A Backpacker’s Life, Introvert Style

It’s been more than 6 months since I left home, hopped on a flight, and landed in New Zealand with only a backpack’s worth of items in my possession.

Now, I have a car (and a whole trunk full of possessions), and I have seen and done almost everything I wanted to do in this beautiful country.

I’ve covered a lot of ground, and here’s my map to prove it!

Each color represents a month: red = July, orange = August, yellow = September, green = October, light blue = November, dark blue = December, purple = January.

Rather than settle down in one place, I used my time in New Zealand to constantly move around, stay in new places, and explore the coasts and corners and peaks. In fact, the longest I spent in one place was 27 nights in Whiritoa in August. (Since then, I went back for 5 more nights in Dec/Jan, so total that is 32 days or just about a month). The second longest I stayed in one place was 9 days on Great Barrier Island in July. Third was 7 nights in Napier and fourth was 6 in Wanaka.

How, you might wonder, does someone who loves spending weeks at home just reading and writing, deal with the constant change of location? How does someone who can go for days without desiring to see another person constantly live in shared dorms, shared kitchens, and shared bathrooms? How does an introverted, large-group adverse, anti-heavy-drinking, control-loving, homebody juggle her dichotomous desire to cheaply travel and explore the rest of the world?

I’m here to give you the answer: small routines and big organization skills.

Also, lots of books.

This post isn’t about big adventures and awe-inspiring landscapes or even about a lesson learned. It’s just about my life–or, more specifically, how I built a life on constantly moving and evolving ground. So, maybe only my mom will be interested in reading this post (which is ok! An audience of one is enough!), or maybe someone else out there who is just as aggressively introverted as me will read it and be inspired to head out and do something so seemingly extroverted: travel the world backpacker style!

Packing on the Daily

I have very little space (the trunk of a car and a backpack) and lots of items that are constantly in use. To exhibit the slightest bit of control and to keep myself from going insane, I very quickly devised an organization system for all of my items.

I have a space in the trunk of my car for clothing items that are not commonly worn (in the winter, it was my shorts and tank tops and now it’s my jeans). The rest of my clothes all go in my backpack, which always goes into the hostel with me.

I bought big bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and lotion and keep them in a box in the back of my car. When the little travel bottles in my backpack run low, I fill them with the big bottles.

I also purchased bulk supplies of a few items like rice, noodles, self-rising flour, peanut butter, and sweet potatoes and have a “pantry-box” situated in my trunk as well. I have a box of canned veggies (mostly chickpeas and cannellini beans) and a separate section for camping gear (sleeping bag, pots, rain pants, headlamp, etc).

Finally, I have two reusable grocery bags (one with fridge items and one with non-fridge items) that I carry into the hostels with me and refill often from the pantry-box and with items fresh from the grocery store. I also have a small soft-sided cooler that I use on long driving days to keep cheese, milk, and veggies cool while they’re in the back of my car.

This system is a mental life-saver because I always know that I need to bring my backpack, my fridge bag, and my non-fridge bag into the hostels with me, and I can do this in 1-2 trips. I’ve gotten really good at opening the trunk of my car and shopping for my essentials before closing up, walking into the hostel, and knowing I won’t have to take another trip out until I vacate the hostel in a few days. Plus, I always feel prepared knowing that I have backup items just outside the door.

Sleeping with Other People

Shared dorm rooms are almost always so much cheaper than a private room. Picking a dorm room generally means paying less than half of what I would pay for a private room, which means I can travel for twice as long.

My sleep strategy, I figured out pretty quickly, is three-fold.

First: earplugs. Absolutely necessary.

Additionally, I discovered that there is a proper way to put in earplugs so that they go deeper into your ear and are more likely to stay. The method: pull down and back on your earlobe with the opposite hand while you’re inserting the earplug. This clears the entrance of the “tunnel” and widens the path. I also wear a soft headband to bed that covers my ears and holds my earplugs in so they don’t fall out if I toss and turn in my sleep.

Second: cover my eyes.

When you’re sharing a room, people come and go at all hours–late nights and early mornings. And they either turn on the overhead light, which instantly wakes me up. Or, they try to be polite and use their phone light. But, if they accidentally shine that phone light directly at your face while they’re looking for their charging cord, it’s like a spotlight searing straight into my brain. So I use the same soft, wide headband that keeps my earplugs in to cover my eyes. This also means that I sleep in past dawn (which during the summer is at 5:45am).

Lastly: being tired helps!

This is marvelous. If I’m physically exhausted from hiking a tough hike and I have my earplugs in and my eyes covered, I sleep like the freaking dead regardless of who is in the room. It’s a wonderful feeling.

But it’s not always the sleeping part that is difficult for me. As an introvert, sometimes I just want to be ALONE. And there’s nowhere to retreat to be alone when there are 5 other people in your dorm room (or 1 other person. Even if a dorm room isn’t all the way full, it’s hardly ever empty to the point of being JUST MINE.)

Often the bathrooms are communal as well, so I can’t even retreat there for a few minutes alone.

While I’ll sometimes find a park to read in or just go park my car somewhere quiet, it’s not the same. Hiking alone helps a lot, but it’s also not the same. There is still a feeling of being in a public space.

So, sometimes I don’t stay in hostels.

Occasional WWOOFing has been good because even though I’m in someone else’s home, I always get a bedroom to myself. Plus, it’s free (minus some labor). AirBnB’s are good too. Even though I always just stay in a room in someone’s house because that’s all I can afford (it is more expensive than a hostel dorm, but in some places it’s only a matter of a few dollars so I can justify it occasionally). Once or twice, in the more “back woods” kind of places, I have even found that some private rooms are the same price as a shared dorm in more popular places. For example, in Golden Bay I payed $50 NZD for a private room. In Auckland and Christchurch, a shared dorm bed is often the same price or more.

Finally, I found a cool website that helps you get off the beaten track. It’s literally called Off the Beaten Track, and it connects travelers with family owned accommodations in less visited areas. Often it’s a whole lodge or big house that is totally out of my price range. But I’ve found a few hidden gems that are the same price as hostel dorm rooms. For example, I stayed at a great place about 1 hour outside of Gisborne that was stunning beautiful and I payed $42 NZD a night for an entire cottage to myself. Sprinkling in some time by myself has been a mental and emotional life-saver.

Cooking Chaos

The absolute most important ritual I have for myself–the one that keeps me grounded in every new place–is cooking dinner.

I think, based on my observations, that most people staying in hostels just want the quickest, cheapest thing they can find. It’s like being in college again. Everyone is eating ramen and plain pasta with pesto and frozen pizzas and Subway sandwiches. And when they do cook, they make a meal for 4 and then put 3/4s of it in Tupperware containers so they won’t have to cook again for another few nights.

Not me. I quickly realized that not only did I absolutely not want to only eat cheap, easy meals for an entire year, but that I liked cooking each evening. The act of it was incredibly important to my mental health and to creating a tiny routine that I could rely on amidst all the chaos. Plus, I don’t see the point in eating something that isn’t yummy!

Of course, that’s not to say that I wanted to dirty every dish in the shared kitchen, take up all the burners, or spend three hours in front of the stove. That’s not fun night after night, nor is it polite to the others who want to use the kitchen.

But, I do cook almost every night that I’m not WWOOFing. And, despite the fact that every kitchen is different and that someone is always standing in front of the cupboard I need to get into and there are never enough sinks and sometimes I planned to make something that needs an oven and the hostel doesn’t have an oven and sometimes there aren’t enough forks to go around–despite all that, getting to cook a meal each night is actually a huge high point in every day.

And I figured out some easy, cheap, yummy meals that don’t take very much time and require very little clean up!

A Day in the Life

So what do my days look like? Well, literally every single day is different–that’s both the point and the mentally challenging chaos of it all. But I have my little routines, and, within the chaos, there is a basic blueprint that captures the majority of my days.

7-7:30am: Wake up. Head to the communal bathroom to brush my teeth, put in my contacts, and generally get ready for the day. But not too ready. I only put on a sweatshirt and lounge pants.

Next, I make a cup of hot water (because, until a month ago, I was literally always cold. Kiwis don’t use insulation or central heating or generally seem to feel the cold at all, so I was always freezing. In fact, they usually don’t have kitchen extractor fans or fans in the bathrooms, so they just leave the kitchen and bathroom windows open all the time. Even in the dead of winter. The only places I was ever warm were in high mountain towns where it actually gets below freezing–because then they have to heat the place so the pipes don’t freeze).

Anyway, rant aside, I make a cup of hot water and sit down in the lounge with my book. Sometimes, if the hostel isn’t very full, I’ll be the only one in the lounge for a while. Bliss!

8:30-9:00: make some breakfast! In the winter months, breakfast was always hot oatmeal (because, again, I was always cold). I used sultanas and mixed nuts to spice up the oatmeal and a chopped date to make it bit sweeter. Now, sometimes I mix in fruit and yoghurt. I love staying with WWOOF hosts or friends because it’s such a treat to get a yummy egg breakfast!

9:00-9:30: Get dressed in real clothes and start the day’s activity. Most often the activity is hiking. Usually either a long day hike or a short one in the morning and another short one in the afternoon. Or, maybe I’m packing up my car to drive to the next destination with a few scenic spots or short hikes planned for the way. If I don’t have an activity planned, then I’ll usually go walk around the town, poke around the shops, explore the parks, maybe drive to a neighboring town and explore there. Or, I’ll head to the library in town and use the free wifi to call my parents!

1:00: lunch time. Lunch is almost always on the go so it’s usually a sandwich. Most often just a PBJ sandwich, but if I’m feeling fancy (and flush), my favorite is a pesto, salami, tomato sandwich. I pair it with some fruit or two carrots and a granola bar, trail mix, or a cookie.

4:00-5:00: usually I finish up my hiking or exploring by this time and head back to the hostel. In the winter, it was time for another cup of hot water (or ten) to warm up. And then I’d work on my blog or research things to do in my next location and book accommodations. This is also a good time to call people that I miss! Lately, all of this time has been filled with planning the trips of the amazing people who are coming out to visit me! Or, trying to figure out what I’m going to do with the 2.5 months of time I’ll have after leaving NZ but before coming home. Since I’m in the hostel lounge, if I don’t want to get interrupted or chat with people, I’ll put in my ear buds.

7:00-8:00: because it’s a shared kitchen, I usually try to wait for a lull before jumping in to make my dinner. Then I cook for 15-30 minutes and enjoy my dinner either while reading my book or while talking to someone I met while cooking. The kitchen and the dorm room are the easiest places to meet other people.

8:30: usually I shower and then read for a bit in the lounge.

By 10pm I’m in bed reading in the room and usually put the book down around 10:30. I’ve found most travelers are generally headed to bed about this time. Other than Queenstown, Christchurch, Nelson, and Auckland, there is really no night life and most travelers to NZ aren’t here for the nightlife anyway. We’re here for the outdoors, so that works well for me.

This is just my hostel routine. I’ve been lucky to meet some great Kiwis who have hosted me in their homes and I’ve done some WWOOFing as well. During those times, my days vacillate between garden work, spending time with my hosts, and doing my own activities. Sometimes I retreat to the room I’ve been given and eek out my alone time as well. When I stayed with my friends Jacky and Bruce, evenings were spent playing cards, watching movies, and cooking meals together!

I was worried, before I traveled, about how I would function, how I would find my comfortable places and mentally relax among all the chaos of traveling and among all the people I would constantly be interacting with. It scared the heck out of me, actually, which is why I pre-booked a month in Whiritoa for August, a place with my own room, even before I hopped on the plane. Because I thought I would need the recovery time (and I did). But I also found that (and I should have known this already), I am mentally strong enough and stubborn enough to just create the time and space that I need. I am also far more adaptable than I give myself credit for. And, finally, I thought I might be the only highly introverted and home-loving individual out there who was setting off to do something as insanely extroverted as this. But either there are far more introverts traveling than I thought or iPhone antisocialness is true.

When I stay in female-only dorm rooms, 90% of the girls are in bed by 9:30 and either on their phones, watching a movie on their laptops, or reading a book (this is excluding the time I spent in Christchurch, Auckland, Queenstown, and Nelson). So it’s honestly a very comforting experience to wind down the day in silent companionship with all these people who are doing the same thing as me. However, I do think that a lot of this comes down to the fact that I am traveling in a country where the natural beauty is the biggest draw. That means that the people who are here are nature lovers. They want to get up at a decent hour and not be hung over so they can go hiking. I did not see the same kind of people in Auckland or even in Queenstown. Those are party places, and they weren’t my vibe. Yes, I know I’m lame, but I’m happy being this way!

And, apparently, there are a lot of other people out there who feel exactly the same way and who travel to New Zealand. Introverts, this is the place to be!