Backpacking around the world for seven years

Travellers’ Tales is a new series on this blog, inviting travellers to share some of their inspiring or memorable experiences. For this edition, I’m glad to have on board- Will Hatton. Writer and photographer. Adventurer and vagabond. Master of the handstand pushup. Conqueror of mountains, survivor of deserts and crusader for cheap escapades. Will is an avid hitch-hiker, couch-surfer and bargain-seeker. He is a devout follower of the High Temple of Backpackistan and the proud inventor of the man-hug. Will blogs over at www.thebrokebackpacker.com about his adventures around the world, you can follow him on Facebook and on Twitter or, if you are really friendly, hunt him down on the road for a cheeky pint.

Since the age of nineteen, travel has been the driving force in my life. I have spent the last seven years gallivanting around the world like some kind of coked up road-runner. I’ve met incredible people, seen stunning sights and had some truly life-changing adventures. Everything has not always gone to plan; I’ve been robbed at knife-point, rushed to hospital on two occasions and even arrested! By getting off the beaten path and choosing travel as a lifestyle, I have had some amazing experiences; I’ve drunk tea with rebels in Burma, stayed in a cave with a Rastafarian Bedouin, herded goats in the Holy-land, bagged numerous peaks and hitched from the UK to Africa. My adventures are far from over; early next year I am embarking upon an epic quest; I am planning on travelling from the UK to Singapore overland and then to build a boat to cross Indonesia and onwards, to Australia!

I first started travelling because I was really very unhappy with my life and needed to make a change; hitting the road has enabled me to not only explore some pretty epic places but also to get to grips with what I want out of life. I honestly feel that everybody should have a whirl at travelling; it truly can change your entire life, the experiences you will have on the road can be incredibly valuable from a confidence-boosting and growth point of view. Without slipping to far down the ‘hippy dippy’ route, I personally feel that travelling has massively improved me as a person. How, you ask? Well, for one, exploring third world countries and making friends with people who live off less than a dollar today has taught me quite a lot about how the world works; really, everybody just wants to be happy, to be fed and to be safe. I feel that after making friends with people in poorer communities, I actually have more of an understanding of what ‘poverty’ really means and how god-damn hard it is to escape. I spent a couple of weeks living in an incredibly basic village in India. I was the only backpacker for hundreds of miles around and didn’t speak much Hindi but I had an amazing time making friends with the folks who lived there and sporadically helping out in the fields.

If you really want to save the world, you probably need to understand it first. So, in my opinion, everybody should head out into the unknown, make friends in the least likely of places and find out the truth for themselves – anyways, deep thoughts aside, travelling really is for everyone – give it a go. If you spend your whole life waiting for the perfect time, the perfect place or the perfect person to go travelling with, you may never go. So pack that bag, stick out your thumb and hit the road!

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