Travelogues - travel diary, information for backpackers by backpackers; mototours, adventure travel & cultural exhanges; travel tips

Welcome to my travelogs! I’m a big fan of backpacking à la shoe-string travel as well as motorbike travel—the latter affectionately called “Harley vacations” or “mototouring” in Europe. This is a collection of my travel journals (some personal, some co-authored).

Although they were originally written for family and friends, other travelers who have found their way to them continue to write from time to time, commenting on the helpful information they’ve found, or about the good laugh they've had reading about the maddening, nerve-fraying situations they recognize all too well as fellow journeymen. So I’m leaving them online for your information and entertainment!

To preserve the spirit in which they were written, I’m presenting them here as is—unaltered, unedited, with typos, grammatical unpleasantries and all. Most of them of these entries were written on-the-fly and published online instantly via Internet cafés.* It’s never easy to proofread your compositions at pay-per-minute Internet cafés with strange keyboards and people breathing all over you waiting for their turn!

If you're a traveler looking for information, be sure to check out the “Tips for Travelers” sections scattered throughout.

Cheers!

Zak
*(on-the-fly journals were published either through Zak’s CMS software or through travelblog.org)

Article by Zak Keith, with quotes derived from hs book: My Life as a Squint-Eyed Chink
Modern-day backpacking could be said to have its roots in the Hippie Trail of the 60s and 70s—the overland route from Europe to Asia, which overlapped sections of the Old Silk Road, which Marco Polo, arguably a backpacker, traveled to reach China in the mid-13th century.

At some point after the 70s, backpacking, like hippyism, had gone mainstream. The term "backpacking" now refers more to a mode of travel rather than a lifestyle reserved for hippies and dropouts. Like everything else that’s gone mainstream nowadays, “backpacking” has been stretched to mean a lot of different things to different people, defying any air-tight, cookie-cutter definitions. In the 60s and 70s, simple terms like “watching TV” implied a shared experience, as did “backpacking.” But like so much else today, backpacking has been diversified into sub-cultures and sub-categories such as flash-packing and gap-packing. I would like to think that despite the different backpacking philosophies out there, that backapckers in general still have some commonalities.

For me, backpacking has always had a somewhat wayfarer dimension to it. I believe you can tell a person by his/her luggage. Although hard-shelled suitcases are far less common on conveyor belts, and although almost all affordable suitcases look pretty insecure nowadays, I’d submit that if you’re the type who chooses to travel with an insecure rucksack, then you’re the type who typically chooses the extra liberating dimension that comes with backpacking. It’s an educated guess, but you’re probably independant and at least fairly fit, and with an open and somewhat trusting nature (either that, or you’re a hardcore fatalist).

The defenselessness of a rucksack is its defense. Backpackers keep nothing precious in there, just replaceable items, hoping that anyone who sees their defenseless pack will understand that principal and leave it alone. Traveling this way, they place themselves in situation after situation where, vulnerable as they are, they have no choice but to trust their fellow man. It’s a daily exercise in trust, in learning to live without attachment.

While you might occasionally find me in a five-star hotel (especially when I’m not paying for it), in essence, I subscribe to a form of old-school backpacking, from back in the day, when budget travelers lived by a common creed, an unwritten but well-defined set of rules and principals:

Besides the preferences that came with their core motivation of traveling for as long and far as possible on as little money as possible, there was an emphasis on self-reliance, minimal luggage and cultural exchanges. True Backpackers would never be caught dead riding in a taxi, staying at a fancy hotel or dining in an air-conditioned restaurant. They did their own laundry, rolled their own cigarettes and mingled with locals without sticking a camera in their face. Living on as little as $5 a day, they sought to conquer unbeaten paths, to find the perfect secret beach paradise. And they left as small an ecological footprint as possible wherever they tread, knowing better than to do things like tossing a plastic bottle into the sea.

There was a certain spirituality that came with old-school backpackers, something monk-like in their renunciation of over-dependency on material things. Every journey, which typically lasted anywhere from 6 months to several years, was a pilgrimage to absorb that something special, that something intangible and alien to their own native habitat. backpackers sought to learn about life through the perspective of the locals they met.

Every leg of an old-school backpacker’s journey was a challenge to solve the problems of obtaining the simple basic necessities of life like food and shelter, or transportation to a sensitive or remote area. There was hardly anything they could take for granted: a hike in Northern Thailand could lead to a run-in with warlords in the Golden Triangle; a boat ride to outlying islands in search of pristine beaches could bring you face to face with pirates; bad weather could hold up your return trip for weeks.

Today, backpackers face few of these challenges, if any. Resembling “suitcasers” rather than backpackers, they tread safely only where others have trodden, where there are a myriad of services and amenities catering to them: hostels, guesthouses, Internet cafés and tour operators. The Hippie Trail is said to have been replaced with the Banana-Pancake Trail. Traveling to a faraway place is no longer about playing it by ear and embarking on a very personal journey—it is about buying and assembling parts of their tourist experience: a PADI diving course, “adventure travels” consisting of a guided elephant-back jungle “trek,” and reservations by email and credit card to secure the beachside bungalow with the best sunset view. Nouveaux backpackers might never endeavor to learn a local language; nor would they have any qualms about tipping generously to rude waiters, or polluting a beach with refuse at a full-moon party, rave, or spending the night with a prostitute. Somewhere along the line in the 80s, consumerism had crept in, slowly replacing the collective social awareness, social responsibility, humanism, solidarity, humility and respect to which backpackers once adhered. We can probably blame it on the availability of cheap air fares, as well as the proliferation of information in guide books (and sites like this one).

Still, whatever my complaints about how commercialization, tourism and consumerism have all conspired to corrupt modern-day backpacking, to be sure, I have certainly benefitted from the developments. Unless you are an Amish-backpacker, some of the modern conveniences so prevalent in touristy areas are just too hard to resist: using an Internet café to send emails beats lining up for hours at the Poste Restante of the GPO of every city you visit; using travel blogs to upload your latest digital photos and keep in touch with friends is far preferable to lugging around precious rolls of Kodak film and waiting till your trip is over before developing your prints. Mea culpa—I am guilty of utilizing modern conveniences and patronizing backpacker establishments!

European bike travel just wouldn’t be the same without the convenient scattering of full-facility camping grounds throughout; and I do prefer to use credit cards and ATMs rather than carry my life savings in a thick wad of American Express travelers checks sealed in a sweaty money belt nourishing a thick crop of rash on a calloused belly...

Perhaps by my own definitions, I should call myself a pseudo-backpacker or a quasi-backpacker. But I still have something against finding ATMs and “Hugo Boss” tailors right on the beach, and it still bothers me to see creepy sex tourists masquerading as backpackers. A True Backpacker, whatever that is, might not want to be seen with a Lonely Planet guide, but I still own one for nostalgia’s sake—a “Yellow Bible” late-70s edition of Tony Wheeler’s South-east Asia on a Shoe String.

OK, gotta go! My bus is here!

Happy Trails!

/Zak
This article copyright © Zak Keith 2008
material heavily derived from his book:
My Life as a Squint-Eyed Chink

In this section are a series of “motorcycle-logs” written for family and friends, as well as any Internet visitors from around the world who might surf in looking for travel tips about the places we’ve been to, or the how-to’s regarding motorcycle travel, motorbike tours, or motorbiking through Europe.

This mode of bike travel is also known as mototouring—a term that may have been coined in Europe—or going on a Harley vacation, which I don’t feel entitled to calling it, since I ride a trusty ol’ Japanese bike I call named the Red Baroness. My bike of choice is a 1999 model Yamaha XVS1100 Custom (it comes in custom and classic models), known as a V-Star in the US, or a Dragstar in Europe — not the wisest of names for a predominantly macho clientele, for it conjures up images of a drag queen for many. The Red Baroness has so far taken me on three round trips in Europe, as well as on numerous short tours.

It’s laughable that adventure travel firms are charging such exorbitant sums for organizing motorcycle tours and group motorcycle touring. Although it is an undertaking which sometimes involves serious logistics, that’s a bit of overkill in my opinion. There really isn’t that much to it. West European roads and highways are made for motorbike travel, and Europe is dotted with camping grounds and hostels, motels and B&B’s which you can drop in on, usually without prior notice. In Scandinavia and Spain, road users tend to be incredibly careful, respectful and friendly towards bikers.

It does tend to be a different story in countries like France and Italy however. There drivers act like they’d like to run you off the roads. A closer look at the behavior of their local motorcyclists and especially the scooterists ("mopeds"), will reveal why that is: motorcyclists are vagrantly disrespectful of the rules and all other vehicles in traffic, and that disrespect is generously returned. Respect is a two-way street!

To be fair, it is even understandable why some motorists would think of motorcyclists as nuisances and flagrant rule-breakers who like to have it both ways: On highways, we demand a whole lane to ourselves—encroach on our space and you risk getting flipped off or having a wrench thrown at your windscreen. On the other hand, when traffic stalls, you’ll find us squeezing between lanes, trying to get ahead, zigging and zagging, disprespecting all healthy boundaries, abandoning all civility and unfairly “sneaking” ahead of everyone else. But if we like to have it both ways, it’s because we need it both ways! If non-biker motorists fail to understand why we’re so seemingly unruly, here it is for the record:

In traffic jams, we deal with a lot more than drivers sitting safely in a car; it’s a lot more tiring for us bikers. It’s actually hard to stop and start our bike, to constantly put your feet up and down, to balance and support up to 400 kg. of weight while you inch forward little by little.

A NOTE TO YOU IRATE ANTI-BIKER MOTORISTS: Why not let us pass so we can get out of your way? It’s actually better if you would let us give you your spot in the lane/queue, because we can! Our torque is a lot better than yours, and we can dash forward out of your way before you’ve even lifted your foot of the break pedal. It’s better to move aside and let us all the way to the front of the queue, because when the lights turn green, we’ll be out of your in no time, accelerating to 90 km/hr in less than 5 seconds; we’re actually saving you the trouble of waiting behind us and possibly having to wait until the lights to turn red again. Learn from the Dutch: drivers in the Netherlands actually move their vehicles to the side so we can pass through in traffic jams.
copyright © Zak Keith 2008