When you hear the word ‘travelling,’ it’s easy to switch your mind to sunsets over the beaches, extreme sports, wilderness hiking and all manner of exciting experiences. However, to get to those parts, backpackers have to go through a lot of sitting on flights, buses and car journeys, and some of them can be for a mind-numbingly long amount of hours, and that means boredom.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways for backpackers to stave off the monotonous boredom of long-distance travel, before the good times can roll again. Here are four useful tips you can use:
Start a YouTube Channel
If you want to document your travels while seeing the world, starting a YouTube channel to document your adventures is a great idea. Plus, it can be extremely lucrative if you monetise your channel! Long commutes and journeys are the perfect opportunities for you to upload all of your videos to YouTube, and to use your social media accounts to share your videos and get your friends and family seething with jealousy.
Keep a Journal
Whether it’s for public consumption or just for airing your thoughts, keeping a journal is a great way to kill the hours travelling from A to B. If you are keeping an online blog, people love to hear about travel experiences, and learning about what they should and shouldn’t do while backpacking, so share your knowledge and expertise if you have a way with words. As long as you have access to a laptop, smartphone or tablet while you’re away, there’s no reason why you can’t spend a few hours a week writing, especially when holed up in a Greyhound bus across the Australian outback.
Play Some Games
If you want to switch your brain off completely when travelling long periods, you should try online gaming. Online casinos such as Unibet are incredibly fun, and if your luck is in, you can kill many hours of travel time and stave off boredom for as long as that luck lasts. There are dozens of different games to play, so it doesn’t matter how long you’re on the road for, there will be something available to keep you playing until you arrive at your destination.
Job Hunting
Most people go travelling to get away from work, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t work opportunities available to backpackers and travellers that aren’t rewarding and educational experiences. Why not take the opportunity to get to know the local community and its people by working on the land, such as on the plantations of Thailand or Indonesia, or fruit picking in Australia? There are easier ways to make money, but none that’ll make you feel so rewarded at the end of a hard day’s work.
Use the idle time you have making the journey to your next destination to search the web for job opportunities, and make some calls or drop some emails to the companies or hostels that organise these opportunities so you can get in on the action. This way, you’ll know what you’re doing when you get to your next travel stop.