Can Life-Changing Travel And Luxury Coexist?

Great article Ross, and a subject close to my heart. The answer to your question, I strongly believe, is yes. I am viewing it from my biased viewpoint of course, as a 40 yr old who has done the $5 a day backpacking many years ago and now chooses a more comfortable way to travel.

Now having worked and diverted almost all of our savings into travel, my wife and I still travel with the same insatiable appetite for experiences, chance encounters and great food that I had in those days of penny-pinching. Only now, we will choose a nice clean hotel room if it’s available, eat in the place that look cleanest rather than cheapest, and will indulge in an occasional expensive airline ticket to allow some sleep (and a bit of pampering) on a long flight.

Do we miss out? I honestly don’t think so. We normally travel independently, and choose our overnight stays according to convenience at the time. It might be a 4 star hotel, it might be a tent. The encounters I have had with wealthy locals sitting in a bar in Malta have been every bit as “authentic” as those while camping in the mountains of central Asia.

In short, the opportunities to get the most from our travels depends on our own approach to it, and our own inquisitiveness of the world around us. With the right attitude, life changing experiences are everywhere for us to find, whether living it up or slumming it.

Adventure travel is a state of mind, not a state of wealth.

I’m with Siobhan and rolling my eyes.

You seem to equate luxury with a package tour, which is a bit weird. Luxurious organised tours do exist but budget to midrange options are far more common. Most luxury travellers are operating independently.

The even weirder thing is that in your scenario the tour group is staying at the same hotel as you. What were you doing that’s so different?

I rarely book packages and I’m not much into organised tours, though I think they have a place. For example, walking tours of cities can be a fabulous way to learn about a city’s architecture and history and a few hours later you’re on your own again.

I can’t afford luxury all the time but I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy it on occasiona and from my experience your ideas about it seem quite wrong to me. Staying at the Paradores Alhambra and being able to go out for a moonlit stroll around the gardens was far more authentic and immersive than staying at a backpackers hostel in downtown Granada would ever be. Ditto staying in the luxurious converted cave of the Museum Hotel in Cappadocia, Turkey, rather than a modern budget hotel or backpacker’s. “Glamping” in luxury tent cabins on a tropical island with only 12 people on the island got me far closer to nature than a budget resort with hundreds of people. (Sure, I could have gone camping but I don’t think cooking baked beans over a camping stove would have heightened the experience for my honeymoon).

This just strikes me as inverted snobbery and frankly, it’s a bit silly. A truly open mind would know that travel comes in all shapes and sizes and one is not necessarily better than the other.

I come from a different camp. I am a “long-term sojourner”. I’ve lived in two separate countries for more than a decade each. The backpack industry created the notion of “authenticity of experience” that they believe put backpackers on a higher level than anyone else. Living with locals and speaking their language, I believed that I had a far more “authentic” experience than any of those backpackers who came through trying to get instant and authentic exposure to a culture that they had little knowledge of. I scoffed when people told me of their great adventures. How much did they really know? One relative told me of coming across a wizened old lady with a donkey on a mountain trail in the Middle East as a true “travel experience”. I mean, that’s exotic, but if you couldn’t speak her language and know what her life is about, it’s no more authentic than seeing her through the window of a tourist bus.

I’ve changed since then. I can see now that I was just as much a victim of the “authenticity” spiel of the backpack religion as anyone else. Who are we to judge other people’s experiences? In a sense, we are all on a journey through life. Each person has his or her authentic experiences, from which he/she learns, suffers, or grows richer. The backpacker with his/her stuttering attempts to use a few hackneyed phrases in his/her latest destination, listening to natives expounding yet again their (often hackneyed) views of the world, will still gain from his/her experience, just as much as the long-term sojourner locked into his/her particular existence, the executive traveller trying to make sense of the business practices of his customers, the leisure traveller seeking to exploit selected aspects of the destination (e.g. sandy beaches), and all the other people who for some reason or another find themselves outside their own country.

Unfortunately, Ross still half clings to the original religion, which is why this article has attracted such scathing comments. On the one hand, no one can “buy” authentic experiences in an organised manner, whether you do it on the cheap from some backpacker’s guidebook or pay for someone else to smooth the bumps with a bit of luxury. On the other hand, all our experiences are authentic, unique to ourselves, helping us enliven, broaden, and enrich our world. In the case of travel experiences, the challenge is, as the backpackers suggest, breaking through the frustrating barriers that prevent us from truly entering the environment in which we find ourselves and making the most of our opportunities. I would suggest that the attempt is just as important as the final result. “Backpacking” is — should be — a state of mind, not a dogmatic, ritualised approach to travel.

Can’t we all just get along?

It’s ridiculous to think that you have to live on the cheap to have an authentic, life-changing experience (hardly any experience is authentic anyway; that’s only possible if you’re a local). Sure, the hardship of sitting for 30 hours in a minibus going up the Karakorum Highway makes for a great story afterwards, but while you were sitting in that bus, most people would have given their left arm for a comfy seat in a normal-sized air-con bus.

Of course, if all you do is sit in your comfy 5* hotel room and only go as far as the beach bar, then you won’t have any experience at all. In the end it’s not about how much money you travel with, but what you do while you’re travelling and you can do everything a skint backpacker is doing when you’ve got money, plus some more.

Crap…sorry, it’s 5 am here. I meant “one believes that they are being open-minded and not conforming to society”

I just think the whole traveler vs. tourist debate has been beaten to death. On some occassions, it seems like just another form of snobbery.

I think that life changing travel and luxury can definitely coexist. In this day and age, there is no reason that travelers shouldn’t be able to explore the corners of the world and experience the best of another culture as well as retire to a comfortable luxury room at the end of the day. Everyone is entitled to experience world travel in the way that best suits their lifestyle, and the fact is that people who lead plush lives want to travel in much the same way.