The modern traveler I love travelling. It was love at first sight. Travelling is entirely fascinating. You get to see beautiful and exotic places, you get to learn about different cultures, you get to meet people, natives as well as other travelers – like-minded humans. The fascination is the background before which you get to meet people. I think that is it for me. And in addition: I get to know myself by placing myself in different, alien environments and by reflecting about my (travelling) self with regard to the concepts of live of the people I meet. I am coming back from a trip to Andalucía and Morocco. I was really surprised to see how many backpackers nowadays are carrying a notebook (or a subnotebook). And I was surprised to see how many budget hostels offer the service of WIFI to their guests. It made me happy to literally find the internet desktops the hostel offered empty every time I wanted to use them. It wasn’t like that when I was travelling let’s say South America. You had to queue for a 30 minute session on one of the few computers. That seems to have changed. Good for me but strange for my concept of travelling, as I find. I made the observation in one of the backpacker hostels where we lodged ourselves that you can easily find a crowd of people from different nations and cultural backgrounds sitting in the common room without speaking, without even looking at one another. Everybody’s attention was sucked into the notebook on his or her lap. Some even managed to be chatting on their laptop and on their smartphone at the same time! I wonder what stories some of them had to tell as they never seemed to leave the place. I ask myself about the point of travelling here!? Is it merely to use the internet and all the social networks and platforms from many different places around the globe? That can hardly be the case as the internet doesn’t care where you log yourself in from. Is it to change your status on facebook and tell your friends around the globe that you are right now using WIFI in Morocco/Pakistan/South Korea? I am exaggerating, I know. Sure the people do sometimes book a tour to the desert or visit some well known sight. But this is not my point here. My point is that I miss the communication within the travelers’ community! Take this as an example: After the WIFI backpacker we stayed a few nights in another city where –by chance- the hostel did not offer WIFI nor internet desktops. Although some (modern) traveler found that quite odd and out of time, people (including "modern travelers") ended up engaging in chats, drinks and laughs with each other and really enjoyed their evenings in that, let me call it: genuine way of backpacking. If i had a request to make, my request to the modern traveler would be to pay more attention to the one-time opportunity of meeting a certain set of people in a certain place and to use these moments! Sure there is a lot to share with your homies back home (who are always just a website away) – but I feel you might put the story-telling before the story-living. The real stories are with the people you meet. Happy travellings!