Photo: stig nygaard

We all know that travel lets you experience new cultures, see incredible sights, and meet fascinating people.

However, being on the road and jumping from hostel to hostel, especially alone, provides another unique opportunity: the chance to acquire an entirely new personality at every fleabag dorm room of your trip.

Not since the first day of freshman year has such a golden opportunity arisen, so be sure not to miss out with this handy guide to the new you on the backpacker trail.

Step 1: Acquire a fancy new accent

That Southern drawl might attract the ladies back home in Raleigh, but it just doesn’t have that certain je ne sais crois to cut it with the unwashed traveling bourgeois. Have no fear – at the hostel, nobody knows that you really sound like Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Just roll that “r” a bit, swallow that “g,” and soften your vowels a hair, and suddenly you’re a veritable citizen of the world.

With this unidentifiable but notably cultured accent, you can pontificate at length on the differences between tea quality in Northern and Western China, and no one will suspect that you have no idea what you are talking about. Which brings us to step two.

Step 2: Become an expert

I’m not talking about actually putting in the work to be an expert in something new. (That would take way too much time).

Lucky for you, on the road, just use some personal experiences and then add any commentary that pops into your head, and voila, you’re the hostel/backpacker bar expert.

Took a rafting trip in Kenya? By all means, present your analysis of the electoral problems there. Volunteered for a week at an orphanage in Guatemala? You’re the Richard Feynman of Fair Trade coffee! Went on a day trip to the West Bank? Write an article on the state of Palestinian tourism for an online travel magazine!

Step 3: Change your life plans

Photo: aoifgejohanna

Deep down you know that you’re going to go home, finish your CPA, and work at a faceless corporation for the next thirty or so years. Suppress that realization as hard as you can, and take the opportunity to indulge your wildest fantasies about dropping everything to live a life of expatriate leisure.

Go ahead and tell everyone at the bar that yeah, you’re “pretty much set on starting a little café on the Peruvian coast”, or whiling away the next few decades “surfing and designing websites from the South Pacific.”

You can even add a bit of weight to your proclamations of life in self-imposed slacker exile by making a few inquiries into real estate prices in the area – “I actually already looked into acquiring the lease on a little bar in Budapest. Think I’m gonna go ahead and make an offer.”

But be careful what you wish for or it might come true; you could end up fifteen years from now spending all your nights with this expat crew.

Step 4: Try a new religion

It’s no secret that for many people, travel and spiritual discovery go hand and hand.

Put aside that annoying inner skeptic who tells you that your sudden interest in Buddhism might have more to do with those mushrooms you ate at the full moon party last night than any long-term religious awakening.

Go East, young man, and let your soul take you wherever it should wander: Hinduism, Baha’ism, Zoroastrianism, Shintoism…the gringo trail will present you with an incredible spread of delicious religious offerings.

By all means, make your way to the buffet table. (Besides, everyone knows that ashram chicks are totally hot).

Step 5: Go native with the clothes

Photo: Y-Not

Is that Lawrence of Arabia over there, walking into a Jordanian desert sunset in a brilliant white dishdasha and checkered red kuffiyeh? No, it’s the new Bedouin you!

Or consider that local Bolivians will have no idea that you’re a tourist hiding under that traditional poncho (if you to tuck the Nikon D300 inside).

Show the world that your mind has been liberated from the corrupting influences of rampant Western polyesterism by donning some of the local threads. Just remember when you get home: email your boss in advance to make sure that the Cambodian monks’ robe is good to go for casual Fridays.

Step 6: Become an instant outdoorsman

It doesn’t matter that your longest “hike” on a typical day back home involves getting from your car to your cubicle. Get yourself some $250 hiking boots, a set of topographical maps, and an absurdly over-featured GPS, and as far as your hostel mates know, you’re Henry Morton Stanley.

Make a point of regularly staring quizzically at your laid-out maps, muttering comments under your breath about “precision bearing” and “attack points.” Then just hire a local guide when it’s actually time to start the trek.

Step 7: Find out that you’re still you

You’ve got a sore throat from all those fake French “r” sounds. You get called out on the fact that you keep referring to Sydney as the capital of Australia yet claim to be intimately knowledgeable of Aboriginal burial rites.

You get bored after swinging in a beach hammock for three days, much less the rest of your life. You realize that real Buddhism actually involves more than a yoga session and a Putumayo CD. That Jamaican Rasta woven hat is really itchy, and it turns out that the great outdoors is actually filled with things that bite you.

And you realize that at the end of the day, or month, or around-the-world year long trip, all of the new personas which we acquire while traveling slip away just as easily as they came about.

Travel does indeed change us, but luckily these changes tend to be more profound than a new accent or organic diet.

And although travel may give us the opportunity to try out new personalities, in the end it teaches us more about who we really are, if only through the process of elimination.

What you do think think of reinventing yourself abroad? Share your thoughts in the comments!

It’s never hard to find your way there – all you need to do is follow the American music which is old enough to feel stale without being old enough to feel hip and look for a chalkboard sign advertising a European football match.

But no matter where you are, the same set of people manages to populate every one these ex-pat haunts, so read on to identify who’s who and save yourself some valuable mingling time.

1. The Overpaid Aid Worker

The aid worker / Photo MVHargan

You can easily pick out this character by the imported beer on his table and the way he litters his speech with acronyms: USAID, NGO, MFI, MPP.

If it’s a weekday night, he might nurse his beer while tapping away on his MacBook, shooting off emails to his friends in D.C., or maybe to the alumni listserve of a bastion of East Coast higher education.

This year he’s empowering women in Latin America, but two years ago he was working on democracy promotion in Bangladesh, and next year it’s off to Thailand to oversee microfinance development.

Is there any world problem this whiz can’t solve on a two-year contract, armed only with his cushy salary, company car, and housing stipend?

Before you get a chance to answer that, though, he will: there’s “real progress” being made at the “grass roots level” with his current initiative. Another European microbrew, please!

2. The English Teacher

This guy couldn’t get a job after college back home, so he’s managed to put to use the one qualification which will always make him stand out abroad: native English speaker.

You can find him sitting at the bar, taking shots of the local brand of firewater with one of his young female “private lessons” by his side. Sure, he can barely string a sentence together in a conversation, much less on paper, but he found the loophole in the system — his wonderfully Western face and accent!

Now instead of stocking shelves back home, he’s got status overseas. Hey, that online TEFL degree was $200 and took a couple of weeks to finish, so give him some respect.

If the bartender knows his name, that means The English Teacher has probably been around long enough to let his rise in status get to his head, and he’s already progressed to the dreaded next stage of ex-patdom: The Wannabe Travel Writer.

If this is the case, no matter how nice he looks, avoid starting a conversation at all costs, unless you’re in the mood to spend your night listening to interminable stories about how much better Macchu Picchu was the way he did it.

3. The Diplomat’s Wife

The diplomat’s wife / Photo Ergo Martini

She shows up every night at five o’clock on the dot, ready for happy hour surrounded by the group of four ex-pat wives who make up the town’s Western high society network in its entirety.

The Diplomat’s Wife will without fail order the one martini on the menu, and will without fail mention how unfortunate it is that “you can’t even get a decent martini around here.”

She spends her days doing her best to avoid the fact that she no longer lives in the land of Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods by shuttling between the one grocery store which stocks imported goods and the one coffee shop which has made a few token efforts to imitate Starbucks.

Any conversation with The Diplomat’s Wife will inevitably come around to all the ways in which “the locals” make life difficult, from stalling the delivery of her shipped furniture to routinely botching her weekly hair and nail appointment.

4. The Idealist

The Idealist / Photo Lucky Tom

A young, doe-eyed recent grad, The Idealist can be found clutching the local bottom-of-the-barrel brew to show his solidarity with the people.

Don’t be fooled into thinking the backpacker in the corner with the Che shirt is The Idealist; no, The Idealist threw that shirt away after freshman year, when everyone else started wearing it, and instead sticks to his tried-and-true collection of ironically-named indie band tees.

If you want to start a conversation with The Idealist, casually mention that you’ve been looking into WWOOFing later in your trip – The Idealist has already WWOOFed in countries you can’t even find on a map and isn’t afraid to tell you all about it.

Plus, The Idealist has a friend of a friend who’s volunteering where you’re thinking of going right now! When not putting up postings for activist events on the community bulletin board, The Idealist can often be seen trying to strike up a conversation on grad programs with his future self, The Overpaid Aid Worker.

5. The Lifer

Who is this leather-faced man, camped out on a stool which has over the years conformed to his shape, taking half-bottle gulps of the mid-range national beer between whisky shots?

He’s The Lifer, and nobody knows much of anything about him other than the fact that he’s been in town as long as anyone can remember.

Where does his money come from? How did he end up here? It’s all a mystery.

But one thing’s for sure, when The Lifer first came through town, that’s when “travel was real, man.”

The Lifer is good for a few amusing stories involving the ingestion of huge quantities of drugs which haven’t existed since the mid-80’s, but be careful: he’s not in any hurry to get anywhere, so you could be in for a long night.

6. The New Ager

The New Ager / Photo Frail Muse

The New Ager is hard to miss. She’s the one dressed up in the clothes which the locals import from India to sell to the tourists as “authentic native garb” and the necklace she bought at the market with a rock pendant that a street kid found on the ground and hawked to her as a “lifeforce crystal.”

The New Ager eschews soul-sucking alcohol altogether, and instead opts to sip gingerly on her herbal tea. A conversation with The New Ager might seem normal to begin with, but you won’t get very far before she casually mentions the fact that your aura is looking a little bit greenish today.

She’ll believe absolutely anything you can possibly make up, so long as you throw in something about indigenous peoples or Eastern religions, so go ahead, try her:

Has she heard that the wood of the bar top was specially crafted by a local medicine man out of a tree bark which cleanses the kidneys? No, but she’ll give it a lick to find out. Did she know that a certain sect of Buddhism teaches that when we stick our tongue to our nose, only then do we truly connect to God?

The New Ager’s way of looking deeply into your eyes and constantly using your name can be off-putting at first, but as you get deeper into your cups, she can become a valuable source of entertainment.

Any expat characters we missed? Share your thoughts in the comments!

“Are you carrying a weapon on you?” the young Israeli soldier asked as we approached the middle of the Jewish settlement in Hebron.

“No,” my friends and I quickly replied, assuming that he was asking a routine security question.

“Well you don’t want to go any further up that road unarmed.”

I exchanged a nervous what-the-hell-does-that-mean glance with my girlfriend. He must just be kidding – messing with the stupid tourists, right?

Suddenly there was a series of rapid “pop pop pop” sounds from up the hill. “Fireworks?” I asked.

“No, that’s us returning fire. They were shooting up at us before. So you still want to keep going?” the soldier responded, half smiling because he already knew the answer.

The Political Tourism

Israel attracts over two million tourists every year, making it one of the world’s great tourism destinations.

Backpackers, Christian pilgrims, heritage-seeking Jews, history buffs, and nature lovers all flock to a wide range of unique sites in the Jewish state.

For the vast majority of these tourists, the volatile political situation is at best a nuisance which fills their trip with security checks and at worst a reason to postpone or cancel the trip altogether.

But for a small minority of visitors, the conflict itself is the reason for visiting, spawning a nascent political tourism industry which gives visitors the chance to see behind the headlines and into the heart of the seemingly intractable conflict.

Traveling into the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank takes a bit of extra grit and patience, but those willing to take the plunge are rewarded with a first-hand look at one of the defining international issues of our time.

View from an Arab market below a Jewish settlement

Palestine Welcomes You

Anyone with even a casual interest in the news is constantly barraged with information about the Israel-Palestine conflict. This has led to the instant association of the Palestinian Territories with suicide bombing, and thus a knee-jerk reaction that any visit inside the area is a highly risky endeavor.

In fact, although Hamas-controlled Gaza remains off-limits to tourists, the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank is quite accessible and generally quite safe.

Although violence does flare up, it rarely does so in a way which would affect visitors, and even though my trip coincided with a small skirmish no one was injured in the end.

Palestinians are exceptionally welcoming, and I experienced nothing but a constant refrain of “ahlan” (”welcome”) while walking through various West Bank cities.

A visit to cities such as Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, and Nablus allows visitors to go beyond the terrorism clichés of the nightly news and into the reality of the situation on the ground.

A trip to Hebron, 30 kilometers south of Jerusalem, presents a particularly stark and memorable picture of the tense state of affairs.

Life In The Right Wing

Ramallah at sunset

The Jewish settlement in the city sits literally on top of the Palestinian market, separated by a jagged horizontal cage to prevent rocks from being hurled down below and making for a surreal stroll through an otherwise typical Arab market.

A walk into the settlement itself gives a glimpse of life on the extreme right wing of Israeli society.

You can even walk right into the ruins of a home demolished by the Israeli government after settlers holed up and refused to move out. After experiencing the situation for yourself, you’ll never watch the international portion of the nightly news the same way again.

Like any form of “backstreets” travel, the nature of political tourism does raise the question of where the fine line between tourism and voyeurism lies.

Similar charges have been levied against so-called “slum tourism” which brings Westerners to the world’s poorest places so that they can snap a few pictures of photogenic misery before heading back to the comforts of home.

However, whereas slum tourists are simply “experiencing” first-hand the images of poverty that they’ve seen so many times on T.V., political tourism (when done correctly) involves understanding the situation behind the images in order to gain an entirely new perspective on a situation.

A day trip certainly cannot cover all the complexities of the situation in the West Bank, but it still goes a long way towards getting past the 30-second clips and soundbites on the conflict spoon-fed to us by the media.

See It For Yourself

Although I visited the West Bank with friends living in Ramallah, there are a few tour agencies which take groups to various destinations in the region.

Fred Schlomka runs Alternative Tours in English, a social enterprise which organizes a number of trips into the West Bank as well as in Israel west of the Green Line.

His company gives tours to about 150 visitors a month, which he says is a way to “help people see the reality of Palestinian life under occupation, and also give them a taste of Palestinian culture.”

Rather than voyeuristic and unproductive, Fred, who has worked extensively with non-profits to help the Palestinian people, finds political tourism to be “a vital service to visitors so they have an opportunity to see the country in a safe and professional manner.”

Some of his tourists, who mainly come from the US and Western Europe, have later gone on to become involved with political and development projects in the region.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is an essential part of the political and social dynamic of the entire Middle East.

For those who pride themselves on partaking in the eye-opening and self-educating aspects of travel, political tourism in the West Bank is an experience not to be missed.

What are your thoughts on political tourism in the West Bank? Share your thoughts in the comments!