“You will totally love New Zealand. It has a great backpacker culture!”
And immediately, I cringed. It was just a reaction that I didn’t intend to offend with, but nonetheless it confirmed something I suspected long before I even arrived in New Zealand. I may be a guy who travels with a backpack, but I definitely did not fit the profile of a ‘backpacker.’*
I Wanted To Be A ‘Backpacker’ SO BAD!
My final year in Korea, I knew this was it. I regretted not doing it earlier, but I was set on traveling across South East Asia with nothing but a backpack and seeing where the wind would take me. There was something about ‘going without a plan’ and ‘meeting other travelers’ that sounded so cool and appealing. That is until I got started and realized, what a lot of people call ‘backpacking’ is not at all what I thought it was.