Seven Years on the Road with a Backpack

Travellers' Tales is a series inviting travellers to share the experiences that stayed with them. This edition features Will Hatton: writer and photographer, adventurer and vagabond, master of the handstand push-up, conqueror of mountains, survivor of deserts and campaigner for cheap escapades. He is a committed hitch-hiker, couch-surfer and bargain hunter, a devout follower of the High Temple of Backpackistan, and the proud inventor of the man-hug. He writes at The Broke Backpacker, and you can follow him on Facebook or Twitter. If you are very friendly, you can also track him down on the road and buy him a pint.

Seven years, and a fair amount of chaos

Travel has been the engine of my life since I was nineteen. The last seven years have been spent moving around the world at a pace that, looking back, seems slightly ridiculous. I have met extraordinary people, seen things I could not have imagined, and had adventures that changed the direction of my life.

It has not all gone smoothly. I have been robbed at knife-point, taken to hospital twice, and arrested once. Those are the stories that make good anecdotes now and were considerably less funny at the time.

The parts I would not trade

Choosing the road as a way of life, rather than a holiday, is what produced the memories worth keeping. I have drunk tea with rebels in Burma, slept in a cave with a Rastafarian Bedouin, herded goats in the Holy Land, climbed a long list of peaks, and hitch-hiked from the UK to Africa.

The adventures are not finished. Early next year I am setting off on a larger one: travelling overland from the UK to Singapore, then building a boat to cross Indonesia and carry on towards Australia.

Why I started

The first journey was not born of confidence. I was deeply unhappy with my life and needed something to change. Hitting the road did two things at once: it let me see some remarkable places, and it forced me to work out what I actually wanted from the years ahead.

What the road teaches, once the romance wears off

Everybody should try travelling at least once. The experience builds confidence and forces growth in a way that few other things manage. I am wary of sounding like a cliché, but the change in me has been substantial.

Part of that came from spending time in poorer countries and making friends with people who live on less than a dollar a day. It teaches you how the world actually works. Strip away the politics and the noise, and most people want the same things: to be happy, to be fed, to be safe.

After those friendships, I understood poverty differently. Not as a statistic, but as something specific and extremely difficult to escape. I spent a couple of weeks living in a very basic village in India, the only backpacker for hundreds of miles, with only a little Hindi. I had a wonderful time, made friends with the people who lived there, and helped out in the fields now and then.

Understand it before you try to fix it

If you want to save the world, you need to understand it first. That is the argument for going into the unknown, making friends in unlikely places, and finding out the truth for yourself rather than taking someone else's word for it.

And if that sounds too serious: travel is for everyone. You do not need a plan, a partner, or a perfect moment. Wait for the ideal time, the ideal place, or the ideal companion and you may never leave at all. Pack the bag, put out your thumb, and go.