The habituated lure of faraway travel to Southeast Asia among Dutch young adult backpackers

In exploring the motivations, experiences, and meaning ascriptions of Dutch young adults in their backpacking to Southeast Asia, this thesis moves towards understanding the lure of faraway destinations amidst observed gaps between sustainable attitudes and sustainable behaviours in the contemporary Western backpacker sector. While backpackers have long been praised for embodying flexibility, lengthy trips, and culturally immersive behaviour, its contemporary form illustrates the opposite has been happening. With partakers’ flexibility restricted by time, a common trotting of overdeveloped popular routes, mitigated host-visitor connections through maintained backpacker interrelations, and prioritisation of ego-centric motivators such as self-development and personal enjoyment. The Dutch tourist embodies postmodern motivations for cultural immersion, yet also the Western-oriented point of view and indication of gaps between these attitudes and their realised behaviour, for example in terms of destination choice and trade-offs. Furthermore, the Dutch backpacker lacks representation in academic and non-academic sources. The perspective of the Dutch case thus provides a relevant perspective for investigations into the interrelation between motivation, experience, and meaning-making in their backpacking to Asia, facilitated by the research question: How and in what ways do contemporary Dutch young adults motivate and experience their backpacking in Asia, and what meanings do they ascribe to this?. These three interrelated concepts were translated into semi-structured interviews with ten participants in March 2024, lending this thesis the gathering of an in-depth understanding of persisting backpacking ventures to Southeast Asia. Thematic analysis facilitated the processing of data, from which the themes ‘Performing Backpacking and Enriching the Self’; ‘Escaping Home and Experiencing the Other’; ‘Immersing in Exoticism and Contrasting the Self’, and ‘Returning Home and Re-integrating the Self’ emerged. The Dutch backpackers are involved in a constant process of moving between the Self and the Other, as well as between life at home and away, in how the act of backpacking and Asia’s exotic differences are anticipated, sought out, made sense of, and reflected back upon. Resulting in experiences that are not believed to be obtained by travelling within Europe.