Image made with Canva
As anyone who’s ever planned a trip can attest, travelling is bloody expensive. It’s dangerously easy to overshoot your budget or have a travel emergency, such as a stolen wallet, slash your funds.
Being a travel-lover with a rather small budget myself, I understand the desire to minimise your costs as much as possible. Hell, I take advantage of discounts whenever I can!
However, there’s a certain brand of budget travelling that leaves a real stink in the air: begpacking.
Wait a sec — what’s begpacking?
A relatively new term, ‘begpacking’ is a portmanteau of the words ‘begging’ and ‘backpacking’. It refers to the practice of travelling to developing countries and then begging for cash in order to fund one’s travel expenses, accommodation, and food.
Never really coming across begpackers on the regular when I was growing up, it was initially hard to see why this behaviour was widely regarded as super shitty.
It wasn’t until I starting travelling abroad myself — and meeting my first begpackers! — that I understood why media outlets from CNN to The Guardian were generally disparaging of the practice.
And let me just say, begpackers give you loads of reasons to hate them.
One rule for me and another for thee
If you’re from most countries in the Global South, getting a visa to Europe or North America is quite the process. In particular, your ability to financially provide for yourself will play a huge part in determining whether or not your visa application is approved.
In other words, us Global Southies don’t have the privilege of rocking up to passport control dead broke and expecting to gain entry to a foreign country. We can’t, for example, head to the Netherlands and expect the Dutch to fund our entire trip, just because we’ve always dreamt of seeing windmills, canals, and tulips.
To quote one Twitter user, “You would never see people do this in Europe, because they actually respect those countries. Once in SEA, we have to fulfil their fantasies of begpacking and exotic adventures.”
Meanwhile, another user noted that begpackers often disobey laws against working on tourist visas, but face no consequences: “Nothing speaks of passport privilege louder than the existence of begpacking itself. Have [sic] it been Thais or Indonesians in their countries, we’d swiftly be on international blacklists.”
And that’s precisely why begpacking gets such a bad rap.
You can smell the hypocrisy in the air
The bottom line is, it’s disgustingly tone-deaf for citizens of rich, Western countries to expect locals from poor countries to foot their travel bills. Whatever argument that’s used to justify it — from ‘finding oneself’ to ‘aligning one’s chakras’ — just reeks of off-brand colonialism.
I think this Tweet perfectly sums up what many of us feel about the topic: “Instead of leeching money off locals while positioning yourself close those who struggle to make ends meet, SAVE UP ENOUGH MONEY OR DON’T TRAVEL AT ALL!”
What do you think of begpacking?
Leave a Reply