Budget travel: a view from long term vagabonding

picture by Kit Yeng Chan

There has been a recent debate about budget travel against cheap travel: the article draws some interesting comparisons between budgeting your trip, and actually being too much of a cheapo to make the best out of it. As much as I agree with many of the statements presented in the article, I had to stop and think hard to find a parallel with my own experience.  Because I did not.

For example, as my own travels in greater Asia testify, it is still very much possible to travel for less than 10$ a day, without being a cheapskate, and actually enjoying your time. It surely requires more work and preparation – like, many hours on Couchsurfing, reading guides, browsing message boards and blogs of other travelers who have been there before you -. To top it all, it probably would come more difficult if attempted in Europe or other Western countries for an obvious currency disparity. Nevertheless, you can trust me, it does work.

To help you get inspired, these are some of the things I did to meet my cheap-but-fulfilling goal when travelling in third world countries:

1. I stopped consuming alcohol and smoking. A slow, natural process which now makes me save at least 300$ per month, and keeps me healthier and more fit for long term travel.
2. I met locals, melt into their culture, and absorbed language skills and lifestyle
3. I became one of the locals, gradually. This can save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on the long run, but of course requires dedication and time spent in a single location.
4. I made real local friends, and a loving real local girlfriend.

Of course, if you want to stay sane and safe on the road for years, you need to take it slow and create some parentheses between your vagabonding. You may study something somewhere, engage in volunteering opportunities, get room and board in exchange for work etc.

What definitely made me reflect in the article was the fact that, it appears, travel has become some sort of pre-packaged experience: something like, “ok, let’s go on a gap year, we have 12 months to spend this amount of money, let’s make it last and have the best time of our lives”. What the author did not emphasize, however, is the fact that someone may have plied the roads of the world for much longer. At that point, travel becomes lifestyle, and then morphs into ordinary life… and then somehow, fades away into a new kind of life. You will forget about the hostels’ common areas, the dudes who talk about how cheap they spent and actually did nothing, those who do not even attempt talking because are too stoned, and also the mighty hostels-haunters, a new kind of Lovecraftian monsters that “not even after strange aeons may die”.

To me, it seemed like the pure essence of travel, which should be a genuine research and an exploration of the unknown mixed with some spirit of adventure, has been somehow neglected and humiliated into a plastic “gap year” label. Everybody goes, has fun, spends money, comes back home and tells others about it. And if we are collectively working to help everybody get a chance to travel, we do not want it to be a jump on the bandwagon of this modern-age new rite of passage, right?

It may be because I am well into my fourth year away from home, and I never returned, that I feel like saying “we also do exist”. There is another category of travellers, which is not the budget or cheap, and if we like to label so much, let it be “the very long term traveler”. So long that the memories of home are fading away into old mental Polaroid photographs. And we do not even think of what happens in the hostels anymore, as they are such a faraway dimension, as we are knee deep into our chosen country’s culture. Let us have a say, for the sake of travel.

To all the long term travelers out there, what do you think? Do you feel like your experience is somehow different from what has been described as budget or cheap travel? I would like to hear your comments.