Bizarre backpacking van

This is the old van that I used for backpacking around Australia - sometimes it felt as if I was driving an  advertisement around

The ad. on the side of the van is for a neon lighting company – a company called `Claud Neon’, so here I am somewhere in the Australian bush, no electricity supply available and none available for maybe the next 500 or a 1000 miles – and I’m advertising a neon lighting company.

This is not neon advertising country. This is water country. Water is the product that is in demand here. Nobody around here is gonna see me driving past in this van, look at the ad. and decide to call Claude to talk about neon lighting – partly because there is nobody around here.

Australia backpacking van

That’s what I liked about it. It was strictly non-targeted advertising. Like everybody else, all my life I’ve been surrounded by targeted advertising. That reaches out to a receptive audience. Ok, here’s some advertising that doesn’t reach out to anybody.
This irrelevance kind of heightened the irrelevance of the situation; I was irrelevant in a place like this and so was my ad. Backpacking – at least this kind of backpacking, is mostly about wanting to feel irrelevant.
I don’t know why backpackers feel this way.
Nobody else seems to do.