A lesson learned from backpackers: embrace chaos, and call it liminality instead!
Sunset over the confluence of the River Sava and the Danube, with the metropolis of Belgrade in the background. One of the most striking sunsets I have ever seen. The famous brutalist ‘Western gate’ is seen to the left.
It is a cliché to say that brief adventures are meaningful precisely because they’re so fleeting. The idea of “cherishing the moment” has cemented itself into the popular consciousness of many travellers, especially backpackers, who, we are told, must truly cherish every moment of their brief sojourns in the places they visit. Yet, while travelling the Balkans in the summer of 2023, I learned a slightly different lesson from my fellow backpackers.
I was lucky enough to study backpacker tourists in the Balkans for my undergraduate thesis (insert joke about questionably serious humanities dissertations). Many of my participants were always in a rush to move on to the next destination—no sooner did they arrive that they were already plotting the next journey. One person, whom I will call Ruby, had been travelling for two years non-stop, and almost never spent more than one night in a place. She told me that she wanted to ‘tick places off the map’—a literal map that she had in her notepad. Others told me about their desire to gather stamps on passports, to cross borders, or ‘see everything.’ Another traveller whom I met in Belgrade, Gabriel, told me he had to leave the city within a few days to prevent himself from getting ‘too comfortable.’ For him, backpacking was an escapism from his home life but also from himself; he told me that he would start thinking about his own life and identity if he stopped even for a moment. Being on the move thus also meant running away from himself.
Initially, I was rather taken aback by this—maybe even a little repulsed. It felt like these travellers were incredibly out of touch and they never “lived in the moment,” to conjure up another cliché. But I soon learned (and tried to convince the anthropology department) that this ‘race through the Balkans’ meant something profound to them. They found meaning in what I referred to as “liminality,” or a state of in-betweenness. Liminality, following the anthropologist Turner (1967), means the state of heightened emotion and energy while “betwixt and between” social statuses, life-stages, or places. Many people I studied in the Balkans sought out these kinds of experiences. If seven-hour Flixbus journeys or one night hostel stays sound like your worst nightmare, think again. To these Balkan backpackers, such experiences were perfect because they took the idea of ‘escape’ to new heights. There was never any stability and that was a good thing. They ‘found themselves’ (cliché number three) on those long journeys and uncertain trajectories by embracing this momentary detachment and disconnection from cultural and social life. Of course, most of them ended up seeking out profound experiences when they arrived—but the journey was meaningful too.
View of the Bosnian countryside—from a coach. Some of the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen has been during these long journeys through obscure stretches of countryside.
It seems to me that our search for richness and authenticity in our travels creates a certain perfectionism, something I also experience as I constantly move between my hometown and university. In both cases, I tell myself that ‘I must find depth and meaning here.’ I’m never satisfied that I’ve made the most of an eight-week term and I worry that my home life is too devoid of social energy. While travelling, I have many of the same thoughts: ‘I spent a lot of money to be here, have I made the most of it?’ My participants deliberately eschewed that kind of thinking, letting go of considerations of permanence and attachment. Many of them also experienced chaotic home lives, and decided to embrace the liminality of their youth by finding meaning in the experience of in-betweenness. They packed their bags and decided to live ‘on the road.’ So it’s not just that fleeting experiences are delightful because they force us to cherish the ‘moment.’ Instead, maybe the point is that the utopian ‘moment’ of rich cultural experience doesn’t matter as much as we think it does.
A typical sight on both a tourist’s and local’s café table.
In 1978, Brian Eno released his famous album Music for Airports, which laid the foundation for a new aesthetic in our globalised world, the ‘generic’ of “Ambient Music.” This music, which I’m sure readers have heard at airports or other liminal travel zones, attends to the human experience of transit as an experience in and of itself, rather than merely a means to an end. It’s an ambiguous experience, but nonetheless something meaningful in its ambivalence. Transit has an aesthetic of its own and I think backpacking is all about that. In the Balkans I learned the perhaps obvious lesson that in backpacking, the most important artefact is probably the backpack itself, a symbol of freedom from the constraints of everyday reality. To embrace mobility was a crucial, albeit rather scary, step for many of my participants.
Of course, this isn’t to say that experiencing meaning, connection, and foreign cultures is undesirable. But we all already know that. Most of the people I met in the Balkans did want to understand cultural otherness and make deep connections (except for some extreme cases!). But what I think we don’t always know—indeed, what I didn’t know before the summer of 2023—is that there’s more to travel than just ‘experiencing culture.’ Being in-between is a really precious experience that we might not have access to forever, and that applies both to travel and to university life. So never mind that the Ryanair flight is three hours late, or that you budgeted so hard that you end up having twenty three hours to see all of Paris—enjoy losing yourself in the rush!
The main public bus station of Belgrade, Zeleni Venac on a summer evening.
All images belong to the author, unless otherwise stated.