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I have been backpacking in Canada for a couple of months now. While not all of it has been in these institutions, I have rediscovered my love for hostels, and more importantly the feeling of liberation that comes with living out of a backpack.
What hostels get right
Most hostels don’t have a tonne of facilities – a bunk bed in a dorm room, a locker to stow your valuables, Wi-Fi and a Lonely Planet if you’re lucky, and a bunch of shared spaces like a kitchen, fridge and bathrooms – so you are forced to be minimal. This is not easy for a lot of people, especially those who are very used to having their own space and doing things their way, as you have to be respectful of fellow hostellers and not treat spaces as if you own them.
The other thing about hostels, and in my view at least this is probably one of the best things, is that they catalyse cross cultural interactions. The number of interesting people you meet in a very small span of time is incredible. As you interact with people from very different parts of the world, you get exposed to so many cultures, learn about personal motivations and philosophies, and get to know about places you could travel to next. Of course, this is a two-way street so you give back as much by telling them about your own life. There is immense learning potential plus the chance to form lifelong friendships, often internationally.
Everything comes with a con
One of the most obvious drawbacks is the lack of personal space. While you can have a private room in a hostel, most budget conscious travellers stay in dorms. Sometimes this can be quite frustrating, like when you can’t fall asleep despite the symphony of snoring in the dorm, or you are homesick and want to sink into your own bed.
There is also a lack of responsibilities, as you would expect in other low-end accommodation places like hotels. Since no one is bound to keep areas clean, you can at times find that the shared spaces are not the best. You may find utensils with bits of food still stuck, or bathrooms littered with toilet paper and paper napkins. However, most places do have some form of housekeeping that takes care of this. And you’ll find the whole spectrum – from well managed hostels part of a chain, and independent ones struggling to get staff – all priced similarly. Even then the freedom from doing chores around a shared space, like you would if you were living in a flat, means no one is really responsible for anything.
The literal weight of things
The biggest revelation for me about living in hostels was how little I could do with. Over the years, I have flirted with the idea of owning less, sometimes more successfully than others. Backpacking forces you to distil down to the very essential things. Every new thing you add to your belonging literally weighs you down.
Those bestsellers you picked up last year and never touched? Yeah nah, those can’t come. The extra towel? No need. The six pack of garlic bread you bought? Someone else can enjoy it. Just what you need, nothing more.
To travel lean, you also learn to keep giving things away. So at every hostel, you will find a free food shelf to which departing travellers have donated leftover food. The constant re-evaluation of what you need is definitely painful in the short term but the inability to stow things away indefinitely in storage spaces forces you to prioritise and live on less. This is why I want to make backpacking into a life principle, which brings me to the final point.
Finding enough
I recently started reading Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin, a book that pioneered the idea of financial independence and a precursor to the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement. One of the central ideas of this book is finding or determining your personal definition of enough.
The convergence of backpacking and reading this book has prompted me to think more about my definition. Currently my enough includes most of the stuff in my two backpacks. I say most because I could probably still take out some things, and some will change depending on the season. Plus, it allows me to keep my environmental impact low.
I am sure I will accumulate some possessions once I get an apartment but the challenge would be to know where to draw the line.
That’s it from me for now. Keep travelling to this space for more such life updates.