Freestyle Backpacking? It Doesn’t Always Work…

Back in the early days, I’m talking 2009 so not that long ago at all really, we dreamed of being travel extraordinaire’s. Loading small backpacks with only the most essential of items and disappearing into the middle of nowhere with guide books in hand.

While that have might not have turned out to be completely the case when we finally hit the road a year later, there have been periods where we’ve had no plans and just gone with the flow. Often it’s resulted in some incredible experiences but on more than one occasion it’s cost us a lot of time and money.

China

Beijing was the very first stop on our original backpacking trip. We took a train from the airport into the centre of the city and emerged from the underground to a whole different world. As is still a trait of ours, we’d rushed to scribble down the directions to the hostel and they barely made any sense at all. It took us nearly an hour to find our beds and set the tone for a difficult (and equally amazing) six weeks in China.

Blending in (China Style)

Our next big mistake involved transport, we hoped to be able to simply jump on a train out of Beijing to our next stop, Xian and Terracotta Army, whenever we felt like it. Wrong. We arrived enthusiastically at the train station to be told the next seats available where over a week away. We couldn’t wait that long, it would put our whole trip in China behind and mean we’d miss even more in the long run, years later and we still haven’t seen the Terracotta Army, one of the main attractions in China we were looking forward to.

We eventually left Beijing on route to Hangzhou, a place we enjoyed a lot, unfortunately due to our lack of forward planning we had to purchase some of the most expensive seats on the train to get there. While the journey was great and included one of the best nights sleep of our trip, it put a huge dent in our budget for the next few weeks.

Thankfully, as our time in China went on we became much more efficient at forward planning and got the hang of planning our journeys in advance to make the most of our time and money

However, one thing that didn’t improve was our experience with food. Before arriving in China we were excited to experiment with the food however, after a couple of weeks, we’d had enough. Of course, we were finding the odd street food gem or perfect hot pot but on the whole, we were not enjoying the food as we’d expected. Most meals were a struggle and finding food became more of a chore than enjoyable.

First meal in China.

While it’s easy to look back on these hiccups now and write them off as not a big deal, there is still a part of us that doesn’t feel like we made the most of our time in China. Six weeks is a long time and we definitely could have done more with the right guidance.

Since our visit, we’ve had friends visit China and they chose to do it very differently, as part of a tour group. Their story is vastly different to ours, they had all the transport arranged for them, the best and most interesting food laid out for them to try and the choice of various activities that best suited them. A particular highlight being camping on the great wall of China.

While it wouldn’t usually be our thing, some destinations do warrant a bit more help than you might usually accept. Tanzania is another where despite having the most amazing time we still feel like with a little help we would have been able to achieve much more with our time.

Travel companies like Wexas offer organised trips to both China and Tanzania and it’s something we wished we looked into more in the past. Now we’re living and working in Bucharest we don’t imagine ourselves jumping on trains with Backpacks anytime soon but that doesn’t change our desire to see the world. With more limited time I’d happily consider letting someone else do the hard work for me, particularly to a dream destination where I wouldn’t want to miss anything.

I quite fancy Mozambique next…