The Actual Rules of Backpacking

Posted: November 25th, 2009 | Author: Shawn | Filed under: backpacking | 5 Comments »

This list probably exists in several places and versions all over the interwebs, but whatever. Before you or your mom go off on some backpacking cavalcade, memorize these rules. There’s a whopping 20 of them, so I put most of them after the clicky.

1. (I’m saving the #1 spot in case I think of something that’s actually important.)

2. If it has wheels, it is too big. Leave it at home.

3. Top bunk makes the rules.

4. Rickshaw drivers are not a reliable source of condoms.

5. In many countries you are a spoiled rich twat, so stand up and let that tired local have your bus seat.

6. No whining. Seriously. Everyone universally hates a whiner.

7. If it tries to bite you, bite it first. Or run like a bitch. Your call.

8. Various hand signals mean different things in different places, but a genuine smile is universal.

9. Everyone poops. Some just more predictably than others.

10. If someone yells, “Bust a move!” while you are clinging to the side of a moving bus, you are excused from said move busting. This does not however apply to, “Strike a pose!” or “Shake your babymaker!”

11. It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. Seriously, sunburns are so not cool. Lube up, Catherine.

12. Learn these words in the local language: hello, goodbye, please, thank you, yes, no, sorry. If you’re gunning for the honour roll, then add these: toilet, how much?, what the fuck?!, numbers 1 – 10.

13. A van is only half full at 13 passengers.

14. Don’t feel like you have to go faster, slower, better, or travel like people tell you to. You don’t have to love the Museum of Income Tax Forms just because that drunk European couple said it was the tits.

15. Be polite and offer to hold a fellow bus passenger’s chicken while she breastfeeds two kids. Whether they are her kids or not.

16. Don’t eat anything that is larger than your own head. Remember, it inevitably has to fit out the other end too.

17. Thou shalt not turn on yonder hostel dorm light after people are asleep.

18. A backpacker that has acquired a car of their own is no longer a backpacker. They are now backpacking aristocracy, and you had bloody well better buy them a beer if you hope to ever escape the chicken buses.

19. Be nice. Do unto others as you would have them do unto your own mother. Remember, you’re essentially a smelly, impoverished ambassador for your country.

20. Don’t leave home without a towel. Douglas Adams wasn’t just trying to sell an astronomical number of books when he advised that the one thing you need is a good towel…

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Alright kiddies, thems the rules. Don’t say I never told it to you straight. I most certainly have forgotten or ignored many rules though. So if you know some more, hit the comments and get contributing for the greater good. Thanks!

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// shawn

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