I find this sort of advice, coming from travelers who enjoy all expense paid amenities, just plain tedious. Stick to your product placement, please.

Also went to WA and it was truly beautiful, i’d planned to go from Melbourne to Cairns as it was my first ever trip but along the way i heard such good things about WA and went 3,000k down the west coast and it was truly stunning.

Far too many backpackers seem to just move from one tourist hotspot to the next, only speaking to eachother and hanging out in backpacker bars. If you want to do that then fine, but to me travelling is much more about being more adventurous, meeting the local people, taking local transport & exploring places not stuffed full of backpackers

One great resource for meeting locals, really gaining an insight into their culture is this site: https://www.tripping.com. You can arrange to meet locals at their favorite pub or even stay at their place.

I can also see the lure of sticking to the well-trod path, going where everyone else goes, doing what the guidebooks say to do. Besides using sites like Tripping, I think that reading your blog, seeing what great alternatives exist is a great way for young people who might otherwise be tempted to only do the most touristy things to be motivated to be more adventurous.

It’s the “off-the-beaten-path-almost-got-robbed-and-landed-in-the-hospital” moments that you remember most. Like the time in some tiny Italian town when I got some kind of bug bite on my face and my lip swelled up so big I had to go to the emergency room, which, by the way, had a garbage can full of liquor bottles and black shutters on the windows like an insane asylum.

I don’t remember those kind of details of the Vatican.

But I do agree with this post. And I don’t quite get the ‘but young people are inexperienced and want the expected’ vibe. My first ‘big’ trip was turning up in Japan with a return air ticket, a suitcase, a ridiculously small amount of money and no plan. I had a blast. And I know plenty of people who did something similar when rather young. Most of my travel since then has been ‘independent’ and is going to stay that way. Fair enough if people are choosing the ’show me what you think I need to see/ticking off a checklist’ route, but it is a bit sad if they are doing that because they don’t realise there are other options.

My husband and I are backpackers, and we usually just go with the flow. We are bargain hunters. When a repositioning transatlantic cruise from Florida to Barcelona was the same cost as the flight, we chose to enjoy the luxury and many stops of the cruise ship (we stopped in otherwise difficult/expensive places to reach, like Madeira Island in Atlantic, and Sardinia). I enjoyed wearing my same dark green cargo pants again and again in formal dinners while majority of the women wore their best cocktail dresses.

Hostels and budget hotels are great, but when Priceline gave us cheaper 4 stars hotels in Copenhagen and Amsterdam than the hostels for two person, we chose the 4 stars one. We travel between cities in Western Europe mostly by public buses and trains, but we also did car road trip Toulouse-Monaco-Paris (and of course anything in between).

We visited obvious tourist destinations, but also did some trekking in places that we just happened to encounter. We have some missions of where to go, but we also love to just stroll aimlessly in cities and towns.

I guess, We do what we feel right (and cheap?) for the moment, be flexible about it, and see what opportunities lay in front of us. We don’t want to limit ourselves by rules (or gimmick if somebody might say it).