I love to watch people. I do it at home, sit­ting in a café for example, and I do it while trav­el­ling. I found Khao San Road in Bangkok, Thai­l­and, to be one of the best places to indulge in my hobby. You just sit down in a res­taur­ant with a chilled beer and watch the world pass by. There’s Israelis with dread­locks and wear­ing bandanas, Eng­lish burnt by too much time in the sun and too little sun­screen, Swedes, tanned a dark brown in their board­shorts and cul­tiv­at­ing that surfers look, Ger­man tour­ists try­ing to blend in to the whole trav­el­ler scene and in between them all left over hip­pies on a short visit from the last full moon party in Goa. Nowadays, you can actu­ally inter­change all those nation­al­it­ies. The country-cliches are slowly disolv­ing I think, but there are still dif­fer­ent types of travellers:

1. The Min­im­al­ist

   This type is not that com­mon really. Some of them just travel with like a day­sack, that con­tains a tooth­brush, a shower gel, a sarong, a spare change of clothes (so, 1 t-shirt and a pair of shorts) and a battered paperback-copy of ‘the songlines’ by Bruce Chatwin. They don’t really need a guide­book, cause there’s always someone around with a Lonely Planet. They just ask, have a look what’s in the new ver­sion of the guide­book and decide to head in the dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tion to what is hailed as the new hot back­packer destination.

2. The Tour­ist

   This type car­ries with him at least 2 dif­fer­ent guide­book, just in case the first one doesn’t cover everything. You can usu­ally see them walk­ing around with a pur­pos­fully gait. This is a trav­el­ler on a mis­sion. So much to see and so little time. If you haven’t seen all 483 temples (just a rough estim­ate) of Bangkok you might as well not have gone at all. Fun­nily enough, most of the time they are trav­el­ling either alone or in com­pany of another ‘tourist’-traveller.

3. Inspector Gad­get

   He’s got all the latest toys. Ipod, a super thin laptop, a PDA and a mobile. An extra small video recorder and a 20 mega­pixel cam­era and he’s not afraid to use any of it. Can be mis­taken for ‘The Bulky One’ quite easily.

4. The Explorer

   This one is quite obvi­ous. He loves the color khaki. Everything’s khaki. The short-sleaved shirt, the shorts (always with a crisp ironed crease) and the back­pack. Then there are these huge trekking boots, even in a hot cli­mate. There has been rumours as well that some explorers carry a big jar with dust, that is used to give them this just-came-out-of-a-pyramid-and-found-the-treasure look.

5. The Hip­pie

   Whenever you hear the sound of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix or Pink Floyd, chances are a ‘hip­pie’ trav­el­ler is not too far off. You can see them from quite far away. The long hair, the jesus-sandals and all those vivid and bright colored clothes make you think you have an appar­i­tion in front of you. Quite often, in Asia at least, when you look closer, they really are from the flower power ages. Prob­ably came to Asia in the 60s or 70s on the hip­pie trail, burned their pass­ports and never made it back. Then there’s the younger ones wish­ing they’d have been on the trail and now make up for it by dress­ing the part and thor­oughly enjoy­ing themselves.

6. The Bulky One

   It doesn’t mat­ter if he’s on a one week all inclus­ive pack­age tour or trav­el­ling inde­pend­antly for half a year. He always travels with a 120 liter back­pack, stuffed full with everything he really needs and a lot of use­less stuff. He packs for 14 days, so that’s 14 t-shirts, 14 boxer shorts, 14 con­doms (he wishes…), 14 of everything, except maybe tow­els or shoes. He can only be iden­ti­fied when arriv­ing or leav­ing a place.

7. The Beach Bum

   He/she knows only one way to dress. Board shorts com­mando style, a sleeve­less t-shirt and flip flops (prefer­ably blue/white). Quite often they have dread­locks and Poly­ne­sian tat­toos cover his/her arms, legs and/or back.

8. The Girly

   This is more or less a female ver­sion of the Bulky One. The only dif­fer­ence, except for the sex and the types of things she packs, is that she is usu­ally trav­el­ling with her boy­friend. Said boy­friend then has the honor of car­ry­ing her huge back­pack, filled with all her cos­met­ics and shoes. She obvi­ously then looks lov­ingly after his mini backpack.

9. Mr/Mrs Nor­mal

   Here we have the green­horn. He or she stands in between all those weirdos men­tioned above and won­ders if they actu­ally know how abso­lutly ridicu­lous they look and/or behave. Mr/Mrs Nor­mal can’t be seen often, or should we say for a long time, as they tend to change into one of the other types quite quickly. After their first arrival, they lock them­selves into their gues­t­house rooms for a few days and then decide that if you can’t fight the other types (and there’s just too many of them) then you have to join them…

I used to be Mr Nor­mal paired with about a third of the Bulky One. I then evolved to a mix between the Minimalist/Explorer, before set­tling for the Beach Bum (without the hair) with a touch of Inspector Gad­get (my laptop plus all my dive stuff). So, what kind of trav­el­ler are you?