Quotes & Sayings About Backpacking

What am I going to do?
I wish I knew the answer, Sienna. The man your going to marry is walking this earth. He's alive right now, somewhere. He could be in Australia, backpacking with friends; he could be working in a bar in China; he could be a hotshot American lawyer; he could be a musician; he could be going about his life in London at this very moment ... Any day now, your paths could cross. She smiled when I said this, like it brought her comfort. — Jessica Thompson

When I left school, I went backpacking around the world for two years. — Georgia Salpa

The old school of thought would have you believe that you'd be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn't what being in nature is all about. Rather, it's about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization - not bringing them with us. — Ryel Kestenbaum

The rule of thumb for the old backpacking was that the weight of your pack should equal the weight of yourself and the kitchen range combined. Just a casual glance at the full pack sitting on the floor could give you a double hernia and fuse four vertebrae. After carrying the pack all day, you had to remember to tie one leg to a tree before you dropped it. Otherwise you would float off into space. The pack eliminated the need for any special kind of ground-gripping shoes, because your feet would sink a foot and a half into hard-packed earth, two inches into solid rock. — Patrick F. McManus

Backpacking is the art of knowing what not to take. — Sheridan Anderson

I see myself being married to my girlfriend and backpacking all over the world. If I can go out and do a 15-mile hike and climb a 12,000-ft. peak, I'm good to go. — Matt Long

Do not make your child your only hobby or you will end up waiting by the telephone in a cheery room covered in brittle, yellowed crayon drawings, regaling those few friends that are left with stale anecdotes about your youngster's accomplishments. Your little baby will be off in college, or backpacking in the Amazon, or on the other side of the country trying to get as far away from home as possible, and you will begin collecting porcelain frogs and feeding stray cats. So now is the time to start getting that life to fall back on. You know what you must do. Do it for your child. Do it for me, and for everyone out there who has to deal with your child for the rest of your child's life. And do it for yourself. — Christie Mellor

Faxian and Xuanzang might have been the first Chinese to travel to India, but sometimes it felt like I was the first. — Hong Mei

When I was a teenager, I went to Europe on a backpacking trip by myself, and I met a woman who was following Sebadoh. It was the early 1990s, and that was my introduction to indie rock. — Jenny Lewis

The world isn't built with a ramp. — Walt Balenovich

It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.
It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. — Cheryl Strayed

Sunrise over the mountain-forest was gorgeous - Aurora brushing out her golden tresses with a comb of dark-needled pine and bare-limbed oak. — J. Aleksandr Wootton

Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice. — Charles Bukowski

There is a lot of stuff I like. I love backpacking. I love going to an island where I can just sit on the beach and read or scuba dive and sail. I do a lot of that. I still go backpacking around Europe in the summers and staying in hostels. I love that. — Sam Altman

I was a little hippie on a world backpacking adventure, and suddenly I became a vampire princess. I still find it hard to believe that it is real. I feel ludicrously lucky to have been chosen to play such a compassionate, complex character for my first film, and I am so grateful to all the beautiful people who made it possible for me. It was a dream come true. I felt like Cinderella every day, going to work with this amazing team on this dream script. If Cinderella were a vampire. — Lucy Fry

Backpackers can pack much more meows than baggers. Beggars never feed stray cats as street cats are self-sustaining. — Will Advise

The rite of passage of learning to build a fire that will burn all night with one match is not an insignificant one in my husband's family, and I grew up camping and backpacking. I love to camp. — Sarah Wayne Callies

I'd really like to get on a Greyhound bus and go backpacking across America. — David Morrissey

Tragedy seems to bring out all varieties of unexpected qualities in people. It was as if some folks got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell. And others seemed to have just the opposite problem, as if disaster had dipped them in acid instead, stripping off the outside layer of skin that once protected them from the slings and arrows of other people's outrageous fortunes. For these sorts, just walking down the street in the wake of every stranger's ill wind became an agony, an aching slog through this man's fresh divorce and this woman's throat cancer. They were in hell, too, but it was everybody's hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste. — Lionel Shriver

Although the vast majority of walkers never even think of using a walking staff, I unhesitatingly include it among the foundations of the house that travels on my back. — Colin Fletcher

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else. — Lawrence Block

I had about as much chance to do that as I did of backpacking my car to the top of Mount Rushmore. — Jim Butcher

Someone once told me a story about long term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through Africa, and I would still never know all there is to know about that continent. To stay the course, to stay intentional, to stay curious and connected - that's the heart of it. But it's so easy to lose track of the trail, to get tired, to want to give up, or to want a new adventure. It can be so easy to lose sight of the goodness and mystery within the person sitting right in front of you. — Joy Williams

Backpacking has noble ideals: to see how the locals live, to interact with them, to be respectful and blend in as much as possible. Backpackers want to learn, we want to understand the worlds we have entered, not simply consume them. — Rachel Friedman

I would never go travelling on my own. Some people like to go backpacking alone, but there's no way I would do that, even if you paid me - I just don't see the point. If I discover something beautiful, for me it's very important to be able to share it with someone and not just see it for myself. — Olga Kurylenko

Meandering cows, tenacious bicyclers, belching taxis, rickshaws, fearless pedestrians and the occasional mobile 'cigarette and sweets' stand all fought our taxi for room on the narrow two-lane road turned local byway. — Jennifer S. Alderson

After the cafes of Paris with their exquisite wines and creamy fromages, crepes and steak tartare
screaming Adore me!
Madrid was these store-bought hunks of unyielding cheese and brick-hard baguettes, consumed in leafless Buen Retiro Park.ll Madrid, dressed as it was, tasting as it did, prideful as hell, didn't care what you thought about it on your junior-year backpacking trip. That was your problem. — Michael Paterniti

Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing. I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old. — Aldo Leopold

Go to other countries. Not a typical backpacking tour. Planned tour
means you will hang with Americans on bikes and flirt with drunk
Germans and someone will steal your Levi's in the hostel and a guy
from Poland will sock you in the face while bad techno plays
everywhere and you will learn nothing except that your face hurts and
not everyone showers. Get into other cultures and talk politics and
love. Meeting other people is the only way to know if you believe what
you believe cause it's been handed to you, or if it really rings true
in your heart.
Getting lost should be seen as a sweet chance to be found.
Remember, you belong everywhere. — Derrick Brown

And now I just keep running. Maybe not physically anymore, but my mind and heart are backpacking through the darkest corners of the world trying to get farther and farther away. — Nyrae Dawn

I kind of missed out on those years when a lot of my friends did big backpacking trips around Europe and that sort of thing. So to be able to travel and see parts of the world on the job is kind of a double whammy. — Jai Courtney

It's not "jalan-jalan" nor "liburan". It's just something we do naturally. Like breathing and eating. It's basically living. — Riana Ambarsari

When I was 23, I went backpacking around Australia for three months. I saved up a few grand, quit my job and flew to Sydney, then went to Melbourne and up the East Coast, which was an incredible experience. I remember running out of money and getting my mum to send me a few hundred quid, which helped me get by. — Olly Murs

Joy of Backpacking, — Elizabeth Wenk

Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners ... If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything ... Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another. — Neal Stephenson

When I travel, people say 'Yet another place in this world'. But I see 'Another world inside every place I go — Vivek Thangaswamy

After a lifetime of soft, easy living in the West, one's buttocks take an awful hammering out here. Backpacking around India is just one long round of sitting on bone-hard, chafing, bruising and generally uncomfortable seats-whether in buses our trains, or restaurants or cinemas. There is no such thing as a padded seat in the whole country. — Frank Kusy

I've been doing long-distance backpacking since 2002 when I hiked the Appalachian Trail. You start to calm down and relax and get into the slower rhythm of nature. — John Mackey

...That's the difference between backpackers and holiday makers. The former can't help but invite hassle whilst the latter pay to escape it. — Harry Whitewolf

Always take the scenic route. — Janice Anderson

When I was 18 years old, in a more innocent time, my first backpacking trip through Europe, I sneaked into the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum after nightfall and spent several hours in there avoiding the guards patrolling. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I'd say I needed to find myself, if that didn't sound like I was heading into the Himalayas, taking only a backpack stuffed with angst and clean underwear. — Kelley Armstrong

If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. There's this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking. — Cheryl Strayed

Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto-trunk and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage. — Aldo Leopold

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror. — Glen Duncan

Books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants. — Jon Krakauer

My first time to Rome was when I was backpacking with my best friend around Europe for a month at 18 years old, so I remember that excitement of being away from home properly for the first time. — Natalie Dormer

Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn't just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. — Cheryl Strayed

In 1995, when I was backpacking through Europe solo, I would head to the train station, look up at the big board, and decide right there and then where I would go that day. — Joseph Pisani

I'd really like to visit India and South America. I think India will be a great mix of sightseeing and relaxing, and I've got a feeling it will also be good for one's soul and spirit. And I'd love to go backpacking around South America at some point. I did that in Australia when I was younger, and the camaraderie was great fun. — Emilia Fox

The success that comes from my books is not something I feel very comfortable with. Past a certain point you have to accept the idea that the success is a lot to do with the timing and luck and that divorces you from it massively. There are aspects of it that I haven't got used to at all. But I've enjoyed some parts of it massively. It relates to the same reason I did a lot of backpacking - partly for the experience - it's something to tell my grandkids. It's a weird chain of events to have in your life. — Alex Garland

I quit my job. I bought myself a real cheap, like, around-the-world flight ticket, and I went to 16 countries for six months just backpacking, living in cheap hostels, looking for stories with a camera and my ex-girlfriend. — Malik Bendjelloul

Under most conditions, the best roof for your bedroom is the sky. This commonsense arrangement saves weight, time, energy, and money. — Colin Fletcher