A white woman’s account of backpacking through southeast Asia? Groundbreaking.

In a post-social media world, I find it impossible to regale you with my trip through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos without first doing some throat-clearing. “Doing” southeast Asia “on a shoestring” has become such a traveller’s cliche – so tainted by association with the most obnoxious type of tourists; the eat-pray-love woman and the fakedeep Kerouacian man – that to be even tangentially associated feels like social suicide. The egoic urge to distance myself from these guys is strong. 

But it is Travel Week on The Spinoff, and we’re talking about our greatest trips. And cliche or not, backpacking through southeast Asia was a really, really great trip of mine. 

It was 2010, I was 23, and I spent the bulk of my Sir Robert Jones Scholarship in Philosophy winnings on flights to Bangkok over the uni summer break. (The scholarship is now defunct, maybe because undergrad philosophers kept doing this kind of thing with the prize money.) I would fly solo into the Thai capital mid November, loop counterclockwise through the four countries and finish up where I started, flying home in mid February. Return flights cost $1,399, which I booked through STA Travel (RIP). My budget for the entire trip was $3,000, and I didn’t go into the red. 

I know this sounds insane and implausible. I have checked and re-checked that I’m not misremembering this figure. But I really did survive – thrive, honestly – on an average of $33 a day, seizing every $10-per-night hostel, 16-hour chicken bus and $1 roadside Pad Thai I came across. 

Smartphones existed in 2010 but I didn’t own one, so I navigated using only a dog-eared Lonely Planet. Unimaginable now, but guidebooks still ruled the day. Thai and Cambodian locals had a good hustle whereby they’d open an identically named restaurant or attraction to whatever Lonely Planet had raved about, so that when I tried to find, for example, the Thai massage parlour charitably employing blind masseuses, I found there were about six of them on the same street – some containing fake-blind workers, according to other travellers in my hostel. 

Backpacking in southeast Asia was (and probably still is) mortifying for this reason: you’re constantly being warned by worldweary, middle-class Brits and Israelis about all the ways locals might cheat you out of an extra $2. And a lot of the locals are trying to cheat you, all the time, but given their relative station in life, it’s pathetic to fight it or even care, but so many backpackers do, because they’re on $33-a-day budgets.

I feel the urge to throat-clear rising again. I wasn’t like this! I’m not like other backpackers! But in the interests of avoiding this kind of posturing, which is boring and probably not even true, I’ll get straight to the point, which is relaying what a bloody good time I had.

I had such a bloody good time. The roadside Pad Thai was $1! Sometimes less! In Kep, a dreamy Cambodian seaside town, I ate Kampot pepper crab by the water’s edge; a meal so transcendentally good I’m transported back to it whenever I’m posed the “death-row last meal” hypothetical. I have similar memories of a massaman curry in the thicket of trees behind Railay Beach in Thailand, the single most picturesque beach I’ve clapped eyes on, and of roadside breakfast bánh mì in Huế, Vietnam, loaded with freshly scrambled eggs and coriander on a perfectly crisp baguette (again, $1). Maybe eight out of 10 of the best meals of my life took place during that three-month window, and altogether they cost me little more than a tenner.

I made fast friends with a French woman whose homoerotic advances I encouraged then danced around. She was so free-spirited it made me nervous. “You have the same approach to nudity as the English,” she told me derisively. One night we lay in bed in stomach-clenching hysterics comparing animal noises in English and French. “What does a duck say?” she’d ask, shrieking with laughter as I quacked. “What does a French duck say?” I’d respond, doubled over, actually rolling, while she coin coin-ed away. 

In the communal area of a Thai hostel we drank mushroom shakes; she boldly (experienced) and me tentatively (not). You could get the death penalty for drug crimes in Thailand, yet every second hostel offered mushroom shakes and pre-rolled joints. I found this dynamic dampened my appetite for experimentation, but I was quite alone on that front. Still, I braved a shake, and a group of us sat laughing and drinking by a campfire (yes) until the wee hours. When I finally returned to my hostel I lay for a while lamenting that the shake had had no effect. As I pondered this, I noticed that my ordinary, garden-variety, stationary single bed was swinging like a hammock. 

I saw the sun rise over Angkor Wat. I zoomed through so many bustling city streets on the back of so many mopeds. I drank 10c beer on plastic stools in Hanoi; surveyed the rice terraces of Sapa; fed monkeys on islands in Halong Bay. I slept overnight in a sleeping bag on the beach where they filmed The Beach; the water irradiated by bioluminescent plankton. I was travelling solo, but I was never alone. I cannot describe how fun it was. 

I saw horrors in southeast Asia that still haunt me in flashes. Malnourished mothers begging for powdered milk for their drowsy babies on Pub Street, Siem Reap. The Killing Fields and the portraits of victims in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum; the way I made myself look into the eyes of every single one, taking hours longer to move through the complex than all the other visitors. A shiny, piglike, American man bellowing across a restaurant patio that it was actually good that he paid young Thai girls $30 to fuck him, because they’d take that money straight home to their families. A Cambodian beggar so impossibly deformed that for a second I couldn’t make out what was in front of me, and whose shuffling approach caused me, to my everlasting shame, to turn and head in the opposite direction. 

There’s a reason what goes on tour stays on tour, I guess. I’m not even going to get into Vang Vieng, which I experienced full-throttle in its heyday (or nadir). Western tourists in southeast Asia deserve their reputation, and I can’t honestly hold myself out as a counterexample. That said, if I could do it all again – relive not just the individual experiences, exhilarating and terrifying and life-affirming as they were, but cultivate again that spirit of hedonic experimentation at all costs; that glorious, pre-social-media feeling of not being surveilled, either by my scolding peers or scolding conscience – trust me, I would.