My Style of Travel

I am the kind of traveller that makes their plans while on the run. Often I am completely undecided about the next stop on my trip until the day before I am ready to move on. I love the freedom this gives me. Being able to travel with no pre-arranged plans and no strict itinerary is incredibly liberating. If I meet some interesting people in a hostel and they invite me to travel with them to a destination I had not previously planned on going to, I want to be able to say yes. If I travel with a detailed itinerary I would need to throw it away every time a chance encounter like this happens. And this kind of thing happens to me a lot!

As a result of this style of travel, I often turn up to a new city with no detailed plan of what to do. But this no longer causes me any apprehension because I have learnt how easy it is to create travel plans on the go. Any decent hostel, certainly every hostel that I recommend, will have a plethora of detailed information for you to digest on arrival. I always jump on a free walking tour as soon as I can after arriving in a new city because it teaches me a lot about your new location very quickly. Normally my first half day is spent learning about the city at this superficial level and very quickly a more detailed itinerary begins to create itself.

However I do like to have some basic information on my next destination sorted before arriving. Just enough information for me to be able to hit that first day running. I need to know where my hostel is (and one other backup), where I can find some cheap food close by, a decent bar and some free walking tour information. Some basic public transportation info is also great. For everything else, I know that I will pick it up as I go along, by talking to other travellers, talking to hostel staff, and on a walking tour.

To find this basic information, I need to use multiple sources. I would check hostelworld to find my accommodation, a blog post or tripadvisor to find a decent bar or street food vendor, and a google search to find some information on a free walking tour. On top of that, a lot of the bar and food recommendations I find don't suit my budget. It occurred to me that a travel website catered to the budget backpacker with all of this basic information documented very succinctly would be very useful. If one existed I would use it all the time. Out of this idea grew BackpackerTrack.com. Hopefully you will find it as useful!