Tour and Travel

One person’s budget for a fortnight in Egypt might well run to a couple of thousand dollars, for others it would be a few hundred.

Generally, budget travel is considered shoestring. Lonely Planet almost made the name their own with their original travel guide to Southeast Asia; for travelers on a tight budget. I even used the yellow book myself in the eighties.

Now LP have guides to just about everywhere, and have included mid-range and top end hotels in their places to stay; to cast the net wider. We’ll be looking at the guidebooks next week.

If you’re traveling on the cheap, there’s nothing to stop you entering the five star hotels. Some of them have good value, all you can eat buffets; at a price travelers can afford — occasionally.

If you’re starting out on a lengthy 3 to 6 month overland journey, you will indeed need to budget for three to seven thousand dollars.

Your budget will vary depending on where you travel. Europe is not as cheap anymore, and the gendarmes aren’t so tolerant of back-packers sleeping on the beach.

When the Summer is over you wouldn’t want to anyway, but it’s still a good time to travel in Europe. The queues for museums have gone, you’ll have less tourists in your photographs, and you will get to meet the locals; in the high season they’re all on holiday too. And guess what? The accommodation prices are coming down as well; almost half the price in some heavily tourist areas.

Amsterdam and Prague are great budget places in September and October, and Paris is coming back to life — the Parisians desert the French capital in August, and that’s not a lot of fun if you like to sit at a brasserie table and watch the world go by.

Good value travel can still be had in Asia, South America, and parts of Africa. In West Africa, for example, the Francophone countries are more expensive than the former English colonies, with Abidjan and Dakar the two most expensive cities. Ghana is a treasure. Now’s the time to start planning for the Southern Hemisphere

The most expensive part of the trip is usually the flight ticket. In this article, we are talking about the budget travel after the the ticket is bought. Getting a good price on airline tickets is quite an art in itself.

You can even make reservations online.

Your budget for traveling, once the ticket is bought, will of course depend on your comfort requirements in both accommodation and transportation.

Dormitory beds, or a room with your own shower; hard seats on 36-hour Chinese trains, or a sleeper in a closed compartment. These are the extremes and there is always somewhere in between.

I have stayed in some very nice hotels in South America for $5, and some dives in the United States for five to ten times that.

There are old colonial mansions in West Africa that you never want to leave and water palaces, surrounded by rice paddies, in Indonesia that offer an outdoor swim before breakfast. Once travelers tell Lonely Planet about these places, they loose the atmosphere. So I’m not going to tell you where they are either.

There are always gems on the route less travelled, and that is the beauty of traveling without knowing where you’ll be staying.

That’s budget travel to me. You have a wad of money when you start out, and you really don’t know how far you’ll get with it. If you want to know how much it’s all going to cost and where you’ll stay, then book through a travel agent.

Before you get your head down for the night you’ll have to get there. Some people do hitch-hike in Asia and South America, but transportation is reasonably cheap and frequent.

The greatest luxury is time, budgeting your time is also a part of independent travel. Again if you don’t have enough of it, you’ll be forced to take the tours.

In countries like India and China you will need to book the long-distance trains at least a day in advance, sometimes three days or more.

Many a traveler has come unstuck by looking around Beijing for three or five days, and then being forced to stay another three or five because they can’t get a ticket out.

On the popular routes, you sometimes need to book your tickets out, before you settle in. Unwanted tickets are easier to sell than trying to buy one for a train that leaves in half an hour.

In West Africa you simply turn up at the autogare and wait for the Peugeot to fill up — early mornings are always best. While other countries have bus stations with many companies competing to get you on theirs that is leaving right away.

So whatever your budget, there’s always something for you — you pay the money, you take the choice. Don’t forget that some countries require you to pay for a visa, and when your budgeted time is out you may well have to pay a departure tax.

The bus pulled off the highway and into the station marking the halfway point between Madrid and Granada. Stepping down from the bus a slight wind swirled the dust, the sunlight glaring off of the cars parked nearby making the whitewashed adobe walls seem blinding. The truck stop, some shabby hotels and an old deserted petrol station were all I could see among the rolling Andalusian hills.

I scrounged in my pocket and pulled out a handful of change. My fist full with strange unfamiliar coins of varying weights and sizes. Pesetas, francs, pence, guilders, deutchmarks, the sum of my travels so far. Separating the pesetas from the rest I stepped into the truck stop café surveying my options. Smoke hung curled and seemed motionless, the inside of the café had an air of perpetual haziness and I felt like my eyes would never adjust.

I listened to the clink of glasses and chatter of the old men with their cervezas and cigarettes. The menu on the wall was incomprehensible, names of Spanish dishes made even stranger by the missing letters on the board. I walked instead to the vending machines safe in the knowledge that the prepackaged snacks, full of chemicals and preservatives snug in their shiny, crinkly wrappers were less of a risk than a cho zo con ques y mant quill bocadillo.

Sitting awkwardly on a rickety wooden bench I leaned back against the wall and felt the heat from the building warming my back. The wind picked up again sending a chill under my sweatshirt and reminding me that it was still fall. Getting up and sticking my hands in my pockets for warmth I walked across the dirt parking lot and up towards the road. I wandered as far as the deserted petrol station and stood there looking at it. The paint peeling and chipping, the pumps all rusting and dirt and trash piled around the building. I thought of what it must have been like years before, trucks pulling in, the drivers tanned and disheveled with loads of olives or wine bound for San Sebastian or Barcelona.

Remembering what the bus driver said about being left behind if you weren’t back on the bus in twenty minutes I turned from the station and walked back to where the bus was waiting. The other passengers were starting to board so I took one last look at the hillside, let the wind chill me once more and then stepped up and walked back to my seat.

As the bus pulled back onto the roadway I leaned my head against the window. We picked up speed and the olive trees seemed to melt, they dotted the hillsides and sides of the roads, becoming blurs as we moved along faster. My mind drifted to the last time I took this ride, to that last time I was in Spain. The huge crowd in Plaza Mayor at the Festival of San Isidro, the gypsy band and my dancing around spilling my drink and not caring. My feet hitting the cobblestones of the plaza in rhythm to the drums and wavering rapid fire Spanish singing. Walking along near Plaza de los Tristes and looking up to see the Alhambra lit up on the hillside against a perfectly clear sky, the moon bright.

The streets where I was living were a maze of small alleys, twisting and turning sometimes emptying you into a small plaza. They always came up unexpectedly, the plazas, and I hardly ran into the same one twice. They were like little jewels, little jewels with small old fountains and benches, the rough and uneven stones underfoot.

I wish I could freeze those moments, the good ones. The slivers of time when that sense of wonder hits you combined with the reality that it’s not a dream and you fill up inside with the closest thing to feeling like a kid again, it’s like Christmas morning and you feel magical, your skin tingles and breath shortens and it’s just you and that moment and nothing else exists. I wish I could freeze that feeling, bottle it or press it between the pages of a book so I can bring it out years later and feel that same sense of being there, all there.

It’s staring at the Alhambra in the moonlight on a chilly November evening, drinking a cold beer in the sun while sitting in a plaza older than my country, on a bench, head tilted back and eyes half closed. Sometimes it’s something so simple as eating a candy bar at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere.