Geoff Dyer: ‘I’ll Be a Backpacker Till I Die’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 04.14.03 | 3:42 PM ET
“Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It” author Geoff Dyer reveals his taste in travel friends, his refusal to take photos while on the road and why he’ll always be a backpacker in a Q-and-A in Sunday’s Washington Post. “Recently, I was in Tahiti and I was staying at a big hotel, a Sheraton. That experience turns the world into a huge golf course. Even the ocean looked like it was part of a golf course,” Dyer tells David Wallis. “This kind of tourism is marked by a lack of independence. Everything is arranged for you. All your relationships are just with slaves, the servants of huge multinational hotel chains. There people are snooty and dismissive of backpackers, but all hail the backpacker in comparison, because they have an authentic experience and the money they [spend] goes directly to the family that owns the pension. In a version of the Bryan Adams song ‘18 Till I Die,’ I’ll be a backpacker till I die.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
