NEWSFLASH: We’ve Gone Digital! Celebrating our 4th Birthday with a Bang.

To celebrate our fourth birthday at the end of this month, we’re taking the magazine to the next level. Incase you hadn’t guessed yet – we’re taking the plunge into the weird and wonderful world of digital! South East Asia Backpacker is now available as an interactive PDF that you can read on the ipad and Android tablet readers. Hang onto your ipad folks, you ain’t seen nothing yet...

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Notes from the Editor: Patience and Backpacking in South East Asia

“What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare”... When backpacking through South East Asia, your patience threshold will be tested on more than one occasion. Trains that take five hours longer than planned, spontaneous holidays that make banks, embassies and post offices close when you just need to get that something done and a laid-back attitude to the point of slumber are just some of the things that you may struggle with. Coming from a Western culture, we find it very difficult to just… WAIT. Learning to adapt to this cultural and lifestyle difference is an ongoing lesson...

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Notes from the editor: Where is home?

Where is home to you? Is it a building or a place where you grew up or where you went to school? Is it where your family and friends are located? Is it a place where you feel like you can just relax and be yourself? Lyrically speaking, is ‘home where the heart is?’ or is it ‘Wherever you lay your hat?’ Editor, Nikki Scott discusses the concept of home and how travel has changed the place where she now calls "home"...

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Notes from the Editor: Going Against the Grain and Forging Your Own Path

Many people in the West tend to follow a similar route - we leave school, go to university and get a job - success is measured in assets and achievements. It can be scary and daunting to imagine a life that strays from this structured ladder. Backpacking is a time to break away from the regimented order of Western society and get a taste of a different way of life - adventure, excitement, spontaneity. Once sampled it may be hard to go back to 'normal life'...

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Notes From the Editor: Travel and a Simple Twist of Fate

Unencumbered by routine and responsibility, backpackers are free to make impulsive decisions that have the potential to change the next few days, weeks, even years of their lives. Have you ever wondered how differently your backpacking trip may have turned out if certain, seemingly insignificant events had gone differently? Retracing the steps of your journey it is possible to pinpoint those tiny instances that with hindsight literally changed everything, the course of your journey and even your life...

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Notes From the Editor: What Does Travel Teach us?

What does travel and living in a foreign country teach you? Does it changed your personality? Does it change the way you look at the world? Since the idea of backpacking began, travellers have returned home with shaggy unkempt hair, a dozen bracelets on their wrist, perhaps a bindi on their forehead and proclaimed to their wide-eyed parents ‘woah man, Cambodia really changed me.’ I want to delve deeper into this statement and ask why? And how does it change you?

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