There are countless reasons to like the huge hostel network that is continuing to grow rapidly around the world. In places where hotels are expensive these hostels are the only thing that makes visiting these cities even possible on a modest budget, and even if you can afford a hotel you’ll find the social aspect of hostel life to be far more enjoyable in many respects. But this last part is also a bit of a problem if you allow it to be one.
This is probably most notable in continental European hostels, but it can also happen in North America, Australia, or parts of Asia as well. Simply put, the traveling style where people go from hostel to hostel can lead to an insular world where you spend nearly all your time with other backpackers (often the same people going in the same direction as you), and almost no time actually interacting with the locals you supposedly came to visit in the first place.
One reason this happens commonly is it’s far easier to keep joining in the tours, parties, and pub crawls offered at the hostel, and if you pass them up it can feel like you will be missing something. But if you don’t forge out on your own at least for a while in each city then you’ll likely regret it after you’ve come home again. People might ask you how you liked Prague, and you’ll be able to tell them about the Aussie girls at the hostel, and the drunken Brits you befriended on the hostel pub crawl, but you might not have any stories about meeting locals or going to off-the-beaten-track restaurants or neighborhoods.
In most hostels you’ll hear English spoken nearly all the time, including by the local workers. It’s very tempting to spend your evenings at the friendly hostel bar, but in a way this is almost like visiting another country and then spending your whole stay in your country’s embassy there. Put another way, visiting a new and foreign city is a bit like going deep into the sea with all its strange new creatures and completely different rules of gravity and behavior. If you visit and don’t spend all your time with the hostel crowd it’s like being in a wetsuit, where you actually can see and touch things up close. But visiting inside the hostel bubble is like going diving in a submarine, where you are always comfortable and things are easy, but you never get to touch the creatures you’ve come to see.
The important thing is to strike a balance. Traveling on your own can be hard, lonely, and very frustrating at times, but it can also be very rewarding when you find a secret little place where no one spoke English yet you were able to have fun anyway. The parties on the hostel circuit are a huge part of the fun of long-term travel, but sometimes you just have to say no and invent your own fun for a while.
Secret places? You should go to Paraty, Brazil. There are so many lonely places to visit.
On the flip side, I’d say making friends at the hostel will make you more apt to go out and explore more if you’re a little nervous or introverted and you have people who can tag along.
so,like the man said: “strike a balance”. Part of the impetus for this plan I have to see the world came from people I met and befriended in hostels. I’ve met people who never left the safe environment of the hostel and the company of its clientèle; I’ve met people who used the hostel only as a place to wash up and lay their weary head; and I’ve met people who fit in all the places between those extremes. I think it is good advice to find the place that fits our needs and remember some of the pitfalls that might confront us. Good article.