilla hypothesized in his essay _The Costa del Sol in the po_p era that what changed Spain in the 1960s was not the political struggle but the people who began to gather on the beaches of Malaga to have a good time, with no agenda in general and , of course, without political agenda. The laxity of customs, the short bikinis and not thinking about tomorrow make better revolutions than rallies and pamphlets. You are not only a means of information for the natives: you are also a source of inspiration. There are children, old people and all kinds of people looking at you in amazement. They expect you to show them that anything is possible. Spread your traveling happiness like a pandemic. Enjoy the road and make it look, it is your responsibility.
Eight things backpackers do