Some twenty odd years ago, Ian Mckaye - at the time the angry singer of straight edge punk pioneers Minor Threat - sung “guilty of being white”. The lines of the aggressive chorus blazed into my mind as I stepped at the airport’s immigration line to re-enter Malaysia; a bunch of what seemed young Australians...

"Authenticity was a buzzword in travel, but what exactly did it mean? At its purest form you could make the argument that the only really authentic places were ones that had never seen contact with the outside world at all. There were still a few of those left -- in the Amazon, perhaps in Indonesian...

Backpackers at a party in Thailand. Photo: Jessica Rabbit / Flickr Creative Commons Did "The Beach" launch backpacker culture, or instead capture it in words like no other book had before? For better or worse, Alex Garland's seminal 1996 novel about young travelers finding and losing paradise in Thailand became a touchstone in the backpacker...