studentsineurope

Traveling is My Life: The Backpacking Experience

Ready for sun, sleet, snow and rain... Francis travels through Europe.

By Francis Nicholls-Wunder

In the past eleven months I have been involved in a drive by water-gun rampage over Songkran in Thailand, dodged bulls in Pamplona in Spain, hiked through the mountains of Vietnam, walked through the Vatican in Italy, seen the Mona Lisa in France, looked out over the alps in Switzerland and sung loudly with the locals in English bars. I’m now writing from a typical Scottish pub on Burns night, one of the biggest nights of the year in this part of the world. I have been to sixteen countries and over one hundred cities as a backpacker, including the majority of Western Europe, and next begin a similar trip in Eastern Europe that will last me at least until the middle of the year.  My name is Francis Nicholls-Wunder, I am twenty-two years old and for as long as I care to remember I have lived out of a backpack.

I am lucky enough to have a dual citizenship: my father is from Brooklyn, New York, and my mother is Australian. I spent most of my childhood growing up near Melbourne in the south east of Australia but made regular trips to the United States to visit all my relatives throughout my early school years.  Unfortunately in my teens a lot of my family members passed away, and with a growing study load I have not been back to visit my American roots for a few years now. After completing a degree with a double major in Media/Communications and Sociology I had very little responsibilities keeping me in Australia so I decided to take the trip of a lifetime, seeing as much of the world as I could with the final destination being New York, my father’s home town. Thanks to a lot of heavy saving throughout my time at university and a conditional inheritance from my grandparents that required me to spend the money on travel, I discovered that I could travel for a long period without having to do any serious work so long as I travelled as cheap as possible as a true backpacker.

After almost a year worth of backpacking experience in all sorts of weather conditions, through all sorts of terrain, all sorts of cultures, with all sorts of people facing all sorts of problems I have learnt new ways to make travel easier and, perhaps more importantly, cheaper every step of the way. I have been lucky enough to visit not only the famous and popular tourist hubs throughout Western Europe but have also managed to have a few experiences off the beaten track and discovered some of the hidden gems on the roads between the capitals and party towns. From personal experience I have found that the best travel advice you can ever get is from others who are travelers themselves, who have lived from a backpack in the real no-frills style of traveling that not only makes your money last as long as possible but, in my opinion, is the best way for any young person to truly experience the culture of a country and get to know the people of the world. I hope that my amazing experience and current lifestyle can inspire others to make their own eye opening journeys as comfortably, cheaply and of course as entertainingly as possible.