I’m preparing my backpack to travel east. I notice some changes in the inventory: I’m carrying less, I added the vaccination schedule, I’m less anxious. Packing my bags again, something I’ve been doing over and over since that New Year’s Eve in 2023 when Mendoza stopped being my home, is the best point of comparison about how I see the nomad life.
The thing is, packing a backpack is a hugely important ritual. It gets you ahead of what you think is about to come and warns you to prepare. That’s why the change is so noticeable: the normal thing, almost four years into travelling, is to see things differently. It’s to anticipate in a different way. In my case, I have a very clear idea of what I expected and what was about to come every time I started a new journey.
Summer, a year in paradise
The trip through Argentina was the warm welcome the road gave to my new lifestyle. The backpack weighed a ton and I had to learn how to sand it down, to let go of everything I was carrying just in case and get used to solving problems with whatever was available in the moment if something went wrong.
Beyond learning how to survive and spend the night, the great doubt that faded away was “what to do” while travelling and what the “right” way to be a backpacker was.
I believed there was a sacred dogma to respect, a code that proved you were travelling in the complete and divine sense of the word. I always made fun of those who talk about being a “true backpacker”, as if your style of travelling put you above everyone else, but internally I was afraid of not being up to it, of the backpack being too much for me… And I did it.
I travelled without money, hitchhiked, stayed away from cities, went to remote little towns where there are no tourists. I slept in church porches, in squares, in forbidden places, in the houses of strangers I had met half an hour earlier. I did everything I thought a “true backpacker” would do and, in the middle of that euphoria, I promised myself I would travel until I felt satisfied, even if it meant doing it forever.
Autumn, something isn’t right
My favourite season, but that doesn’t mean it stops being a challenge. The last part of my trip through Argentina and my flirtation with Uruguay and Brazil were difficult emotionally and economically. I got stranded in Mendoza until I could save enough to go to Europe. Every time I think I don’t have the budget to visit a place, I remember that I set out to explore extremely expensive capitals, betting that everything would turn out fine.
And it did.
There was no tent or sleeping bag in the backpack, only an enormous dependence on my budget making friends with hostels and on the road bringing friends who would put me up. I packed everything while watching every gram, but with too many changes of clothes that I was never going to use (or that I may have already used too much).
I travelled through Europe, but deep down, I didn’t enjoy it. I felt guilty about that, like when someone makes your favourite food just when you’re full. I got tired of going around without a purpose, having no one to share the moment with, passing unnoticed through so many places until disappearing. Travelling certainties filled up with doubts, because when you’re invisible you can’t really see who you are.
Agonisingly, I travelled all of Ireland, all of Scotland and collapsed in London until I could take the flights that brought me back to Argentina.
Winter, knowing how to stay still
I became a hater. Of content creators and preachers of travelling as the supreme way of life. Of backpacker stereotypes and the zombie hordes of tourists who fall into traps made to fit them.
I got tired of travellers obsessed with authenticity and, above all, of the algorithm chasers who sweeten every moment and experience so that it can be a reel, a TikTok, a spotlight placed on them. Is it the generational shift and I’m just a bitter old man? Or was I always bitter and now I’m extending it to travelling?
My backpack was prepared without hesitation, as if it didn’t matter, without expecting adventures. That “what will be coming” did not foretell unforeseen events and deep down I wished the rest of my life would be like that. I went back to Ireland and cut my hair.
I gave up.
You didn’t know it, but inside me the determination formed to replace the backpack with a briefcase as soon as the opportunity arose. I just needed a stroke of luck.
And, luckily, it didn’t happen.
Spring, I was waiting for you
I’m preparing my backpack again. Winter is ending and I feel it in my bones, underneath my skin as a man comfortable with his life. I feel it as if the road were the sun that dodges the curtain and hits you in the face to wake you up. Nothing drastic happened. There was no emotional moment of inspiration. One day I opened my eyes and there they were: the desire to travel.
Maybe it’s because I think about everything I’ve travelled and it isn’t enough. I have all of Southeast Asia in my sights. But first Luxembourg. And before that, Norway. I firmly believe that chasing adventures is what makes me happy and, while the body holds up, you have to answer the whims of the soul.
As I look at the map, I feel like I’m on a first date: the nerves, the expectation, the overflowing desire. I don’t settle for imagining the first steps, I go further and tell myself that if everything goes well, after Asia comes Latin America at last. That I can leave Africa as the last great challenge and that everything that comes afterwards will be completing side quests, all those parts of the world on the list that I still haven’t crossed off.
This is my fourth year of travelling and I’m preparing as best I can because I can’t stop thinking about everything that is yet to come.