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.

To a restaurant in Tirana

Oda Traditional Restaurant, Pazari I Ri 

There’s a restaurant in Albania’s capital. Tucked away off a side street close to Pazari-ri market, it is completely inconspicuous from the outside. A tall white wall stops passers-by from being able to peek into its terrace - when you are inside, you get the impression of being at a local restaurant in a secluded Greek island where all the walls are painted in that kind of white. Men dressed in tall hats carrying their instruments journey through the restaurant, singing to various onlookers as they wait for their food. The food is served on huge plates - a mountain of bread, white cheese cut into cubes, rice wrapped in huge cabbage leaf packages, all placed on the table to share.

I have been to Tirana three times in the past nine months, a sequence of events I certainly did not expect to occur. Each time I have visited the city has been very different - alone, then in love, and then alone again. First in winter, then in spring and finally in summer. And each time, Oda Traditional Restaurant has served as a familiar monument, a tiny container of my experience in this city. Each time I went to this restaurant with strangers, and yet, somehow we always fell into the same rhythm. We would find each other in the garden of our hostel, or by chatting from across our dorm beds. We would ask each other where we had heard it was good to eat in this city, and we always seemed to land on Oda. A few jugs of wine for the table? Why not? On that first trip back in February, our group that began as three quickly became nine. We went around the table introducing ourselves, not knowing that by the end of the meal we would feel like old friends. I wonder what the waiters thought of us - nine strangers laughing loudly within this now empty restaurant and eating so late because we could not pause our conversation long enough to look at the menu and order. 

At that moment I don't think I could have believed how terrified I had been as I took that train to the airport. I had felt lonely in Lent and Skyscanner led me to an £18 flight to Tirana that was just a week away. My housemates warned me about organ trafficking and I boarded a plane not knowing that I would be back there again less than a month later with a girl I had just met, or again in summer, where I would spend two weeks amongst backpackers. 

In the Blloku Neighbourhood 

People have asked me why I am so attracted to Tirana and I can’t always give an answer. It isn't glamorous or particularly busy. There isn't that much to see and do and the nightlife is disastrous, as others have constantly reminded me. There are so many potholes, I can't even count the amount of times I've fallen over. It isn't the cheapest or most friendly city in the Balkans. The cars won't stop when you cross the road, stray dogs might follow you home for food and you never know if they might bite you. The best alcohol to drink is homemade raki served in reused water bottles and tastes like bleach. Buses never run on time, or they won't leave until every single seat is full. This is the city where I threw up for the first time in ten years, my biggest fear, one that I never thought I could survive. A city where I have felt lonely, where I have cried, where I have  been scammed…

The Park on the Artificial Lake

But Tirana is also the reason that I truly fell in love. I got to share a pomegranate by the lake and a jug of wine at a beautiful restaurant and make friends who made me realise that life won't just end when I'm 25. Tirana made me realise that Cambridge might actually be okay too, that I can leave and there will be more than this and I can be part of it. I got to see colourful buildings, street chess tables surrounded by tens of old men on a Thursday morning, book sellers lining their books up on the side of the road. I got to climb the stairs on the pyramid of Tirana and see the whole city at once, closer to those mountains that are always on the horizon. I got to wrap up in my coat in winter, wear a light shirt in the spring, and boil in the heat of the summer. Tirana was always sunny though. This city always has its way of pulling me in. The cheap flight was the catalyst, but what kept me coming back was those mountains, the smell of the olives at the markets, the lake at sunset, and the assortment of people that I encountered each time and spilled my heart out to at that restaurant. I think Tirana just might be the most beautiful city in the world.

All images belong to the author, unless otherwise stated.