Dear GoMad Nomad:

I’m low on cash but still want to travel, what should I do? Go into further debt and live life in the moment, or do the prudent thing and save up my money?

-Broke In Brooklyn

Dear Broke in Brooklyn:

My first advice is to get the heck out of Brooklyn! You’ll save up more money living in the sticks. But, yeah, yeah, I know you want to be at the epicenter of Hipsterdom.

Anyhow, to answer your question: Don’t go into debt! But…you can still travel on very limited funds. The options are limitless.

Since you don’t have money, I’m assuming you have time.  You can spend that extra time that you normally spend nursing PBRs on Bedford Ave, researching and planning out your travel.

First thing you’ll have to understand about cheap/budget travel is that it happens very slowly. You’ll have to opt for the pueblo bus over the bullet train; and if you’re going to hitch, you’ll have a lot of time to perfect your hacky sack skills while waiting for your free rides. So I’d reserve anywhere from two months to a year for this expedition.

If you just happen to have graduated from college and don’t know what to do, check out this fantastic post over at Almost Fearless.

Since you have the time, I would highly recommend volunteering, “helping,” working, and temporarily residing in the places you plan on visiting. This will allow you to actually experience the place and get to know the people you have traveled so far to visit.

Volunteering

This one is tricky. You want to avoid paying a fee to volunteer. I don’t mind helping others, but I don’t like to have to pay for that privilege, and neither should you. Check out these awesome articles for low-cost or free volunteering opportunities in Nepal, the West Bank, and Spain. Transitions Abroad Magazine is also an incredible resource for volunteering abroad info.

Help Exchange

Before I started teaching English in Madrid, I almost took a gig helping an English couple in Brittany restore an old train station into a B & B. I would have helped them for four hours a day and they would have fed me and given me a room in their home. The rest of the day I could spend working on my writing projects with the help of their wireless internet. I used Help Exchange to connect with these people in need of a helper. But the dream was never realized.

Working

Get to the Caribbean or cross the Atlantic while working aboard a yacht. Skippers in ports far and wide are always looking for a crew that preferably speaks their language and may or may not have sailing experience. Good sites to connect skippers and crew: Crewfinders, Yacht Crew Register, or Dovaston Crew.

Temporarily Residing

A great option is house sitting. I kind of want to make a career out of this, except it doesn’t pay very well. Why not take care of the perritos and water Señora Torres’ garden for the month August while she’s vacationing at her other home on the Canaries? You’ll probably need a good reference before strangers will entrust you with their home and animals. Use Mind My House, House Careers, or House Sit World.

So if you combine a little traveling in between some of these ideas, you’ll have a well-rounded trip.  Use couchsurfing for accommodation read up on hitchhiking before you leave.

-Stephen

By Stephen Bugno

Blog of a Modern Nomad

The next day I rode the slow, winding topo train to the French border town, Hendaye, where I caught a short ride out to the on-ramp of the divided highway. After about 25 minutes standing with my thumb up, I was picked up by a guy heading nearly all the way to Bordeaux. Quite well-traveled and speaking excellent English, Sebastian and I chatted nearly the whole three hours as we ripped through the great Landes forest, the largest maritime pine forest in Europe (10,000 km²). “This is the lung of Europe,” he pointed out.

Bordeaux

He lived in a small beach town and dropped me off at a rural crossroads. Waiting in the warm afternoon sun, my next ride really caught me off-guard. A young woman with her elderly mom and her baby in the back seat pulled over on their way home from spending the afternoon on the beach. At first I didn’t even look back, figuring they couldn’t possibly be stopping for me. But they got out, glanced at me and started repacking to make room in the back seat for me. I threw my backpack in the trunk, brushed some sand off the back seat and we pulled off. They dropped me on the outskirts of Bordeaux and as the rain began, I took shelter under a bus stop and got on the next bus going into the center.

Bordeaux, while lacking traditional tourist sites, is certainly a necessary stop if you’re into wine. It is the wine-producing region of the wine-producing country.

On Sunday afternoon my brother and his coworkers and I checked out the World Heritage site of Saint-Emilion. The village was over-run with day-trippers (like ourselves), souvenir shops, and wine shops, but an easy five-minute stroll in one direction landed me in a quiet street with no signs of tourism and great views of the beautiful town and surrounding vineyards.

We toured and tasted at one of the many wineries surrounding the town and took a walking tour through the historic sites, most notably the hermitage of the 8^th century monk for whom the village is named. We also visited a huge church carved into the limestone cliff which was reminiscent of the churches of Cappadocia.

Back in Bordeaux I sat down with a young Bordelais one afternoon before he briefly showed me around Europe’s biggest 18^th century architectural urban areas. After much complaining about the current politics and President Zarko (complaining is a national pastime in France, I would learn later that week) my new left-wing friend suggested I check out an area of town in which he noted was “a good example of an immigrant community integrated into French society”. The next day I enjoyed a stroll through the colorful, mostly North African shops, restaurants and flea market around the Basilica of Saint-Michel.

Stephen Bugno  June, 2008

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 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!”