By Stephen Bugno

Fishing boats in Varkala, India

Although they’re situated on four different continents, these five beach towns are hard to beat for the low-budget independent traveler.

What makes a great beach? I’m thinking small towns or villages, low-budget guesthouses or bungalows on or near the beach, good local food, relaxed vibes, and great sand and water in a striking natural setting.

These are places you could end up staying a week without realizing it. And your conscious will be clean because your dollars are going into the local economy and you can have a good time without excessive hedonism.

Tarabin, Sinai, Egypt

Just north of Nuweiba on the Sinai Peninsula is a strip of cafes and guesthouses called Tarabin. I stayed at Soft Beach because it was recommended to me. This place is hard to beat: little bungalows close to the sand for $3 per night, calm water for wading into the Red Sea, and a hut where meals are served any time of day.  These are not Arabs running the hospitality businesses in Tarabin, but rather the Bedouin. They have relaxed views in general, will serve beer, and traditionally cater mostly towards the influx of young Israelis on holiday. But it’s not crowded. Since the 2004 bombings here, many of the small businesses on this crescent-shaped beach have been squeezed as dry as the craggy, arid mountains that loom behind.

A nearby alternative:  Although it’s chock-a-block full of backpackers, Dahab is still hard to beat for outstanding diving, snorkeling, budget accommodation, eating establishments, and basic traveler needs. Check it out just to compare, as long as you’re in the mood to rub shoulders with your fellow foreign travelers.

Soft Beach in Tarabin, Egypt

Varkala, India

This is a beautiful cliff-top village in Kerala, on the southwest coast of India. Papanasam Beach is actually the place you want, three miles from the Varkala train station. It’s also a Hindu place of pilgrimage as well, so you can witness devotees paying homage to the site where they’ve been coming since the 12th century. The guesthouses, small hotels, and cafes spread thinly along a trail at the top of the precipice overlooking the crashing Indian Ocean. Restaurants display the days catch for passers-by and will cook the fish up anyway you like. The further north you walk, the beach is less congested with tourists and more local fishermen hang out. Their thatched boats sit up on the beach.

A nearby alternative: At Kovalam, an hour and a half to the south, there are a few top-notch beaches; but the area has been criticized recently for being overcrowded and over-developed.

Castara, Tobago

Castara is a chilled-out fishing village with a few guesthouses and cafes. The beach is set under a jungle-clad mountain. The cool thing about Castara is that it’s a real fishing village which would subsist without tourism. The snorkeling is fine, the beach is even finer, and there are no touts to bother you. Once a week, a local bar has a live steel-pan band, dinner, dancing, and all you can drink rum punch.

A nearby alternative: A few miles north is Englishman’s bay, a sweet day-use beach with no permanent facilities. Check out Charlottesville, even further north, for a bigger town, more beaches and guesthouses.

Sagres, Portugal

Sagres is a nondescript small town on the far southwest corner of Portugal. However, it’s got four outstanding beaches practically surrounding the town. I bumped into a few German surfers living out of their Volkswagon van for the week and plenty of other Europeans that moved to the area for the outstanding weather, beautiful cliffs, and economy that makes Portugal the cheapest destination in western Europe. Check out the sheltered, south-facing Praia de Mareta for bathing, Praia do Martinhal for windsurfing, the wild Praia do Tonel for surfing, and Praia de Belixe for a stunning setting under cliffs.

An alternative: About an hour and a half to the east, Tavira is a river-side town, a ten-minute ferry ride away from the Ilha de Tavira—an island with a 14km stretch of dune-backed beaches without a hotel in sight.

Ko Samet, Thailand

Ko Samet is a small, quiet island with beautiful white sand beaches. Not renowned for its parties (as with other Thai beach resorts), it is an extremely relaxed place to chill out for a while. Most of Ko Samet is part of Khao Laem Ya and Mu Ko Samet National Park. One of its advantages is being situated within easy reach of Bangkok. I didn’t have the means to reach the beaches of southern Thailand, but this is a great alternative to those. Spend your days eating pineapple or papaya in the sun and wading into the shallow blue-green water for a dip to cool off.

Stephen Bugno has been traveling and teaching English abroad for the better part of ten years. His articles and essays have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times, and Transitions Abroad magazine. He edits the Gomad Nomad Travel Mag.

“Amsterdam is the greatest city in the world.”

With such a recommendation we knew we couldn’t go wrong. We felt we had to break up the trip from Paris to Berlin by stopping in Amsterdam for a couple nights. Our drivers on the way up all had great things to say about the city, they told us about the abundance of just about everything one needs for a good night out. Our main concern to begin with was accommodation. Hostels are ridiculously expensive, couchsurfers are booked weeks in advance during the summer, and parks are few and far between in downtown Amsterdam.

Our last driver dropped us off in the center, a short walk from the famous red light district and pointed us towards Zeedijk where a cafe hosts the weekly couchsurfing meet up. We were thinking about fishing for hosts in a last desperate attempt to find someplace warm and civilized to sleep or at least drop some of our luggage.

It’s only when we reached the cafe where the local couchsurfers were meeting that we realized that this was not our scene for tonight. Our budget did not allow us to drink in such an establishment and we felt that hanging around awkwardly with empty hands and backpacks lurking for a couch was not the best way to spend our evening. We decided that we could spend our first night on the rough even though camping in cities is not high on our lists of favorite pastimes.

We wandered the streets of the red light district amazed and shocked at the atmosphere: the drug culture, the prostitution, the flaming gayness were pushed to the extreme and turned into a circus tightly packed in the narrow streets and canals.

After losing ourselves in the maze of this onion shaped city we found a grocery store and stocked up on the staples of the homeless travelers’ diet: beans, lentils, chickpeas, corn. All canned of course. This is in my opinion the cheapest and most efficient way of eating something other than cheese sandwiches while on the road. A little bit of curry powder and some Tabasco for flavor and you have yourself a nice salad. Sadly beer is disappointingly lousy in Amsterdam. Despite housing the Heineken and Hollandia breweries, the Netherlands rank very low as a beer country in comparison to their neighbours. So equipped with a pair of Atlas 8.5% beers and a wide variety of beans we set out for more exploring.

With no place to sleep and no park within walking distance, two tired and lazy travelers with bags but no maps, crashed on the edge of a canal. We enjoyed the night and the quiet of the very posh neighborhood we found ourselves in. We started dozing off under the stars, still undisturbed by the rapidly sinking temperature.

I awoke to the sound of a small boat stopping near us. We watched a man get off and say goodbye to the friend that had just taken him home. The hitcher reflex in me came out and made me ask the boater where he was heading. I didn’t really care about his destination; I was more interested in seeing if we could tag along. The boater answered in a thick English accent “Ya wanna go for a tour?”

“Sure we would.”

“Alright then, hop on, let’s go for a tour”.

We climbed down into the boat with our bags. The boat was very simple: a long thin wooden boat with a small engine attached to the end of it. We moved slowly through the canals to keep the noise down. We drifted through canal after canal, in a direction that was very unclear to us, past streets lined with small private boats and through entire blocks of boat houses lined up one after the other.

Some were built like very comfortable boats others just look like floating trailers, boxy wooden structures that seem unfit for anything rougher that a canal or a pond. It was past midnight and all the tourist boats were done sailing for the day so we could comfortably float down the middle of the waterway and enjoy discovering the city from a unique angle, looking up at everything. People, bicycles, buildings all towered above us in the night.

Our guide was amazed by our luck even though he had everything to do with making this happen. Still he kept repeating, “You are fucking lucky, first time in town and you get a free tour of the canals, fuck me!”

He looked like he was in his thirties and claimed to be some kind of sound engineer who worked out of his house in the very calm and pleasant Jordaan district. He used his boat for his everyday transportation and seemed to be enjoying this quiet late night cruise just about as much as we did albeit without the element of surprise and novelty that made it so special to us.

“Here, you are right in the middle of town,” he said when he dropped us off. This meant nothing to us since we used only the tram stop maps for direction and hadn’t seen one in a while. The neighborhood was nice and as we walked through it we felt more and more like stopping to get a couple hours of sleep.

We found a long narrow street, weakly lit, very quiet and full of trees and potted plants that we hoped would hide us from most late night walkers. We felt far away from the craziness of the red light district, far enough that we wouldn’t be disturbed by late night drunks. Determined to sleep through the coldest hours without unpacking and pulling out the sleeping bags we put down our bags as pillows, put on as many layers as we could and did our best to get comfortable next to a building, hidden on each end by small trees and potted plants.

As Murphy’s Law would have it this quiet street got a lot busier as soon as we shut our eyes, and of course, as soon as we stopped moving the cold hit us and made it hard to find sleep.

Despite this we managed a couple hours of rest before going for a walk to find a park in time for sunrise. The sun was only minutes away from clearing the buildings and trees when we reached Oostpark and settled on a patch of grass by a pond. Finally we were warm and comfortable so we shut our eyes and dozed off.

In a sudden move I turned around and jumped to my feet. Facing me, his hands still on my bag, was a tiny drunk man. His ridiculously small size and the strong stench of alcohol on his breath were the first two clues indicating that I shouldn’t be too scared of him. After shouting at him a couple times and looking at his hands and pockets for signs of our belongings I realized that I had woken up before he had any chance at taking anything. This was followed by a couple minutes of mind games where he would try to show strength, then beg for money, then emphasize that he was Dutch. After that he would try to convince me that he was an honest man and was not in the middle of opening someone else’s bags when I surprised him.

At one point he took insult at a sound that the nearby swans made and charged them and until the last second it looked as if he was going to throw himself off balance and into the water but it was his lucky day and he stayed dry. I had been seriously considering throwing him in to get rid of him until I decided it would be less entertaining but more efficient to just walk away. At this point he went from begging for one Euro to demanding five Euro and in a final act of drunkenness he sent himself spinning a couple times before jumping up in the air and spitting in my direction. Luckily he was seriously dehydrated from a night of drinking and I walked away almost unsoiled. As we walked away we watched him pick an argument with someone much taller and stronger than myself. But the spot we had chosen was too good to give up so we walked for a couple minutes and returned once we were sure that our drunk friend was far away.

Now at seven in the morning, enjoying the first rays of a beautiful summer day we dozed off and got the rest we had been looking for all night. We slept in, and watched the park fill up as it was now Saturday and the weekend crowds were out. At the water fountain we took care of basic hygiene which always gets a funny reaction from bystanders. Brushing your teeth is a very normal thing until you do it in front of everyone and suddenly their reaction makes you feel completely naked in public.

We spent our Saturday afternoon wandering around the city some more. We couldn’t afford the Van Gogh museum and our big bags barred us from seeing Anne Frank’s house. After getting a little bit of internet in a Bagel and Beans coffee shop (which is one of the few to offer free wifi) we chose to spend the night outside Amsterdam in a small town on the way to Germany.

Muiden, pronounced mooden or mawden or mweeden or however you want to because unless you’re a native speaker you’ll never get it right, is an old town stuck in between the water and the highway and crossed by many canals. With an old castle, two cafes by the water locks and a marina it’s a quiet bourgeois town with a steady trickle of tourists and very occasionally a couple of backpackers walking through to the small beach by the marina to spend the night.

The beach is a small patch of sand, no more than 100 feet wide but there is grass to pitch a tent on and the view is beautiful. To the left, across the water you can see the lights of Amsterdam lighting up the night sky and at if you stand on the top of the ancient dirt dyke you can see the castle sitting above everything else in the town, beautifully lit up against the summer sky. The layout is such that you can watch the sun set and rise from the same point and once the sun is up and you’ve enjoyed a little rinse off in the water, you are just a fifteen minute walk away from the highway from where you can catch a bus to Amsterdam (which takes twenty minutes and costs a little more than two Euro). Or if you’ve seen enough of Amsterdam you can hitch in the opposite direction, where a gas station (Tankshoone) is conveniently located a couple kilometers down the road. The highway will take you straight east to the rest of the Netherlands or Germany.

Gilbert Carlson, August 2009

By Stephen Bugno

First, what exactly do you mean by the “the backpacker’s scene”?

We’ve all been there. The crowded hostels of Europe. The well-beaten path along the Turkish coast. Khao San Road or Jalan Jaksa’s traveler’s ghettos. You’re getting tired of spending so much money to be so far away from home only to fritter away much of your time drinking and talking your next travel move with other western backpackers.

Getting beyond the backpacker’s scene is getting off the well-trodden path. It’s taking the path lesser traveled. It’s losing sleep, taking chances, having more encounters. It’s moving out of your comfort zone.

A sheep herder in rural Kazahkstan

So how do I get beyond the backpacker’s scene?

Choose your destination wisely. Don’t go to the Greek Isles during the summer. Go to Kyrgyzstan instead. You want to lose the tourists and even other travelers as well? You want fewer backpackers? Don’t linger in Bangkok. You want to actually have to use your phrase book? Go to Mongolia or the Republic of Georgia or Syria. If you do end up going to Florence in the high season, you’re going to have to get creative in order to circumvent the hordes of retired American tourists and generate a unique travel experience for yourself.

Ditch your guidebook. I know it sounds like a drastic measure to take, but guidebooks do a good job of keeping all of us tucked snugly in at friendly Mohammed’s hotel in Amman. It points us in the direction of that delectable, authentic, and inexpensive café downtown that all the German’s are eating at. Remember how you met that couple from New Zealand in Damascus and ran into them again in Cairo a month later?

Bring a tent and sleeping bag. When you carry a tent, you have a place to sleep wherever you are at the end of the day. Especially in a place like Norway, which has a law that allows you to camp freely in the wilderness. Even when this law doesn’t exist, many times you can get away with setting up your tent just out of sight. Traveling with a sleeping bag allows you the opportunity to crash at a bus or train station or even in a city park if need be. Often times when locals see your desperation, they’re more likely to invite you home.

Don’t plan so much. Not having a strict plan allows for improvisation in your trip. Allow spontaneous decisions to come to life. Go home with people you just met. Stay an extra day at your new friend’s apartment. The most memorable part of your travels are usually those unplanned.

Cycling around Copenhagen with a Dane

Get online. Sometimes planning is good. Sign up and use a web site that connects travelers with locals. Try Couch Surfing or Hospitality Club to keep you to stay away from hotels and hostels and into the homes of locals. Then you’ll be walking in residential neighborhoods you wouldn’t normally be in and riding bus routes that tourists don’t usually ride. Your hosts know the best places to get coffee, pizza, or kimchi. And these nice people will most likely introduce you to their friends. You all of a sudden know 12 people in Cork and you just arrived.

Get on the bus. Carry a good map. Ride to the outskirts of the city. Get off the bus. Walk. Throw away your map. Don’t worry about getting lost. Someone will help you find your way back.

Don’t always take reliable or quick transportation. Cancel your domestic flights. See the countryside the way it’s meant to be seen. Don’t take the inter-city express bus. Get on the pueblo bus. You might lose some sleep, but you’ll be riding next to Guillermo the farmer and his newly hatched chicks while stopping in every village between Porto and Madrid.

Stick up your thumb. Don’t listen to those naysayers who tell you it’s dangerous. Sure it can be, but so can taking the bus or flying. People like company in their cars. Stand on the on-ramp, put your pack in front of you, and take off your sunglasses. Stay positive. Before you know it, you’ll be in Bordeaux and will have met several French people that you may or may not have understood a single word with.

Camping in Nagorno Karabakh

Get out to the countryside and small towns. Show up in a town that has nothing of touristic interest. You will actually meet a local. The conversation with babushka might start by her asking why in God’s name you have come here. Don’t do a whirlwind tour of the European capitals. Sure, visit Moscow, but ramble through a string of Russian towns that you will never remember the names of.

Stay a while. If this technically moves out of the realm of traveling and into vagabonding, so be it. Linger to absorb the local culture. Organize a few weeks exchange in Switzerland using Help Exchange. Volunteer on an organic farm in New Zealand with WWOOF. Teach English in Madrid or rural China. Take a cooking course in Thailand or study meditation or yoga in India. Do a long-distance walk or pilgrimage. Do a cycle tour of Nova Scotia.

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Carefree travel on the Cheap

Stephen Bugno has been traveling and teaching English abroad for the better part of ten years. His articles and essays have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times, and Transitions Abroad magazine. He edits the Gomad Nomad Travel Mag.

By Gilbert Carlson

We were in Bulgaria when we decided to visit Kosovo. All we knew about Kosovo was what we’d seen on the news about their war with Serbia and their unilaterally-declared independence earlier in the year. Our travel map was sketched on the back of our first guitar and complemented by a real map of the Balkans in Cyrillic that had been given to us by a driver on the ring road of Sofia. Because of our lack of proper tools, we avoided planning as much as possible and let random events guide us through the Balkans.

We’d hitched out of Sofia with the intention of going to Skopje for a day or so and then heading on to Pristina. But a very kind lady had picked us up outside the border crossing from Bulgaria to Macedonia and told us she was driving straight and fast to a hotel 10 km outside Pristina on the main road.

As we drove through Macedonia I regretted not stopping in the country: it was a sunny afternoon, the landscape was beautiful, the roads were tiny and beat up, and the living looked simple. It seemed like a perfect place to get lost in for a couple days. Our driver was having an affair with a Kosovan man and drove every weekend from Sofia to Pristina to meet him and we’d been lucky enough to cross paths. She drove fast through the lovely Macedonian countryside. We slowed down a little when making our way through the Albanian markets in the suburbs of Skopje, and again when we passed the UNMIK-controlled Kosovan border. We drove very quickly through the mountainous area of southern Kosovo and gazed out the window at the gorges, rivers and snow covered mountain tops. We were getting excited about the country until it suddenly faded into the flat and uneventful plain that surrounds Pristina.

Our driver left us on the parking lot of the hotel her lover managed. We enjoyed the last of our bread and cheese and took a minute to think about where we were and what we were doing. It became clear to both Nathan and I independently that we did not care much, if at all, about seeing Pristina, or the rest of Kosovo for that matter. We’d wanted to come here for one reason only– to say we’d been to Kosovo. Now that this was done we would be content just crossing the road and hitching back the other direction to somewhere else. Some of these thoughts were influenced by the fact that we were on a parking lot, surrounded by industrial sprawl on a very flat plain outside of a city that had no famous monuments nor anyone we knew. The sun was setting and it was getting chilly and the idea of sleeping outside in this climate was not appealing at all. We considered heading back down south to Greece and its sunny Mediterranean coast. We’d seen signs on our way up which was an encouraging sign for a hitchhiker.

We finally made up our minds and decided to hitch the last ten kilometers into town, spend the night and check it out in the morning: leave whenever we got bored. We’d hitched all the way here and the idea of turning around seemed somehow stupider than the idea of going to a country just to say “I’ve been there”. However ugly and uneventful Pristina may turn out to be it could hardly be worse than the parking lot of a hotel and gas station we were currently standing in. Greece was several hundred kilometers away and the idea would have been hard to sell to the two more reasonable members of our group of four. Hitching proved incredibly easy and fast. We split up into two cars that then drove together as a convoy to make sure we made it to the same spot in the city. Our meeting point had been “the oldest and most famous thing in town” but Pristina had nothing old and nothing famous in it so our cars dropped us off in the middle of town.

A contact on couchsurfing had told us about an abandoned building’s rooftop that we could camp on but we were having a hard time getting in touch so we went looking for alternatives. The big fancy five-star hotel had no free rooms to spare but was willing to let us sleep in a corner of the lobby as long as we could get the security guards to agree to it. With accommodation secured we’d decided to hit the bar scene. It was Friday night and we’d heard good things about the Pristina night life. Of course we still had all our bags which meant we had to find a spacious and relatively quiet bar to crash in.

The Contra fit the description perfectly. On top of that, the staff was extremely friendly, even to the point of forgetting to bill me my drinks and the owner was kind enough to let us spend the night in the bar. Closing time was midnight and we would have to be out by the time they opened the next morning at seven. I crashed at eleven, before the bar was either closed or empty, but no one seemed to mind the tall fellow stretched out on a couch in the corner.

I have no idea what negotiations went on during my sleep but the fact is I woke up the next morning to a thirteen-year-old kid telling me in broken English that it was way too cold for us to sleep in the bar and that we should absolutely come to his house and that his aunt and uncle would pick us up in a couple minutes in their car. Apparently he was one of the peanut-selling kids that go around the bars of Pristina at night. He’d seen us settle in to the couches for the night and according to the others he had tried to communicate all this to us beforehand, but my friends hadn’t quite understood what he meant and were in no mood to give up a comfortable set up in a bar to follow a kid into a cold night. Both he and his sister felt bad for us and convinced their family to come pick us up. When a working teenage boy from a war-torn country feels bad for you, you know you’ve gone very far in a strange direction.

Minutes later we were being driven around Pristina to a house that was well within walking distance of the bar. We were led into a well-heated living room to spend the night and in the morning given hot milk, bread, butter, and jam for breakfast. We got to know the family better and hung out with the two kids while resting after what had been a short and chilly night. After a couple hours we were served soup for lunch.

We went out for a tour of the city, which was a very short affair, and played the guitar to an audience of Kosovan kids. In the evening we drank some more at the Contra and enjoyed free pizza in a restaurant. We returned to the family’s home and spent the night in a warm, comfortable bed.

In the morning we left our generous hosts and hitched our way out of Pristina only to be ‘kidnapped’ thirty kilometers down the road by Isuf, who absolutely insisted on taking us to his house in the mountains, going fishing, showing me how to change the battery on a Caterpillar tractor, taking us out for coffee by the river, and dropping us off the next morning on the road to Albania.

by Stephen Bugno

“When you’ve found heaven on earth, why go anywhere else?” We were standing outside of a small guest house, just steps from the beach, in the village of Castara. It was 10pm and with no reservation we were deciding how many nights to book for. “This is our sixth time here in the last four years,” continued Catherine, a middle-aged English vacationer, promoting this village on the northern coast of Tobago as if she was raised here.

Castara's beach

Respectful of her opinion, I needed to decide for myself if this was the perfect beach. We booked for three nights.

In the morning we saw just what kind of place Castara is—a village where everyone knows each others name and tourists aren’t obnoxious. Castara has no resorts, big hotels, or fancy restaurants. What it does have are small, reasonably-priced guesthouses and locals that rent out extra rooms. It has relaxed cafés on the beach. It’s the kind of place where you can help fishermen haul the seine, or fishing net filled with the day’s catch.

Castara has it all

Relax, play, eat, and practice steel drums. A supremely laid-back place, you can sit on the beach in Castara without getting harassed by touts. The only person to interrupt your sleep in the sun is the man with the portable steel-pan drums who offers a lesson for about $4. My travel companion was playing Amazing Grace within five minutes.

The snorkeling is outstanding. While my newly acquainted South African friend saw rays, I spotted lots of colorful fish, an eel, and stunning brain coral. Don’t have snorkeling equipment? Don’t worry; you can rent some from King David Tours for about $6 per 24-hour period.

For dinner, Margarite’s in the center of the village serves up flavorful Tobagonian fare at honest prices (mains $10-12). Besides the chicken, pork and goat offered, there is always the catch of the day. We had the dolphin-fish with ginger vegetables and the local favorite, macaroni pie. Wash it all down with a ginger beer.

For some, the biggest attraction to Castara is its gorgeous palm-fringed beach. The blue-green waters of the bay and jungle-clad hillside above town make the setting incredible. You can’t go wrong spending a whole day lying on the beach or swimming in the warm water.

A unique feature of Castara’s beach is the Boboshanty. Here Rudi and his wife offer relaxing herbal steam baths and massages (from $40-50) right from their wooden shed on the beach.

A real village

What may surprise you is that Castara is a real village. Its economy is centered on fishing and agriculture and only recently has tourism played a larger role. The tourists seem to be temporary members of Castaran life, rather than hedonistic holidaymakers. Attracting a mix of ages from the UK and the rest of Europe as well as Australia and the U.S., they’ll be lined up next to locals at the fisherman’s co-op to purchase the day’s catch.

Whenever a catch comes in, folks gather around the co-op. It’s located on the edge of the beach where the only road in town dead-ends at the sand. As its real estate suggests, it’s the most significant place in Castara. We looked on as the bare-chested fisherman scaled and cut up the huge kingfish, oblivious to the blood splashing everywhere.

Where are you liming tonight?

This popular local phrase addresses one of the more important aspects of daily life: socializing. To lime is to stand in the street or at a bar simply talking with your friends.

Once a week, a local bar has a live steel-pan band, dinner, and all you can drink rum punch for $25 a head. After the band, some locals informally break out the African drums. And by the time you have finished your Tobagonian shark or Creole shrimp, and many rum punches, everyone is dancing to the current Soca hits. Needless to say, it’s the place to lime on Wednesdays.

It seems unlikely that Castara will develop into a resort area anytime soon and lose its attractive small-town local-life flavor.

We spent the rest of our trip circling the island, enjoying just about everyplace we went. But there is something special about Castara. Its beautiful setting, local hospitality, and decidedly laid-back feel make it the best place to relax for an independent, low-budget week in the Caribbean.

Tobago is one of the most overlooked and best value destinations in the Caribbean. It is cheaper than other Caribbean Islands and is not geared toward package tourism, making it ideal for independent travelers. With a trip to Tobago you are almost guaranteed a travel experience that will have you chatting with dreadlocked fisherman, dancing in the street with a cold beer, and putting your tourist dollars into the local economy.

by Gilbert Carlson

Have you ever had the desire to be totally liberated? Wanted to hit the road with only a few things in your backpack, little or no money, and trust completely in the world around you? Travel not caring where you sleep, how you move about, or where your next meal will come from?

This guide to carefree travel is based on an overland trip from Palestine to Paris, focusing mainly on the last part, which took three friends and I through the Balkans, Italy and Germany before reaching France.

The trip was motivated mostly by necessity; we had to make it home on an extremely small budget since we had spent the past few months volunteering. One of the self-imposed conditions was to keep a two Euro limit on accommodation every night. The other was that transportation would have to be kept in the same proportions—that meant hitch-hiking most of the way.

When traveling long-term in this manner, it is necessary to first eliminate the negative anticipation otherwise referred to as worrying. The needs that a traveler usually worries about are essentially transportation, accommodation and food; assuming safety is not an issue. Carefree travel eliminates the first two and very often the third. The main requirements are optimism, creativity and a tent.

Carefree travel is very much a faith-based concept. The traveler must believe in himself and the world around him. Remaining optimistic is crucial. For those who favor realism to optimism, keep in mind that reality is your worst enemy. The minute you start believing in reality you’d better go book a flight and a hotel room. That is to say give up.

This form of worry-free travel only works for those willing to walk out randomly into an unknown situation and trust their luck and the good nature of other humans to take care of them.

The trip: How we did it

The free-spiritedness really kicked off with our meeting point in Bulgaria. After a few days together in Istanbul, the four of us had to split up and arranged to meet at an Ace of Base concert in the very small town of Lovech, in central Bulgaria. Our meeting time was as vague as our meeting point. The instructions were to be in the town by early afternoon and be as visible as possible.

All this turned out to be completely unnecessary as we all naturally met up near one of the beer stands at the town’s festival. So there we were in a small town in Bulgaria where we knew absolutely no one and had no plans beyond the Ace of Base gig. We never once thought about accommodation even though we were in a mountainous area in early May and only had a two-person tent and two sleeping bags for the four of us.

We met some Bulgarian ravers who invited us to a weekend-long house rave party with drum and bass playing all day and all night, an endless supply of alcohol, as well as strange characters and language barriers. We walked out of town the next morning, found our highway and hitched to Sofia.

Our plan had been to get to Skopje that night, but after a bad decision in one of the cars we got stuck on the ring road. We ended up spending the night in Sofia with a last-minute-arranged couchsurfer and hitched out the next morning. Leaving Sofia was slow and painful and we thought we’d never make it to the capital of Macedonia before nightfall.

We arrived at the very quiet border crossing in between Bulgaria and Macedonia in the late afternoon. The sun was getting low and the altitude meant the air was already a bit chilly and there were not many cars traveling this road. All signs pointed towards a cold and uncomfortable night in the mountains. We walked through the border crossing and looked around at the mostly deserted shops and buildings welcoming us to Macedonia. After a couple minutes on the side of the road a car took all four of us all the way to Pristina, which was our first-choice destination before reason made us opt for the more realistic goal of reaching Skopje by the end of the day.

These stories may sound like a series of lucky breaks but it’s interesting to consider that they all took place in the same 48-hour period which also happened to be the very beginning of the most absurd and random leg of our trip. To say, upon reaching Pristina, that we felt unnaturally lucky is an understatement.

How to liberate yourself while traveling

By traveling free, and I mean truly liberated, you are detached from obligations, reservations, hassles and other related problems. But how to get to this state?

Determination is key. Things don’t come easily when you rely on other people’s generosity for your necessities. Things might not even come at all but you still have to hang in there. Hitch-hiking is the most random and unreliable means of transportation and waiting for a car may keep you on the side of the road for as little as five minutes or as long as five hours.

Flexibility is a must. Accommodation may turn out to be a spare room in somebody’s house, a hotel lobby’s couch or perhaps a field in an empty lot. The uncertainty is what makes it exciting. It also makes it difficult for those travelers who expect everything to be handed to them. Of course we want the world and we want it now, but if now is five hours from now you’d better find a game to play on the side of the road.

Creativity one of the essential prerequisites to carefree travel, after optimism. Creativity comes in handy in every situation. You have no car, no house and no food and you have to make one or all of these elements appear. The important thing to keep in mind is that everything you need is out there and available. In any given city at any given moment there are empty rooms, almost every car has an empty seat in it, and every restaurant has extra food or leftovers waiting for you. All you have to do is figure out how to cross that bridge that separates you from what you need.

Obviously, things won’t come easily, at least not quite as easily as if you were to book ahead and pay full price for them. Being creative means being able to come up with unconventional ways of obtaining things. It means coming up with a quick story when required and being able to communicate on little or no common language through ideas and signs. Creativity allows us to overcome all the challenges that can’t be ignored.

Don’t be shy. In many situations all you have to do is ask. We walked into a Pizza restaurant in Pristina asking for free food and were served fresh hot pizzas made just for us. We asked a bar owner if we could stay after closing time to sleep and he let us. We asked internet cafes for a couple free minutes and they let each one of us use a computer for more than an hour. If you don’t ask, people won’t think to offer. We were sitting outside a mall in Croatia on our way to Venice when a man walked up and offered us rooms for rent. Instead of just declining the offer I randomly asked him if he was driving to Venice in the afternoon. There was absolutely no reason to believe he might be and as it turned out he wasn’t, but after a couple minutes he came back and offered to drive us to the first rest area on the highway. That ride saved us hours of waiting in the suburbs of Zadar.

Lower your standards. Chances are you won’t be getting a shower and a hot meal every night. You’ll probably sleep outside many nights and go several days without washing. Most personal hygiene can be taken care of with a bottle of water, but you have to learn to live without showering for days at a time. Travelling near water is a good way to ensure basic hygiene. Lakes, seas and rivers are great to wash in if you’re traveling in warm climates. Sleeping outside is not as bad as it sounds, especially when the weather is nice. In Trogir, Croatia, we found an open building and borrowed cushions from the nearby cafes. It turned out to be one of our most comfortable nights. Keep your expectations low and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what comes your way.

Travel light. Anything beyond one change of clothes, a sleeping bag, tent and a basic set of toiletries is excessive. Unfortunately, we had two hookah pipes and three guitars for four people, but things would have been a lot easier with just the minimum. Keep in mind that you will be carrying everything on your back, throwing your stuff into and out of cars all the time, and during some rides you’ll have to hold your stuff on your lap.

Why travel this way?

One question I feel obligated to answer after giving all these tips for carefree travel is: why do this to yourself? Why wouldn’t you just get a job and save up the necessary money to go travelling in a more comfortable, typical way?

The most important benefit is the feeling of liberty that comes with such an experience. Rarely have I felt as free as when I found myself standing on the side of an unknown road in an obscure country with no local currency in my pocket, no knowledge of the language, and no sense of direction or time. Nowhere to be, nothing to do, no deadlines to meet, trains to catch, or bookings to confirm. When you know that you’ve just traveled a certain distance in one direction but you could turn around and go another direction and it wouldn’t make any difference to anyone, you know you’ve reached a certain degree of freedom that few people will be fortunate enough to experience in their lives.

The second major benefit is all the opportunities that arise only for the , carefree traveler. Could I have gone fishing in the rivers of southern Kosovo and spent the night in a farm in the mountains if I’d been taking trains and staying in hostels? Would I have spent the night in a sixteenth century monastery in Montenegro if I hadn’t been picked up by an Orthodox monk on a small country road? Would I have met so many interesting people if I hadn’t had to walk up to them and ask for assistance? On this trip I experienced a lot more of the Balkans than I would have, had I travelled like the typical Euro-rail-pass-carrying backpacker.

The third benefit is the complete absence of hassle. No longer do you have to get up early on your last day in a city to make it to the airport in time. You don’t have to find out how to get to the airport nor how much it will cost you. You don’t need to worry about making it to your hostel before they cancel your reservation. All these problems come with conventional travel and make it painful at times.

The fact that this way of traveling happens to be a very cheap way of doing things is a benefit, but in comparison to the other advantages, it seems so minuscule that it is hardly worth mentioning.

Is carefree traveling for you?

You don’t become the ultimate carefree traveler overnight and it isn’t a philosophy that everyone will embrace. But if you already have a tendency towards detachment from objects and you enjoy peace of mind more than a warm shower, then you should get used to it pretty quickly.

You’ll probably want to phase into it gradually: first by replacing overland flights with buses and trains, then switching to hitching when you can. Then you’ll start replacing hostel nights with couchsurfing, camping or urbancamping.

Before you know it, you’ll be wandering the streets of a city you’ve never heard of looking for cardboard and a bus stop to sleep in while looking forward to hitching to a lake the next morning to take your first bath in four days. You’ll find yourself sitting by the lake on a sunny day with nowhere to go that day and you’ll lie in the grass, stare at the sky and think to yourself “life is sweet!”

by Stephen Bugno

Despite the Algarve’s reputation as an over-developed holiday destination for Northern Europeans, there are a few gems—unspoiled, laid-back, small towns with adequate, reasonably-priced accommodation and fantastic beaches.

Tavira

Although technically a river town situated on both sides of the Rio Gilao, Tavira is a ten-minute ferry ride away from the Ilha de Tavira—an island with a 14km stretch of dune-backed beaches without a hotel in sight. The town itself is very attractive with a few sites of its own, and plenty of accommodation and restaurants, bars, and cafes. Located about 20km from the Spanish border, it’s a fine spot to use as a base while exploring the coast of the eastern Algarve: place such as Cacela Velha, Manta Rota, Altura, and Praia Verde.

Sagres

On the far southwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula, Sagres is surrounded by four superb beaches. Although not necessarily an overly charming town, it is pleasant enough and has the necessities to keep the family, surfer, or backpacker content. The sheltered, south-facing Praia de Mareta is great place for bathing, Praia do Martinhal for windsurfing, the wild Praia do Tonel for surfing, and Praia de Belixe for an absolutely stunning setting under cliffs. A couple outfits in town offer surfing lessons as well.

Carrapateira

North from Sagres, along the untamed Atlantic, sits the small town of Carrapateira. Located on the hillside about a kilometer inland, it has adequate budget guesthouses and plenty of private rooms for rent. From here you have access to two fine beaches with incredible surf baked by beautiful sand dunes. In town there’s a surf school which many come here especially to do.

Odeceixe

Four kilometers upstream from a beautiful beach where the Odeceixe River empties into the sea, the town with the same name is built upon the hill. A haven for campervanners, backpackers, surfers, and families alike, the Praia de Odeceixe is a wide, sandy beach with excellent, mild-temperature-water swimming. The gorgeous, cultivated, river-valley setting only complements the calm atmosphere of this community. Zambujeira do Mar Although located in Alentejo, Zambujeira do Mar has much in common with the surf spots of the Algarve. Set atop a cliff, the attractive whitewashed village looks down to a strikingly picturesque beach surrounded on both sides by protected coastline. Zambujeira is a quiet place to relax for days on end, enjoying seafood or drinks at outdoor cafes and restaurants. Every summer it hosts the huge “Festival do Sudoeste” music festival, which attracts big names in the music world and an alternative, laid-back crowd.

Vila Nova de Milfontes

Understandably, Vila Nova de Milfontes is a popular place, though it remains unspoiled. The beaches here are the main draw at this typical Alentejo resort, located about 30km north of Zambujeira. Sandy spots face the open ocean as well as those strung out along the calm, warmer, estuary waters attracting families and independent travelers throughout the summer months. Vila Nova de Milfontes is a great place to sample the outstanding cuisine that Alentejo has to offer, enjoying the small-town atmosphere while al fresco dining.

Stephen Bugno has been traveling and teaching English abroad for the better part of ten years. His articles and essays have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times, and Transitions Abroad magazine. He edits the Gomad Nomad Travel Mag.