Travel isn’t a new phenomenon. Humans have been travelling since our ancestors, perhaps as few as 100, first left the African Savannah , made their way up to the Caucuses, then spread out all around the world, traversing almost every possible landscape. Many of those who ended up in our part of the world weren’t finished yet even though it may have looked like we’d reached the end of the world at the time. A sixth century Irish monk was probably the first European to get to the Americas, but certainly not the last. There were the wild geese, spreading irish names all of Europe and latin America, the post-famine diaspora…the list goes on. So travel is ingrained somewhere deep in our psyches… I’m actually writing this on a greyhound bus in Quesnel, BC (I hadn’t heard of it before either)
Yet recreational travel was the preserve of the very rich until a relatively short while ago. Before the 18th century tourism didn’t really exist at all, then the so-called Grand Tour which took English grandees to places like Venice and Paris, so much so that when Goethe’s Faust was written in the early 19th century, the main character wonders why there aren’t any Britons visiting hell.
Another Englishman, Thomas Cook had the unbelievably bad idea of trying to stop drunkenness by organizing cheap package tours so that Working class people would have their horizons broadened. Thus, fairly inauspiciously began modern tourism, and it’s stayed the same in many ways.
While in the past we travelled to find food, fight wars or look for work, now we started to work in one place and save the money to have a short holiday every year. And there’s the rub. Travel costs money. There’s flights, insurance, hotels, car rental, bus tickets, plus whatever people deem is a reasonable price for visiting whatever the local tourist attractions are.
Or does it? In New Orleans, I met a guy who was travelling to every state in the US spending money only on beer. He’d been teaching English in Japan and was sick of people there imagining that the US was a paranoid society where everyone carried hand-guns around with them, and decided, like another famous NOLA resident, to rely on the comfort of strangers. He decided to make a movie on the theme of trust in America. He found out about a website called couchsurfing, where thousands of people around the world o(including me)offer living space to travelers and then (hopefully) find places when they go on the road themselves. Then he oiled up his hitching finger, packed his bags and got on the interstate. He carried a video camera around with him and documented the whole experience.
I’d hosted a guy from Toulouse who was doing pretty much the same thing, except he was trying to promote world peace by walking round the world (no, I couldn’t see it either) after that I stayed with a guy in Montreal who cycled the 5000km to Vancouver…sure beats sitting on the sun in Benidorm getting drunk and having your swimming pool place stolen by Germans. All in all, I’ve hosted people from 15 different countries and stayed in 7 different countries with other hosts.
So finding out about couchsurfing, which I did entirely by chance, sitting down reading the Guardian one day, altered my life pretty substantially. I wouldn’t be in Canada right now if it wasn’t for chancing upon it. I love that something like this can exist in a world where there’so much greed and paranoia. There are those who would say that it doesn’t benefit the economy, but that seems to be looking at it the wrong way…believeing that GDP per capita is the ultimate measure of happiness hasn’t exactly worked out that well for us, has it? In any case, many of the people who I hosted would probably never have come to Ireland if it wasn’t for this project.
Since then its become way bigger, when I started there were only about 100 people in the whole country, now there’s more than that in cork alone. There are a couple of similar sites called hospitality club and global freeloaders but neither of their websites leapt out at me the way couchsurfing did. I like the way you can create a facebook-style profile so people have an idea who you are. There are also some craigslist style forums (for a?) discussion groups on subjects like finding cheap flights and getting rides… basically you can spend your whole life there and some do.e
It always takes me a while to explain to people that people let you stay in their houses for free, when I explain the exchange element they always assume that the same people stay with you but the chances that there’s someone in Regina, SK who wants to stay in Cork are rather slim…it’s really a global, sharing, pay-it-forward thing… and it works.
In case you are wondering, those signing up (you haven’t yet? What are you waiting for?) have to sign a couple of icons ( I say “sign” though I know there’s probably some fancy computer term) saying that you recognize that it’s not a dating site. However…people are people… we all have the same basic needs…the first coupple I stayed with actually met on the site and ended up marrying each other…whether I ever became more than just good friends with anyone I met on the site is obviously something I’m not at liberty to say.
I have had a few experiences which I wouldn’t have had staying in a hostel or a hotel. In Philadelphia I got taken to a place where I got a vegan Philly Cheesesteak (seit an and soy cheese, since you ask) In New Orleans I somehow managed to get into a frat party where Girls Gone Wild had been th year before. In Cleveland, I got into the Rock’n’Roll hall of fame for free. In Washington DC I stayed with four gay drag queens who brought me to a Mexican Day of the Dead party. In Regina I was at a party for cross-dressers where every drag queen in Central Canada was in attendance. In Lisbon I got to stay in a restored 18th century mansion which just survived the tsunami of 1756. In Santa Fe I stayed in a house made from soil though that’s not a big deal there.
Like everything else in life, it hasn’t been all plain sailing. One of the hairiest things to happen me was in Berlin earlier this year (09) when I went out to a nightclub in Berlin but wasn’t trusted with the keys by my hostess. She told me to ring the bell but I got no reply; this was in January and it was -5 Celsius outside. I threw some pebbles at what I thought was her window but the response I got was from some other, angrier German woman… I don’t speak the lingo but I did catch the word polizien… but such is life. This was in Prenzlaur Berg which I would have had to cross a mine-ridden, barbed wire covered wall to get into 20 years before…
I also had major complications in 2005 as a host. I shared one place with a guy who was, and there’s really no nice way to say this, a psychopath who would have gone and snitched me to the landlady if he knew I had anyone over. I used to have to wait till he went to bed which he did at 10.30 every night and then smuggle people in climbing up the stairs in tandem with them…part of me got some sort of surreptitious thrill from it, though.
I’d also like better if it was truly global, but sadly not that many people outside Europe, North America and Australasia get to visit Ireland. One guy from Bombay was going to crash with me but he found somewhere else.
The next cheapest way to find a roof over your head is to stay in a hostel. Hostels have a bad reputation in some quarters mainly thanks to that Eli Roth movie which I haven’t seen, and have no plans to see, thank you very much. There’s also a quote from a Douglas Coupland Novel called The Gum Thief that I was actually reading while working in a hostel where a typically alienated Coupland protagonist writes that hostels are like crack houses without the crack. Never having lived in a crack-house ( I used to live in the same block as one, but that’s another story) I cant comment but if crack houses are as bright and friendly and helpful as some of the hostles I’ve stayed in then crack has been given a really unfair portrayal by the media. The one I worked in was actually pretty institutional as many are, though some people prefer quiet places where they can get a good nights sleep. Bizarrely, they hosted a wedding party one night but that does show how hostels have come up in the world in some respect.There are a number of websites like hostelbookers, hostelworld and hostels.com which help to sort out some of the wheat from the chaff. I use hostelbookers a lot as they give $5 worth of phone calls every time you book with them. Just in case you are wondering, I actually was hosting couchsurfers while I was working in that hostel. I used to live just across the road and used it to give directions.
Before there was couchsurfing, there was backpacking. Actually, backpacking is still there. I don’t know if a definitive history of backpacking has been written, but as far as I know it started out in the late 60’s and early 70s when Australians in their late teens and early 20s realized how much cheaper places like Bali were than their own country and Americans and Europeans started going to india for much the same reason (oh, and to find enlightenment) It was the start of a beautiful friendship that lasts into this era of cheap flights, web access and satellite TV. The publication of the first lonely planet guide to South East Asia turned the trickle into a current and I don’t see that stopping for a while.
My first experience with backpacking was in India in the crazy, rollercoaster year of 2001. I’d managed to save up enough money while writing a screenplay that never got made into a movie and living on unemployment benefit. When I think back on it now, I wonder how I actually did it… remember, that was back in the early years of the Celtic Tiger and there’d only been 3 massive, inflation-busting rises in the dole since the soldiers of destiny got back into power. On the other hand, India, being a poor but relatively stable country, is really cheap, or at least is was before all our call-centre jobs migrated there.
One thing I didn’t like about India was that many travelers (don’t even mention the word “tourist”) see cheap travel as an end rather a means. Once in fort Kochin in Kerala, there were 2 Germans and myself trying to get a cycle rickshaw ride, (thankfully, they don’t have any of the foot-pulled rickshaws there any more) He wanted 15 rupees for the 3 of us, but they insisted on paying 10. When you consider that a rupee is worth 2 cents, it really doesn’t seem worth arguing over.
I only once paid more than 2 old Irish pounds for a place to stay. That was in Khajarau near the so-called Kama Sutra in stone, on the way to where I’d met 2 swedish girls who I wanted to try out some positions with myself. Never happened, but that place I paid a princely 3 quid for was so nice that I kind of wished I splashed out a bit more. En suite bathroom, fan, perfectly ironed mattresses…
India is probably the only place in the world where you can sit on the beach all day, be served fresh fruit by locals and spend less than E10 a day. At the time, in Kovalam beach in Kerala, I only spent around 5 pounds in old money doing that. I remember paying around 8 pounds for a 1000-mile railway journey from Mumbai to Allehabad and wondering how much that would have cost at home, a pretty redundant exercise as we don’t have that much rail stock in the whole country. Rumours were abound at the time that the Indian government were planning to introduce separate prices for foreigners as the Vietnamese government very unwisely did, but as far as I know it still hasn’t happened. The response in Vietnam was for tourist agencies to set up their own private buses, allowing people to travel the whole length of the country and stop off at all the interesting places along the way for as iittle as $21. That had come down from $32 a few years earlier, as there was so much competition in that so-called communist country for tourist dollars.
South East Asia isn’t that more expensive and the hassle factor is exponentially smaller. Thailand has a reputation as the land of smiles and it’s hard to argue…it seems that they collectively know that tourism benefits them all, at least in the short run, whereas in India a lot more people are fighting over a much smaller piece of pie. Places like Vietnam that haven’t been that tourist orientated in the past have learned from every other countries experience and provide backpackers with everything they could possibly want. I stayed in one place in Hanoi that was a hostel, a restaurant, a cybercafé and a tourist booking office. If I’d asked really nicely, they would have probably cut my nails for me as well. I went on a tour of Halong Bay, possibly the most beautiful place on Earth, for 3 nights and 2 days, including all food and lodging, for $21, the cost of 3 beers in an Irish pub. It’s so cheap that even a dedicated cheapskate like me used to tip the people working as guides or drivers fairly generously. I was aware that most of the money goes to agents.
South East Asia is one place where you can get involved in extreme sports relatively easily. Thailand is one of the cheapest places to learn scuba-diving and rock-climbing. The cheapest place to learn to surf is on the pacific coast of Central America.
I’ve never been to South America which is pretty well established on the backpacker trail though I’m aware that it’s in the same price bracket as South East Asia. Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world but it’s economy has collapsed leaving it’s currency undervalued. Countries in the Northern part of the continent like Bolivia are particularly cheap. On the other hand, getting to Machu Picchu and getting deep into the jungle in Brazil can be costly.
The only really cheap place you can get to without getting on a long haul flight is Morocco which you can get to from Spain and there’s a few direct flights to Agadir now as well. You can get relatively cheap flights down to Mexico and make your way to Guatemala, Nicaragua and elsewhere from there. In many tropical countries its advisable to take anti-malarial medication which doesn’t come cheap, unless you have a medical card, in which case you can get doxycycline, which is also used to treat gonnoreah, for free.
The downside to suddenly being a rich person is that every poor person in the country wants you to share their wealth with them, and it just isn’t possible to help them all. You can help some, but you have to be really careful. Once, carrying a huge bunch of those small, locally grown bananas, I was unwise enough to give one to a little kid, prompting a swarm of little kids to surround me….i was taking nutritional supplements which contain potassium which they probably weren’t so I guess it all works out…I was a bit unfortunate that the prices of the Taj Mahal and a lot of other monuments went up exponentially for non-locals just before I arrived… the Taj went up from around $1.50 to $20 though that’s still only the cost of a nighttime cab ride in Dublin.
Many people only visit Western countries because of the perceived element of danger in the developing world, and it’s certainly true that, statistically you are more likely to mugged there. I had a walkman robbed in India, a camera nicked in Kenya, and made a non-consensual donation of E40 to a Morrocan beggar. All the really serious accidents I’ve had have happened in Ireland though. It’s best not to be too concerned about danger anyway. When I was in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, TX, I was wondering why I was the only gringo flicking through the counterfeit DVDs that lay in stalls in front of cheap chemists and tequila bars. I found out when I got back to the US that thirteen people were gunned down on the street in broad daylight a few weeks before. But I’m still here to tell the tale, not surprisingly : as there are 1.7 million people in Juarez my odds or survival were pretty good. Likewise, in Laos, fourteen people got killed on the main road from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, the two most popular Lao towns for tourists, the day after I arrived in Luang Prabang. People were queuing up outside cybercafés to tell their moms they were alright which would have freaked them out as it wasn’t reported back home. Because bad news sells, you only hear about it when something bad happens a traveler to a third world country, but the fact is that more than 99% of us make it home without incident, whereas almost all of us are hospitalized at some stage back home as a result of workplace or traffic accidents or domestic abuse. To me, smoking tobacco is a far more serious gamble with your health, as around 50% of you smokers will die of either heart disease or Cancer, condemning yourselves to a slow and painful death.
Full Disclosure: I did panic a bit when I was in South East Asia and SARS broke out. That was because I was reading the papers, which made it seem like a serious disease.
Before I went backpacking around Africa and central America I had to actually earn the money to go to Africa as it’s a lot more expensive than India for a number of reasons. The paradox is that some really poor, screwed-up countries don’t really get that many tourists and the only people who stay are UN staff who are on expense accounts…in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi (you knew that, right?) the cheapest hotel is $30, more than I paid for a dorm bed in Manhattan… apparently Bujumbura’s not that great anyway. I remember working in the shitty, repetitive, low-paid job I was doing in the long, hot summer of 06 when someone asked me if I was paying for the trip to Africa with money I’d earned from one of the novels I’d written. If I’de been a published novelist I wouldn’t have been working in that craphole. The truth is we just don’t know how rich we are and the only way we can find out is by going to poorer countries and watch how far our money goes. If it seems absurd that I travelled to Indian with money I saved from unemployment benefit I guess that’s because it is…but I cant change how things are…and neither can you.
I’ve read that some employers are giving employees 1 or 2 year breaks to travel around the world in the hope that the recession will have subsided when they come back, which makes perfect sense on some levels. No-one knows what the future will bring, but it’s my sense that the current arrangement where westerners with seemingly bottomless pockets descend on every poor-but-stable country in the world every winter can’t last forever, particularly as so much fossil fuel is involved.
It’s hard to know what’s going to happen to Flight prices in the next few years. Some were predicting that air travel would become a thing of the past when oil hit $100/barrel but it hit $135 last year and survived. It isn’t going to hit that level again until this recession is over and that won’t be for a while.
Also, we’re being told that we need to stay at home and keep money circulating in the country. I have some sympathy for this view even though most of us did nothing to cause the recession. It’s obvious that less people are going to visit Ireland in the next couple of years, the prices for hotels and B&Bs may be coming down somewhat, but from a really high, post-celtic tiger base so still cripplingly expensive for many people. I came across a piece in The Irish Times where they gave 3 hacks the supposedly small sum of E300 to spend a 3-day holiday. ONE HUNDRED EURO A DAY! In very few countries would this be considered budget travel. I only spent around E40 a day in Manhattan, and that was staying in a hostel rather than couchsurfing.
The good news is that our Island is really small and has a moderate climate so it’s possible to camp most of the year. I went camping last November on the Beara Peninsula way, one of the many excellent, reasonably well-marked trails that criss-cross our little island. Mind you, the island doesn’t seem quite as little when you are walking across it as when in a car or in a bus. I didn’t have the fancy equipment that you see many hikers using, just a cheap tent that I got in Dunnes for E30, which came with 2 bags and 2 mats; a backpack I got for e28 back in 05 and still have, a couple of makeshift repair jobs later. As for food, well, Tesco do some noodles that retail for 13c for they aren’t vegan so I went to Dunnes and splashed out on some fancy noodles for 25c, then winged it over to Tesco to get their half kilo bags of oats for 41c and some of their so-called organic fair-trade chocolate bars for 99c apiece. Fuel to heat this cheap nosh with another matter… I don’t recommend lighting fires because of the danger and because they draw so much attention and are pretty unreliable in our climate. Primuses (Primi?) and gas canisters don’t come cheap and the gas always seems to run out slightly too soon. I had a really cheap propane-based stove that I got in Africa which you couldn’t possibly buy here because it was so messy but when the wicks ran out I couldn’t replace them so I had to bid it adieu.
Camping is something that often happens in a legal grey area, though one time last year in Colorado I stepped over into the black side by pitching my tent in an unused fairground only to find myself woken up by a friendly officer of the law the next morning. It was my birthday so he let me off with a warning. Generally you can get away with camping rough in Ireland though a lot of farmers will get really angry if you stay on their land without asking and it can be harder to track them down as some of them own really big areas of land. I fell foul of one in the Kenmare area who was concerned with the possibility of being sued if I broke my leg on his property. I tried to tell him I had a new-fangled modern tent that was optimized to avoid those many leg-breaking accidents that used to occur but that was pissing into the wind which I’ve done in a literal sense on a few camping trips before and since. It actually worked out Okay as I got a free meal in the campsite 5 miles down the road.
As you probably know, the insurance industry has been making a concerted effort aided by some nanny-statist politicians to rob life of any aspect of pleasure from life and camping is no exception. There’s a place you may have heard off called the Old Head of Kinsale which was the best place in Europe to learn rock-climbing as well as being an area of outstanding natural beauty which you can only visit now by paying E200 for a round of golf. At first the golfers and hikers were able to co-exist peacefully like those humans and aliens in the bar in the first Star Wars movie but then one of the hikers got hit by a golf ball and sued...many people are scared to open a bar or a club because of the crippling costs of insurance as well. From a camper’s point of view it’s a bit paradoxical as many farmers wont let you camp without asking them, but their consent implies legal responsibility…it’s the sort of thing that even Franz Kafka wouldn’t dream up. Some farmers get around this by putting up liability waver signs, others adopt a don’t ask, don’t tell approach, and some, like that Kerryman go round looking for campers to evict as his ancestors would have got rid of peasant farmers after the famine.
It really shouldn’t be this way as farmers were compensated heavily for allowing hikers to walk along their land along with the massive subsidies they get for producing food that as often as not isn’t even eaten. Fortunately it’s generally possible to camp rough, especially if you arrive late in the evening and get up early in the morning.
Cycling is another way you can get around cheaply unless you’re one of those ponces who likes to wear lycra, goggles, tour-de-france style tops and drink energy drinks to optimize your performance. Me, I just wear charity-shop cut offs and shades I get from Penney’s. It’s said that it’s possible to cycle all around Ireland in a month though that itinerary leaves out some of the most impressive peninsulae. Personally, I can only cycle around 45 miles a day and for about a week at a time though that’s more than a lot of people. It’s a little sad that teenagers stop cycling as soon as they are old enough to drive assuming their parents can afford it but this trend seems to be reversing.
It’s actually gotten a little more expensive to cycle in recent years as second-hand bikes are getting snapped up way faster as people seek ways to beat to recession, though bargains can still be found, particularly at police auctions. Bear in mind, too, that Vittoria de Sica’s 1948 neo-realist film The Bicycle Thieves remains an inspiration for many people today. I’ve had 3 bikes stolen and have responded by buying thicker locks, though the thieves seem to keep buying stronger llock-breakers as well. It’s a kind of evolutionary arms race akin to the one that non-organic farmers are waging with super-bugs. I bought the last one on ebay at a cost of E18 saving me nearly a tenner but while I was waiting for it to arrive I had to walk everywhere like someone in one of those countries where they don’t have bikes.
In Toronto the police had the ingenious idea of buying some second-hand bikes and leaving them at a cctv-monitored spot… so brilliant in it’s simplicity that one wonders why no-one tried it before or why our own boys in blue haven’t replicated the idea.
Cycling is also a good way to keep fit as you probably know already. The guy who used to be my doctor until my medical card ran out cycles everywhere though he can probably afford a car. Apparently some bright spark had the idea of a machine called an “exercise bike” which was like a bicycle except it remained static and was only to be used in indoor areas called “gymnasia” or “gyms”. I don’t know if that ever caught on.
Many cyclists get around the way they do because it’s so much better for the environment which is why some of us feel we aren’t bound by the rules of the road the way motorists are. I actually worked out that the fuel I use for long-distance road trips (orange juice) isn’t actually that much cheaper that petrol as I can only get around 15 miles to a litre of OJ which isn’t that much more than some of the more fuel-efficient cars get from petrol, which costs around the same. However, when you consider the cost of insurance and the rate at which cars depreciate it works out way cheaper. And OJ tastes way better than petrol, as well as giving you vital vitamin C. Lets not forget that Minister for Energy at the time of writing (September 09) was once a guide to cycle tours around the Ring of Kerry. Before them, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy anf Flann O Brien’s Third Policeman rode the highways and byways of Ireland on two pedal-powered wheels, and older readers may remember that we had some of the best cyclists in the world in the eighties, so cycling is ingrained deeply in our collective psyche.
I’ve noticed that hitchhiking may be having somewhat of a renaissance as well. I used to hitch a lot up till the mid-nineties but then I stopped getting rides. I assumed it was because I was getting older but then earlier this year I managed to bum a ride from Glebeigh in County Kerry to Mallow, in 3 different legs. Last year I had a crazy experience in Colorado getting a ride from a guy whose house was shot during a siege on a neighbouring crack-house and who was able to get away with drinking beer and whiskey while driving since. He still drove more safely than my grandmother used to.
These experiences led me to suspect that the reason I wasn’t getting lifts all those years wasn’t my age but people’s increasing greed. I’m hoping that people realize more that they are lucky to have cars and that it doesn’t cost them anything extra to pick people up. In Washington DC, they effectively get paid to pick people up as there’s a discount for people in the car pool lane. I expect that our own government will follow suit around, oh, never; which is a terrible pity because car-pooling saves almost everyone including the government themselves who have to spend less money reinforcing and widening roads.
In French-speaking countries they have ride-share websites and there’s something similar on craigslist though that’s just a Dub thing here. I’ve met people who’ve had a lot of success arranging lifts on craiglist but I’m not one of them.
Getting around Ireland by bus has gotten a little bit cheaper since completion was introduced though only on the major routes where private companies like AIrcoach and Citylink can turn a profit. Elsewhere, Bus Eireann can basically charge what they want, which is generally quite a lot. They do have some offers for travelling long term but nobody’s jaw is going to drop when they see how cheap they are. This actually did happen me when I got a bus ticket from Liverpool to London for a pound… not a pound plus taxes and charges, but A POUND. I confidently predict that I will never get a ticket from Dublin to Cork for that price, no matter how long in advance I book.
There’s a company called paddywagon which does fairly good value tours aimed at backpacker. I did a Giant’s Causeway and Derry City tour with them earlier this year for a very reasonable 18 pounds and they get my seal of approval.
I don’t recommend getting the train, as it’s ridiculously expensive. Only in Germany does it cost more to travel by train and even there you can save money by booking way in advance to travel on their faster, more comfortable trains. I hate to say this because trains are the most eco-friendly way to travel, but the government seems to have no interest in promoting them. We actually had a more extensive rail network a hundred years ago, and they probably didn’t go that much slower.
Another way to travel cheaply is to work on organic farms through the World Wide Oppurtunities on Organic farms. (WWOOF) Like couchsurfing and a lot of other stuff I discuss it exists in the margins of the conventional economy though in this case you don’t have to worry about being on the side of the angels. Organic farmers are people who try to live in a sustainable way growing most of their own food which is what we may all have to do when the oil runs out. Like most governments, ours doesn’t support small scale subsistence agriculture very well preferring to give massive grants to industrial scale farms, though this policy is ultimately doomed. In return for helping out at whatever farm you rock up on, you get a place to stay and home-cooked meals every day. From relatively humble beginnings it’s become a global phenomenon helping to regenerate the economies of countries like Sierre Leone. You don’t have to go all the way there though, as there are plenty of places in West Cork, Clare, Galway and elsewhere that always need people. I’ve WWOOFed in quite a few places around the world and nearly all my experiences have been positive. I’ve stayed in the jungle in Belize and by the rocky shores of Skibereen, lived in gites and yurts and seen all sorts of eco-homes being built, always living on whatever bounty the land gives. It’s a way you can experience a whole different way of life without ever leaving your own country.
On a related note, a volunteer project worth getting involved in for a small fee is groundwork, which helps to regenerate Irish Oak forests. As you probably know, the whole country was covered in Oak forests until about 500 years ago, which has since been reduced by a combination of imperialism and greed to two small areas which are fighting for their existences against an invasive foreign species… the rhododendron. I know… they look nice when they bloom in spring but they thrive so much on the acidic soil and their saplings block out the Oak saplings. Groundwork use only hand tools to cut back the Rhodos which is why they need so many volunteers. Even though there’s a small fee it works out way cheaper than visiting the national parks as a mere tourist as there’s nature walks every evening after the days work is done. I’ve done it four times in the past and I may do it again…who knows what the future will bring?
There are those of you who might say that travelling round trying to help the environment is a bit self-defeating, and have a hell of a point if you do. I’m loathe to admit that I’ve been on quite a few flights and I’ll probably be on a few more. I find it bizarre that it’s actually cheaper to fly than ge the bus or train, as through a series of complex agreements governments actually subsidize air travel. Worse still, by travelling on low-budget flights, I’ve lined the pockets of Michael O’ Leary, a man who’s actually glad the recession is happening. That’s correct, he actually wants you and your friends and your loved ones to lose their jobs so other airlines will go bust and then their employees will go bust and he can buy their fleets. Funnily enough, when I’m on a long bus trip it helps less to think of how I’m benefitting the environment and more to think I’m depriving scum like him of money that he very much doesn’t need. I’m hopeful the government will increase air surcharges or else subsidise buses so much that it becomes cheaper again to go by the ferry, so I can relive those school tours I went on.
I’ve never taken an internal flight in The Americas or India or Africa. I took one from Vientiane in Laos to Hanoi as I heard the bus journey was particularly tortuous. I spoke to one guy who did it, he said it was okay except the bus driver ran into someone and killed him which delayed them by an hour. I’ve got around North America by bus, which is the cheapest reliable way to get around. At the moment I have a pass which lets me travel everywhere in the US and almost everywhere in Canada that has a bus station, and it only cost $500 for 2 months. The downside is that travelling by greyhound can be really sketchy, as in the US generally only the poorest people use the bus, which is why the tickets come wrapped in recruitment ads for the army. As often as not you find yourself sharing the bus with criminals and crackheads. When I was boarding buses in both San Francisco and New Orleans I either heard a gunshot or saw someone being carried away in a police body bag. In Sacremento some junky spat at a woman working in the restaurant and had to be carried away by security… and this was just a few blocks away from the terminators office…Where is he when you need him?
One cheap alternative way to get around the US is with a private firm I recently found out about called green tortoise. They organize cross-country tours of the continent which can work out as little as $50 a night including all food which is all vegetarian. I really wish I found about it years ago but I’m happy to let you know about it right now.
I do buy carbon credits when going on flights. I’m not convinced 100% of the science behind them: it seems a bit too good to be true that you can neutralize your carbon emissions by paying the cost of a litre of 7up on a ryanair flight. Still, it seems better than doing nothing. I’ve been known to use price-comparison sites like expedia and cheapflights.com though they aren’t always that reliable. As I’ve hinted being computer literate helps you save money no end. Google maps is the best thing to happen travelers since the wheel was invented. I know many people have big privacy issues with them, but as long as they give me the directions to every thrift store in every town I rock up in,they csn film me in the bath as much as they like.
That’s how I’ve got around on a low budget. I never had to go to the extremes that Homer Simpson did to save up for that trip to Japan, which is just as well as I’ve never been a fan of plankton. We’re fortunate to live in an era when travel is cheap, it’s not quite over yet though it definitely isn’t going to last forever. Part of me would rather be a millionaire jet-setter as there’s places that are clearly off limits to people like us. At the same time most people in the world never stray that far from their home village so it’s easy to see why we appear so super-rich to those less fortunate than ourselves. And maybe that, after all the souveniers have been taken down from the attic and dropped off at a charity store, is the most enduring legacy of my travels.
