by Tasha Sudan It is way after midnight and my boyfriend and I lie sleepless in a dingy Oaxacan posada, staring vacantly at the tellltale irregularities in the brick roof above our heads.Their lack of slick, first world uniformity does little to distract us from the less charming aspects of travelling budget in Mexico; the smell of a broken sewage pipe outside our door, the unflushable toilet, the unlockable door, the outside wall of our room which is blackened ominously by two archaic gas cylinders. And, perhaps the biggest drawback of all (which, incidently, rarely gets a mention in any guidebook) - other budget travellers. All the backpackers in Mexico seem to be jammed into the room next door, the guests of an increadibly annoying Dutch couple who seem to have been in every budget hotel we have stayed in everywhere across the length and breadth of Mexico. Which would figure, since they have the Lonely Planet Mexico too. Right now, at 3am, they are playing a tape on a scratchy stereo that we guess is supposed to be mariachi music but sounds about as authentic as Speedy Gonzales. It’s so loud, they may as well be beating us over the head with a ukelele. It’s hard to figure out from here which is the most pervasive and nauseating smell; the mescal or the marijuana (at this time of night, after 48 hours of travel, nothing smells good) - and equally as tricky, which is the most annoying backpacker; the english guy droning on about the joys of sleeping atop a ruin naked in Tikal, the french boy relating his encounters with a brujo ("He made the cow better, man, it was lying down and when he whispered to it it stood up"), or the two dutch girls who just giggle and whose english vocabulary seems limited to those two essential travel words - ‘wow’ and ‘cool’. Eventually we decide they all deserve to have their tongues rubbed with jalapenos. "He made the cow better, man..."   After a few more hours their conversations progress to the metaphyisical level: "No, man, I really believe something happens to you when you die" (no, really?), and my boyfriend and I are just about ready to unsheath our swiss army knives and make balaclavas of our pillowcases and pretend we are Zapatistas and give them a ‘real’ Mexican experience to write home about. Fortunately, the dutch couple start throwing up in the bathroom and the other backpackers begin to make a languid and lengthy retreat to their rooms. We lie listening to the romantic noises of the couple vomiting in unison and wishing we could afford some glitzy hotel in Acapulco. We make a pact that we will never again stay in any hotel in the accomodation section of our guidebook.The place is infested with Lonely Planet disciples. The problem, we decide, when we have gained enough sleep to think straight, is that we are travelling budget out of necessity, not because of a deluded desire for grassroots travel. We would have exchanged the wholesome pleasures of our $10 a night posada for the cushy pad of a Oaxacan five-star hotel in a second, to hell with credibility. But I know that these folk in the next room are the kind that really relish the backpacker thing and the infinite joys of travelling in sarongs and canoe sandals with only a Guatemalan shoulder bag through each page of the Lonely Planet Mexico Survival Kit. In "South East Asia On a Shoestring", the book that would one day spawn the entire Lonely Planet empire, Tony Wheeler, LP founder, describes the ‘shoestring’ traveller like this: "Tourists stay in Hiltons, travellers don’t. The traveller wants to see the country at ground level, to breathe it, experience it - live it. So blend in, enjoy yourself, but most important, make it easy for the travellers who are going to follow in your footsteps." (And, I would hasten to add, for those trying to sleep in the next goddamn room.) It was with this statement that Tony Wheeler popularized the notion of the budget traveller. Not only did he make it easy for those following his footsteps, for many, he made it possible.   Tony’s vision was a great one, concieved at a time when he may not have been able to forsee the huge appeal of the backpacking mode of travel. He had, and probably still has, a genuine interest in low-impact tourism and travelling with an awareness and sensitivity to the country you are in. Alas, for all his good intentions, many of those travellers who use LP guidebooks are often as damaging and offensive to the countries they visit as the regular tourist. And as for ‘blending in’ or ‘living it’, these guys are about as in with the locals as Cortez. I wonder if Tony has, in any small way, questions of conscience of his own, about the enormous popularity of his guidebooks, and therefore of the traffic to the places his books cover. I don’t mean to suggest he is responsible for the impossibility now of finding an ‘off the beaten track’; but you cannot help but notice as a traveller to a place like Mexico the frequency with which even the remotest destinations are populated by backpackers clutching their LP’s like a sacred text. The problem is not Tony’s guides, but the homogeneous travel experience guides like his have facilitated. No longer must you find your own way from place to place by actually communicating with the people around you. No longer can you be pleasantly surprised by arriving at a place you never imagined in the middle of nowhere, or the breathless, unexpected view from the hilltop of a tiny village you don't even know the name of. Nor must you discover the different dishes of a country or fruits at the market by blindly sampling them - now you can look them up in the ‘food’ section of your tragically informative relevent guidebook. The irony of the guidebook trip is that it precludes the very ‘grass roots’, what the hell just get in there and try it, experiences it tries to facilitate. Ok, you might say, just go without the goddamn book then. But what could be more frustrating than going through the gruelling experience of arriving at a deserted, idyllic location completely unaided, only to be greeted by a kombi van full of German tourists who simply joined the dots in their guidebook? The sad thing for me is that even the existence of such thorough guidebooks greatly reduces one of the most rewarding aspects of travel - the element of surprise. Chance, too, is left in the airport boarding lounge. After a while, consulting the guidebook makes you fell like no square foot of the country is left unmapped, and that your own travels will (and can only) ever be along a predictable trajectory peppered by the slight variations of day to day contact with the people of your host country (or, more likely, other backpackers). It begins to sound more and more like a guided tour, only your guide is not a loudmouthed american in a bad hat but an annoyingly politically correct and flavourless text. And the traveller becomes the tourist.   Still, the backpackers seem not to have noticed. In Palenque we watched a trio of bearded and unwashed americans eating toxic streetfood, pitched at just the right gringo price (which they still, insultingly, felt the need to barter over), get into a chicken bus bound for San Cristobel de las Casas along perhaps one of the most dangerous stretches of road in Mexico. We took a bus to the same place, leaving at the same time, only this was a ‘premiere’, the fare costing one dollar more. It was full of Mexicans who knew better than to take the option with completely bald tyres. But for these backpackers, it was obvious that the ‘authentic’ experience was priceless. They probably would have even paid more for it. I think it’s necessary now to redefine what we want from budget travel. It’s no longer possible to expect to experience the ‘real’ Mexico in a world where you would be hardpressed to find a place that doesn’t sell coke and lucky strikes. I think too that the lifestyle of backpacking and the mentality it seems to create is increasingly redundant when the journey is no longer about the journey itself and the discovery of unheard of, unimagineable things, but instead becomes a slavish imitation of travel at a time when there still was space off the beaten track. Before the world become one big beaten planet. It’s still possible to have a rewarding travel experience if you can be blind and stupid ( our Dutch pals in the next room), or adapt your expectations and method of travel to the time in which you live (me, I hope). It can do less damage to stay in a Hilton every now and then (if you can afford to), instead of trashing the last outposts of less frequented areas with your insistence on seeing the ‘real’ and the ‘unspoilt’. It is possible to watch a country globalizing and gain more from that experience than months of lying naked atop archeological sites or grilling brujos for spiritual guidance. It is possible to be both traveller and tourist and use guides or guidebooks, go on and off that imaginary beaten track, watch the places where all this intersects and becomes a more interesting picture to show the people back home. Where a bunch of nuns at a mexican computer fare becomes as meaningful and interesting as a remote village full of tired, crushed spirits, maintaining the tropes of indigineity for the tourist dollar. You can watch a documentary on the Discovery channel anywhere. This is the world, where everything meets, becomes messy, and is nothing like you thought it was going to be. No matter what your guidebook says. To hell with getting drunk in a Mexican hostel on cheap mescal that tastes like bandaids, united with other backpackers through the relentless universality of an address in a guidebook. Reassured by the familiarity of other travellers. And a mariachi tape that you brought with you from back home, because they don’t really make that kind of music here much anymore. Back to features