Backpackers.

Love them, hate them, you've probably been one of them.

It's hard to miss backpackers here in Southeast Asia. They're everywhere, obvious like sore thumbs outside of hostel or guesthouse walls, or like hitchhiker thumbs navigating the local transport routes, hopping on the cross-border buses. If you've been a backpacker, you feel an affinity to them. You see a towering hump, a bedraggled figure hunched under it like a pilgrim on a mission, and you want to run up to them and talk to them, ask them what their story is. You want to be friends.

It's terribly clichéd but true.

There are the long haired, dreadlocked types, ones who go months cultivating a bushy beard to reflect the supposedly morose hygiene conditions of their months on the road; the fisherman pant-wearing - or whatever you call them, harem pants, jester pants, groucho pants - with a variety of faded tee shirts; the girls with knotty hair, bunched up in head scarves; the ones with button shirts and sleeves carelessly cuffed up; those in ragged shorts, worn canvas shoes and a slouchy hobo bag with embroidery marking its origins from Varanasi or Vietnam. There are the drinkers, the spontaneous musicians, the poets, the writers, the ones who left illustrious careers, the ones with no careers to speak of. There are also the ones with tees marking each city they've been just before, wearing green and red-starred shirts in Phnom Penh, wearing Sanskrit shirts in Chiang Mai. There are pairs of Scandanavian-perfection girls, or trios of Japanese indies. There are many types and all of them recognizable and familiar in the landscape.

But the backpacker scene is changing, and with it, there are new travellers popping up everywhere. My friend Keitha and I were sitting in the middle of the backpacker ghetto of Saigon that is Pham Ngu Lao, sweaty and dirty as we’ve come to accept with resignation each day in Southeast Asia. Yet around us, down the streets, were sights we weren’t used to seeing. Groups of girls walking through parks, clutching their front packs and glancing around the locals with the darting wild-eyed look of fear that read "Don't pick my pocket!" We watched them stand at intersections for the entirety of our pho noodle dinners on the street corner (10 to 15 minutes), while they waited and waited for a break in between the cars and scooters, until they finally accepted that the only solution of getting to the other side was braving the Saigon traffic head-on and foot first like everyone else. We saw them out in the middle of the day dressed strangely - in pretty tube dresses, carrying miniscule clutch bags that seemed to only fit a map.

I was jealous - there I was struggling to keep my white oversized button shirts at least a shade of off-white, and the dusty Saigon traffic made our feet black at the end of each day. How did they manage to stay so fresh-faced, so clean? How did they look like they were just transplanted from a city like NYC, or London, and not like they had just fallen off the back of a cross-border bus? Where did these travellers come from?

Keitha, who was in Vietnam years back and is far more well-travelled than I am, tells me that things have changed a lot in the past few years. Then, it was difficult to navigate through the country, but now you can't walk a street without encountering 5 motorbike drivers yelling at you, "You, motorbike!", or vendors hawking photocopies of Lonely Planet guides, or kids trying to sell you toothbrushes with methods that range from pitiful to vicious.

Now you have the travellers who have, after careful consideration and rounds on travel forums asking "Is it safe to travel in Thailand/Vietnam/[insert name of country']??", have decided to enter the intrepid world of Southeast Asia. But the truth is it's no longer intrepid, and the fact that they serve 'home favourites' like pasta and pizza at the cafe at the corner of the alley from your guesthouse is a sure sign that it's not really the way it used to be.

But variety is good, and sometimes you just get sick of the same old backpacker crowd, and it makes everything more interesting. And now you have backpackers on the internet – they all have travel blogs. Some are interesting, many are sincere, but every once in a while you chance upon something that just raises an eyebrow.

Take one: A young woman leaves the comforts of Montreal to live in South Korea for a year, to be an English teacher. Readers were praising her on her blog, asking her how she got the courage to do it, and she wrote an entry dedicated to encouraging others to be adventurous like her. It began with:

"Before I went to Seoul, I had never been in a third world country..."

Seoul, South Korea? Third world country?

Well, I guess variety is good... right?