Backpacking around the globe is a great adventure, especially when you are young and don't have any strings to tie you down. But with so many people putting off having families and travelling later in life, should there be an age limit on backpacking?

I was 27 years old when I set out on my first backpacking holiday — a month-long overland trip taking in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia.

But it wasn't until a few years later, after I'd turned 30, when I finally felt secure enough in myself to take off on my first real extended solo backpacking adventure. That time I bused and trained my way around the lesser-known parts of Eastern Europe. So as a bit of a late-backpacking bloomer, I've usually always been the oldest person in the dorm room.

Yet some 10 years on as I pack my bags for my next backpacking adventure in Cambodia I'm wondering if, at the ripe old age of 41 years, I'm starting to get a little too old for this?

I've already traded in my traditional rucksack for a far more practical and convenient (and might I add less backbreaking) trolley backpack, so perhaps it's time I hung up my hiking boots and signed up for a seniors-only bus tour of Europe?

For me, age always has been, and hopefully will always be, a number. It's more about how you live your life rather than how many candles are on your cake. At the same time, as the years have marched on I've noticed the gap between myself and younger travellers at hostels is indeed widening.

While they revel in all-night drinking parties and only crawl into their bunks just before dawn, I'd much rather find a hole-in-the-wall restaurant where I can enjoy a local meal along with a glass of wine (or two) and be in bed well before midnight. I also appreciate a few more luxuries, such as hygienic bathrooms and clean bed sheets, than I did when I was younger. But does this mean I should give hostels a wide berth?

Hostels of course offer a great budget alternative form of accommodation and they are excellent places to meet like-minded travellers. Yet while they were once the domain of drifters and students, today's hostels cater to the young and the young at heart with many dropping the "youth" tag and opening their doors to families and mature-age travellers.

Granted I'd find screaming children as annoying as drunken teenagers and late-night snorers, but no matter whether my dorm mates belong to gen Y, gen X or the baby boomers, as long as they share my independent travelling spirit then, as far as I'm concerned, they can only make my hostelling experience richer.

Perhaps in the end it's all just a matter of definition. That is, if to you the word "backpacker" means the party all night, sleep all day gap-year student whose round-world trip drifts by in a drunken blur, then by all accounts my backpacking years are well behind me.

But if, like me, you believe backpackers are in fact independent travellers who don't go in much for set itineraries, who avoid package tours and who relish the opportunity to get off the well-beaten tourist trail, then you can never be too old to be a backpacker.

So while I may end up being the oldest person at the hostel yet again when I touch down in Phnom Penh, as long as I continue to enjoy the challenges and complexities of independent travel, I can't see myself giving up backpacking anytime soon.