Embedded Files
Homebums already make budget travel hard enough in developed countries; now they're apparently bent on ruining it for us in the rest of the world
by Ryan Vagabundo
Thanks to SoloTraveller for the image
As I stated in this blog's inaugural post, "It's meant to embrace, explore and be honestly (sometimes brutally) critical of all the different forms of living without a permanent home."
Usually I try to reserve judgment, because this isn't about advocating for one particular lifestyle or another. We're going to get around to everything from truck driving to living on a yacht.
But today, fair warning - it's time for a little of that brutal criticism.
The Homebums Abroad
We're going to be examining the trend and practice of "begpacking", and things might get a little nasty.
"Begpacking" burst into the public consciousness in early-mid 2017, with this opinion piece in The Telegraph by Radhika Sanghani. If you haven't heard of it before, it's the practice of travelers from Western developed countries funding their trips through less-developed countries and begging on the streets for money, or competing with the local impoverished peoples by selling the same sorts of knickknacks on the streets that they do.
There was a little pushback against this initial article, mostly due to Radhika indiscriminately wrapping busking up in with begging and trinket selling, which confused the issue. There's some general controversy over whether busking is a form of begging, for which I think I have a simple and reasonable answer: if it's good busking that is clearly welcome by the people in the area, it's work, and if it's bad busking it's just really loud begging. (Seriously, if I were dictator of the world, I would sentence everybody who bangs monotonously on a plastic bucket in the street to death by trash compactor). You might also have made the initial argument that the article was just somebody cherry-picking a few choice pictures of the most clueless of the Trustafarians and creating some sort of controversial movement out of it for The Clickzzzz.
But then Thailand started requiring backpackers and ESL teachers on visas to demonstrate they have at least $748 USD available to enter the country. Thanks to incidents like this? Maybe. Maybe more because of undocumented workers sneaking in from neighboring countries. Maybe a little from column A and a little from column B.
That's not all, though. The Vietnamese government felt the need to issue a formal statement banning foreigners from begging in the streets, and it became a hot-button issue covered by local media. And though this is a secondhand source (since the primary is in a language I don't understand), it appears this is becoming an issue in South Korea as well.
That's enough evidence, at least to me, that this is a worrying trend. And it's been (rightfully) bashed in many other places already. The criticism is obvious - privileged kids from wealthy nations, who have a million other options available to them, going to an economically challenged area without means or plan to pay their own way and just expecting the locals to take care of them because they're Mighty Whitey on a totally empowering and important spiritual journey, maaaaaan.
I'd like to dive a little deeper into this phenomenon, though, and cover some points that I'm not seeing other critical posts making.
Bottom-Shelf "Lifestyle Design"
First of all, this strikes me as the final lowering of the bar of "lifestyle design" to its inevitable bottom rung.
If you're not familiar, "lifestyle design" is a bullshitty buzzwordy concept that you can mostly thank Tim Ferriss for. There's a lot of the usual Tony Robbins / Law of Attraction stuff floating around it clouding it up with woo, but the true backbone of his "four hour workweek" concept is basically having a bunch of operating capital and then leveraging it in developing countries to get the cheapest possible labor for your business ideas and the cheapest possible cost of living for yourself.
So basically, exploiting the Third World by leveraging your big Western monies. That's the master plan.
Ferriss' book turned into no end of "nomad blogs", "lifestyle designers" and "location-independent entrepreneurs" finding ways to hustle the world's most poor and desperate, all while making it look like one of those Corona beach commercials.
So, begpackers are basically lifestyle designers who don't have the capital. Instead of leveraging their pile of Western money, they're simply leveraging being able to get away with shit that other people can't (due to local reliance on tourism dollars), being a novelty and abusing the generous natures of the cultures they visit.
The Motley Homebum
I never thought I'd live long enough to see homebums engaging in cost-of-living arbitrage through national border hopping, but here we are.
That's what this is, really. It's the "dropout" homebum (as opposed to homeless people who are homeless due to circumstances), the feral cousin of the "crusty traveler kid", gone abroad because they see a new and rich field of exploitation. It's the same entitled, shitty attitude: "fuck this and fuck everybody, life sucks because it doesn't work exactly the way I want it to, so I'm entitled to just fling myself out in the world and be taken care of, and everyone can just clean up after whatever irresponsible mess I leave because fuck everyone who isn't me."
Basically, they're sociopaths who ended up living broke instead of climbing the corporate ladder.
This is something I wanted to save for its own post, but I'll touch on it and give you a preview here: homebums ruin absolutely everything they can access for everybody, but especially those of us trying to live on the road cheap and travel cheap (but paying our own way). They ruin public parks and beaches, they get restrooms in cities locked down because of their unrelenting abuse of them, they get sit/lie laws passed, they make it dangerous to "stealth camp" in the areas where they congregate, they make long bus rides insufferable ... well, I'll save the rest of it for another day, but you get the idea.
I guess they couldn't be content just ruining the Western cities with plenty of fat to live off of; now they're spreading out like a virus and ruining the rest of the world's public spaces.
The Case Against Begpacking
We've already touched on the totally gross optics of people from richer nations just crashing up into poorer ones with no plan to provide for yourself and feeling entitled to displace the local beggars / low-end labor market for their "amazing personal journey." Sitting there with a handout sign with your Apple products and a DSLR camera is just like the ultimate middle finger to the community you bombed up into.
I understand legitimate emergencies can happen. But if I was in an Asian or African country and a reasonably healthy looking Westerner came up begging at me, my first question would be, have you gone to the embassy for emergency assistance? If they have a sign saying "gibe moni to fund my travel plz", they can fuck straight off to Hell.
I'm sure that people have been doing shit like this sporadically for decades now, probably all the way back to when the Beat Generation started getting fascinated with "authentic low budget travel" in poorer countries. It certainly took place in the '80s and '90s in Europe, as this post points out. So it could be a case of social media just catching up to something old and making it seem new, but the examples of governments specifically addressing it cited above makes me think there's been a specific rush of it recently. Was it maybe spurred by the 2016 TV series Free Ride, as this article suggests?
I'm not against low-budget dirty backpacking around the world or whatever, I don't want this post to come off that way. The key distinction as far as I'm concerned is that you go into it with a plan to provide for yourself. Even if that's stealth camping, work-trade at hostels and scratching out money from some sort of internet blog or "microtask" job, at least you are taking care of yourself and not burdening the places you visit with your royal ass.
So while I do intend No Fixed Address to (mostly) be a judgment-free zone, I do have to take one stand here - being a bum at home is shitty, but going abroad to be a bum is the height of entitled douchebag arrogance. Please, don't be a fucking bum.
Alternatives to "Begpacking" For Making Money In Foreign Countries:
Work at hostels
Set up a viable online career / business that can be run 100% remote before you go
Work as a guide for other Western tourists
Do legitimate busking in areas where it is appropriate and accepted
Slap up a travel blog and document your travels, slap AdSense or something into it, and use it to pitch travel magazines and sites for paying assignments (Andy the Hobotraveler built a whole damn life out of this)
Teach ESL
Look for temporary jobs at resorts and big hotels where they would like to have a Western face in a customer-facing position to cater to Western tourists
WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms)
Work as a movie extra in areas that have a film industry
Sell stock photography
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse