Friday, August 05, 2005

A Day Without a Back Packah

One aspect of Australian society that we've found interesting has been the whole aspect of a nomadic sub-culture: vagabonds, travelers, backpackers. We're currently in the doldrums of the tourist / traveling season and have already seen such a strong presence in daily life. When the weather starts to heat up a bit, I would expect it to increase fivefold.

They have a pretty strong hold on an entire economic sub-class here by providing cheap, temporary labor to service industry businesses. As we were passing by a car wash, we looked over and saw that all of the 'towel boys' were hippy-looking white kids, including some middle-aged folk as well. It seemed a bit out of place, as we're used to seeing the ethnicity gap exposed in this remedial, low-paying (but low commitment) jobs. The backpackers pour your drinks, bus your table and probably clean your houses; all for the temporary buck in order to get them to the next city.

Businesses target this type of lifestyle as well. When we were looking for a car, there were several 'traveler's lots' that had vans, buses, campers, SUVs that were targeted only towards people needing a cheap, reliable (probably not) car to get them moving again. A parking garage in King's Cross (the red light district here in Sydney, but come for the Baba Ganoush as well) has an auction every Saturday to sell off their three floors of Backpacker mobiles. Some of them looked pre-WWII era and very decrepit.

Cities such as San Francisco and San Diego would collapse without their tourist revenue and have launched several national advertising campaigns promoting their destinations, but I have never seen this kind of informal, targeted marketing before by a city and its' businesses. Auckland, New Zealand does it a bit, with their extreme adventure offerings. Vegas as well, with their 'all you can sin' packages. Perhaps with Australia's massive size, the behavior of the nomadic sightseer is more relevant here than in other places.

Speaking of traveling, we're going to take the Holden out for a run at the end of next month and do the Great Ocean Road, heading through Melbourne on the way. Perhaps Blue Mountains this weekend as well.

posted by ncawthon at 1:29 PM