Loathing the Bangkok backpacker
One group of people for whom The Lost Boy has come to feel some sort of hypocritical resentment towards is backpackers. The Lost Boy was a backpacker for all of around ten days, but it was not a comfortable experience. From this feeling of uncomfortableness comes The Lost Boy’s own mixed feelings of pity and sorrow for the travellers who move in and out of Bangkok so fast you would think they actually had somewhere to go.
The plight of the eternal globetrotters
When The Lost Boy arrived in Bangkok he was confused, hot and a little horny. This was nothing out of the ordinary, but it was made unbearable by a feeling of helplessness that was multiplied exponentially by a large backpack and a Lonely Planet guide. It’s as if you step off the plane all keen and wide-eyed, but as soon as you put your backpack on the stark reality of where you are hits and all sense goes out the window. You effectively become a drone, lost in the eternal haze of trying to get somewhere without having anywhere to go.
This is why Khaosan Road is such a horrible place. It is full of people just wandering, with no idea where they are going or what they should be doing. People are just there. Walking around with a backpack and a guidebook, The Lost Boy felt like a tired cliché and soon decided that this was not the way he wanted to do things at this stage in his life. Backpackers all mould into one unrecognizable entity, effectively draining themselves of their individuality and replacing it with a common goal to be helpless.
You would think being The Lost Boy and all that our young reporter might have thrived off the backpacking lifestyle, but really it seemed so redundant and uninspiring – moving from place to place, following well trodden paths in a quest for enlightenment. Backpackers can really give off an aura of arrogance as they strut around in their fishermen’s pants and strange looking bandanas. They radiate feelings of superiority, as if they have a secret knowledge that nobody else could ever understand.
Gap year students are the worst, because they are still too young and naïve to get to grips with the world. Their time will come, but for now they are still the school children they were when they left.
Perhaps staying in Bangkok makes backpackers appear so unsightly and dull because if you look for long enough, you see the same cycle of events unfolding one time after another. A friend of The Lost Boy’s, who had spent two months travelling around Thailand and Laos, recently said “It’s not that different over here to back home really. I mean, the culture and everything.”
The Lost Boy just looked at him and frowned. For someone to think in such a manner suggests that the mind of the backpacker is wired so that every fleeting visit to every stop-off destination must feel the same. Although there will be stories of river-tubing, ladyboys, temples and elephant trekking, these stories must lack any real conviction and become just tales of a chain of curious events.
It isn’t fair to not like backpackers, but The Lost Boy cannot help the feeling. They just look so dumb in their helplessness, and this is the feeling that our self-conscious reporter hates the most in life. The Lost Boy travels light everywhere because he never wants people to look at him the way he looks at backpackers. There is probably something wrong with The Lost Boy, but this remains to be seen.
The Lost Boy – one day there may even be a fan-club.
Techno' tags: Bangkok, thailand, expat, backpacker, travel
