A Backpacker by Any Other Name...

In January, Steven and I booked a trip to Thailand for the Vietnamese TeT holidays (or rather to avoid the Vietnamese TeT holidays) to have a last "honeymoon" getaway before we have more responsibility than simply lounging on the beach. We booked our tickets early this year to avoid being stuck in Viet Nam over TeT and resigned to either staying in HCMC at home for 10 days or going somewhere in Viet Nam and
 paying double or more for transportation and accommodation, which is where we found ourselves t
 his time last year. While we did spend a nice few days in DaLat and Mui Nei over TeT last year, and saw what I will remember as the most spectacular fireworks display ever, complete with a full 20 minute "grand finale" and sparks flying in our eyes, we also paid a lot more to travel to, and stay in, places we'd been before. So this year, we booked early.


Now with our flights taken care of, its time to move on to planning the rest of the trip. We fly from HCMC to Bangkok on Wednesday, Feb 10 and arrive around 11 p.m. We plan to spend Thursday and Friday visiting my old haunts and a friend of ours from last year, who is now teaching in Thailand. The plan is then to take an overnight train to Surat Thani - where I spent those lovely 10 days in a meditation retreat back in 2005 - and a bus/ferry combination out to the islands, where we'll meet up with a friend of mine from Atlanta and spend four or five days lounging around on the beach before heading back to Bangkok on the overnight train on Wednesday for one last day in Bangkok before heading back home on Friday morning.

In order to plan all of this, I need to book a hostel in Bangkok for Wednesday and Thursday evenings, as well as the following Thursday evening; overnight train/ferry tickets, and some bungalows on whichever beach we decide to stay on for the week. Having found a few great travel planning tools over the years, trip planning has become relatively easy, but I do notice that my preferences are changing. For hostels, I usually rely on reviews from the Lonely Planet's Thorntree Forum or Travel Fish in Asia; for train tickets anywhere in the world there is no better site than Seat 61 and simply searching on Google for "Koh Samui/Koh Phangan Beaches" brings up some nice beach reviews (and then back to the Thorntree for more recommendations).

As I'm reading through the hostel reviews (I haven't quite graduated to "hotel," I guess that will come with the baby - or maybe just "hostels with 'family' rooms), I find myself skipping past the ones that say "authentic/homey backpacker feel" or "casual backpacker environment." These terms, which use to evoke images of cheap food, cheap rooms, funky decor and world maps full of pins denoting the origins of their many guests, now immediately bring to mind bad facsimiles of western food, Rage Against the Machine videos blasting at full volume while I try to eat my universal banana pancake in peace at 9:00 in the morning, and smoky common rooms full of loud, drunken strangers, which give me less of a 'homey' feel and more the desire to go straight to my room and pull out a good book. While it is to the Leo Hostel in Beijing that I attribute all of those unpleasant memories, I think it is less that it was a 'bad' hostel and more that perhaps, I am no longer looking for an "authentic/homey backpacker feel" or a "casual backpacker environment." Perhaps I would feel more comfortable in an "authentic (insert name of country) historic house with quiet gardens" or a "rustic bungalow on the beach."

It is towards those descriptions that I now lean and with them comes the need to say a final farewell to $5 fan rooms with holes in the ceiling and basic accommodation with shared bath. I may travel with a backpack, but I don't know if I am young, or carefree, enough to call myself a backpacker anymore. It is sad, somehow, to cast off that part of myself and my life, but at least I can say that I lived that life at one point. And while I no longer look forward to 12 hour bus rides or trudging down the beach for hours with a 30 pound back pack find the cheapest accommodation, I pride msyelf in the fact that I am still travelling, albeit on somewhat of a different path.