63 Things That Demystify What Your Backpacker Friends Do All Day

‘What do you DO all day?!’

This innocent and quite understandable question from friends and family at home makes me chuckle. The inquiry flatters me, even…as if everything were perfectly mapped out, and I, the omniscient traveler, know the exact location of every street, bus stop, well-recommended but hidden restaurant, general store, health clinic, and hiking trail, along with who to trust and who not to trust, how to decrypt train timetables, speak foreign languages, and elegantly float my way through unknown lands, to name just a few simple feats.

If only! How easy travel would be. But also, how boring. Truth is, the lack of knowledge of one’s surroundings takes up time – copious amounts of time – and makes one quickly aware of the clumsiness, the challenge, and the exhaustion that comes along with exploring far-off lands.

Contrary to widely held belief, we don’t do nothing all day (well, sometimes) but nor is every day spent galivanting from one tourist attraction to the next – I mean, think of how draining it is to deal with pushing crowds, long lines, screaming kids, and overpriced food…imagine a year of that?!

It’s just life…somewhere else.

So in case you were wondering – in no order of importance or quantity of time spent – here are some of the things that turn our hours into days into months:

1. Get lost – let’s talk about this for a sec. This accounts for about 37% of your day. Greater than 50% when you’ve just moved to a new location.

2. Get unlost

3. Sightsee – I’ll get this one out of the way, since it doesn’t happen as often as you think

4. Research accommodation, food, and sights of your next destination

5. Wind up doing nothing with that research and take about 3 full days to get acclimated to your new destination anyway (or wind up not moving at all because you met cool people and your whole plan changed)

6. Scramble around town in search of accommodation with your backpack on (extra turtle pace)

7. Bargain for accommodation once you find a place you like

8. Have travel small talk – Ugh! Yes, it exists. How long have you been in France? What parts of Thailand have you been to? How long are you on the road for? What were you doing back home?

9. Meet new people (prerequisite: tolerance of #8)

10. Take way longer to figure out who to trust and who not to trust since you’re outside your normal surroundings

11. Have amazing, deep, multiple-hour long conversations that you’d never have at home due to everyone’s time constraints

12. Explore – hard-to-get-to natural beauty, charming side streets, local hang outs

13. Scramble around for places that back home you’d get to in a cinch – somewhere to buy toothpaste, get your shoes fixed, buy a phone charger, a book you want, underwear, etc.

14. Read

15. Write

16. Think – processing the overstimulation of an unfamiliar environment takes an abundance of time and energy

17. Hunt for an ATM

18. Hunt for a functioning ATM

19. Search for wifi

20. Search for functioning wifi

21. Look for public toilets

22. Look for other alternatives once you see the public toilets

23. Take courses (Spanish language, Ayurvedic massage, Muay Thai boxing, Yoga, etc.)

24. Shop!

25. Bargain – which turns what would be a 2-minute process into a 10 to 15-minute ordeal

26. Keep up with people you meet traveling – Whatsapping, calling, Facebooking to see who you can link up with next

27. Keep up with people from home – videochatting at odd hours thanks to different time zones, uploading pictures to Facebook, etc.

28. Watch the sun rise

29. Watch the sun set

30. Find non-shady-looking places to eat

31. Often: Send your order back because it wasn’t what you asked for, and wait again (if you’re from the United States, Australia, Germany, or any other place with speedy, accommodating service, lower your expectations as soon as you venture abroad, I warn you).

32. Eat

33. Get sick – inevitable if you’re journeying anywhere off the beaten path

34. Come up with creative ways to stay in shape (handstands, bench pressing your backpack, deliberately choosing the hostel up the steep hill)

35. Shower (3 times a day when you’re hot, sweaty, and gross)

36. Try to find a place to do laundry in each new spot you visit

37. Until you realize (in some places) that handwashing (WHAT?!…Yes, handwashing) your clothes is the cheapest, safest, and cleanest (yikes!) way to get the job done

38. Learn the local language…or don’t and spend more time stumbling around not knowing it; both are fun

39. Ponder life in coffee shops

40. Deal with cultural inconveniences, even for things that you’d swear are the simplest of simple – e.g., sugar for your coffee in India might take 3 requests and 15 minutes, a Costa Rican ‘yes’ means maybe just not showing up to the meeting you planned, and a 5pm social gathering in Jamaica is sure to start at 7 o’clock the earliest

41. Ask questions – about the culture, the country, the prime minister, why they eat rice & beans for breakfast, how to say ‘how much is this?’ in Spanish

42. Answer questions – about your country, your culture, your president, why you eat croissants for breakfast, why you’re travelling alone, why you’re not married yet

43. Nap

44. Listen to people’s stories – which seem to be much more varied and captivating than the tired-miserable-and-sick-of-work story you constantly hear at home, so suddenly you’re a great listener

45. Walk to places instead of drive (crazy, I know)

46. Brainstorm tons of ways to make money on the road…and not do any of them till your back’s against the wall (Kidding! Sorta…don’t let this happen)

47. Attend goodbye dinners (every other day) for people you swear you’ll keep in touch with

48. Wait – on lines, in traffic, for trains, for cell service, for internet connection, for friends, for waitstaff, for food, for packages, for your shower to be fixed, for your body to recover from sickness (or from the night before)

49. Meditate

50. Watch the rain instead of running through it

51. Lay on the beach

52. Trek mountains

53. Go camping

54. Spend 30 minutes to 1 hour asking around about how to do something that should be relatively simple, but you’re a rookie in this country, so it’s not (how to send a package from Tokyo to New York, catch a train from Rome to Florence, buy tickets to a Flamenco show)

55. Find out that despite your inquiries you messed up #54…and do it over again the right way

56. Book buses, trains, flights

57. Run into problems with #56 due to having a foreign credit card, a foreign phone number, and a foreign passport, and overall just sucking by being foreign

58. Travel from one place to the next – time spent is inversely correlated with the thickness of your wallet (e.g., a 30-hour train from Bangalore to Mumbai or 1.5 hour flight)

59. Randomly get invited to cultural events just because you’re foreign (benevolent prejudice?)

60. Party

61. Still do meaningless things you’d normally do at home – like aimlessly scroll through Facebook, watch dumb YouTube videos, lay around after your shower, procrastinate doing your laundry or calling your grandma (I mean, you’re still living regular life…just somewhere else)

62. Sleep

63. Practice accepting that you’re not home, that nothing goes the way you’re used to, and get really good at catching the next fun curveball that comes your way…