To everyone who travels with a backpack: bring an extra layer, but not for the rain. There’s a brand new prejudice out there, and it comes with a polite smile.
I came back from a trip with a heavy backpack and a thought stuck in my head:
First world people can be pretty savage.
And yet we Latin Americans are the ones with that label.
I guess I’d rather be the savage, then.
In Europe, the land of youth hostels (and questionable techno), I ran into a kind of prejudice I didn’t know existed. Sexual taboos there are almost gone, racial ones not so much, and on top of that there’s a new one, fear of backpackers.
I could feel people staring. Some of them moved away from me as if I had dengue in my backpack. Theeeen my hostel roommates gave it a name, punkabbestia, the Italian word for the punks who live on the street with their dogs. Cute. According to them, people were feeling paura around me, plain old fear.
So I started paying attention, and it really is fear, of anyone who doesn’t follow the dress code. People traveling alone, immigrants, street musicians and punkabbestias, basically anyone with a backpack and no clear destination.
It isn’t only a European thing, either. I’ve seen the same nervous eyes in the “modern” cities of South America (hello Curitiba 👋😊). A backpacker doesn’t fit any template, no uniform and no flag, and to be honest, even we don’t know what’s inside that backpack hehehe…
Maybe they’re right to worry
This prejudice is only growing, so stand up straight and smile, it still works better than anything else I’ve tried.
A lot of people say this doesn’t exist. Maybe they’ve never met a feral traveler, the stubborn kind who keeps trying to understand a world that spins the wrong way and was never really theirs anyway…