I wish I could travel like you — I'm so jealous!
Jealous? I wish? If you're not travelling, it's because you don't want to. It's not about "buts", it's about choices. If you want to travel, you can. You just need to want it badly enough to let go of whatever's standing in your way.
Sure, but where do I get the money to travel?
Anywhere! You don't need a lot of money to travel. It's possible to travel on very little — or even on nothing at all!
Come on, seriously?
OK, let's say you don't have the experience or the appetite to travel without money, and that travelling on €3 a day like I do sounds completely mad. Let's look at the alternatives.
The least disruptive option is to slash all non-essential spending to the bone and save whatever that frees up over a few months.
More drastic — or necessary if your job doesn't leave enough room to save even once you've cut back — is to go abroad, somewhere it's easy to pick up work (anything, really), and save there while you experience a completely different environment.
Scared of going without a guaranteed contract, or put off by the language barrier? Another option is to work online — plenty of jobs can be done from anywhere in the world today. All you need is internet and a laptop.
None of that working for you, but you're determined to make it happen and figure out the finances as you go? Look into personal loans online. Carpe diem.
Do you need savings to travel?
I can tell you that you don't — but you'll probably feel a lot more comfortable setting off with a financial cushion, a safety net for if you can't find ways to fund yourself on the road.
Before you get into the rhythm of travelling, it's natural to worry about this stuff. It makes sense. We're used to security and comfort, and letting all of that go to take the leap is genuinely hard.
Right. So how much money do you actually need?
That depends where you want to go and how you want to travel. I get by on €100 a month cycling around the world, and I've travelled Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia staying in hostels on €300 a month.
Sounds too low? Let's say €500 a month as a more comfortable, realistic figure.
How long do you want to travel — 3 months? A year? The total money you need grows with the time you're on the road, but I can tell you that the longer you travel the less you spend per month — you find your rhythm, your way of travelling nomadically without going broke. Those €500 a month will drop month by month.
Do you need enough money for the entire trip? Or is having enough for the first few months, and then stopping somewhere, hustling, finding opportunities or doing something online as the months roll by, a good enough plan?
A sensible middle ground: save enough for the first few months and take it from there.
How to get those €1,000 or €2,000 to start the adventure?
Do you smoke? Drink? Go to the cinema? Buy new clothes now and then? Eat out? Add up what you spend on all of these things and work out what you could save by sticking to free activities each month. €100? €200? €500?
If you want to, you can — right?
Instead of spending your weekends at restaurants and bars, or going on a day trip and sleeping in a hotel — cook something, pack a bag, and go for a picnic somewhere in nature. Or wild camp somewhere properly off the beaten track. Mini adventures are totally possible!
And how do I fund the trip while I'm actually travelling?
That depends on you — your skills, languages and nerve. But in every country where I've stopped for more than a few weeks, an opportunity to earn money has turned up in one form or another.
In Georgia I decided to stop for six weeks in winter, so I set up some photography workshops and promoted them on social media.
In China I stopped and had three job offers within a day. I'll tell you about the string of jobs I've done in China in a future post — and just how easy it is to get propositions of every kind simply for being a foreigner. I've even done some acting!
In Thailand I was down to my last €500, so I had a dabble at importing and exporting: I came back to Europe with a suitcase full of dresses to resell in Eastern Europe. What we made from that kept us travelling for months before we headed to England.
I arrived in England practically broke — with an offer of accommodation in exchange for giving Spanish lessons to a young child. The place wasn't what we'd hoped — you can imagine — and the next day we were renting a room. I didn't have enough to cover the first month's rent plus the deposit, let alone live for a few weeks before I started earning.
So I put it on a credit card — a poor man's loan — covered the costs and was working in a restaurant within a few days. By the end of the month I'd paid back what I'd taken out plus the fees, and a few months later I'd saved enough to buy the bicycle I'm using to go round the world and most of the kit.
Travel for free? What are you on about?
Setting off without money might sound like madness right now, but once the travel bug bites, your ingenuity sharpens and you open up to other possibilities.
The list is nearly endless, but it's genuinely possible to get free accommodation and even travel with all expenses covered.
You can sleep in locals' homes through hospitality networks like Couchsurfing or Warmshowers (for cyclists). You can housesit through various websites, or if you have a place you can arrange a home swap.
And if you're willing to put in a bit of work, you can volunteer through the well-known WWOOF or the cheaper and more flexible HelpX and WorkAway — in most cases you get accommodation and food included.
As you travel you'll find that talking to people, making contacts and selling yourself without going through websites or middlemen gets much easier.
In Bosnia, after more than a month cycling through the country's wildest terrain — minefields, mountains and forests — we arrived in Mostar. Dirty and exhausted, we wanted to stop and rest in a hostel but weren't keen on spending the money. So I walked into the first hostel that looked decent and offered to take photos and build them a website. They invited us to stay for 10 days and fed us too.
In Japan I got caught in rainy season and wasn't in the mood for more hitchhiking and urban camping — my standard mode there for the past few months — so after meeting a girl who worked in a hostel, I got in touch with the owner and mentioned I was a photographer. A couple of hours later I was unpacking my bag in one of the rooms: they offered me a whole month if I wanted, in exchange for taking some photos for them.
Still going to tell me it's not possible? That funding a long trip is just too complicated?