The Long & Winding Dollar: Saving Money While Travelling

The foldable bowl... budget saving magic.

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this, he was reflecting on his two-week trek by donkey through the Cévennes mountains of France.

But who knows what his expenses were? Travelling for the sake of travel is great, but you can do so much more of it if you can make your money go further – and most 21st century travellers have many more expenses than donkey feed.

Drawing on my own travel experiences, here’s a baker’s dozen of tips on stretching your travel budget:

1. Pack light. The obvious benefit of taking minimal baggage is mobility, but it also saves cash. For a start, budget airlines normally charge more for luggage stored in the hold. Secondly, if you only have a small pack you can save money on taxis by walking or catching public transport. For more details, check out my post last year on how I pack ever so lightly.

2. Plan ahead with transport bookings. Inevitably, flights become more expensive the closer you are to the date you want to fly. I remember one time I had to book a flight from Kraków to London just a week before, and it was cheaper to fly British Airways than the usual budget carriers. And that wasn’t cheap at all, either. The same applies to train fares, especially in the UK.

3. Check out transport passes. There are a number of good-value rail passes which can only be bought outside that country before arrival, which can then save stacks of money if travelling frequently. The BritRail Pass, for example, is only available to non-Brits before arrival. The venerable Eurail Pass, by comparison, can be bought in Europe but at a 20% mark-up. Much better to buy before you go.

4. Catch local trains rather than international. In Europe, international trains tend to be pricey. A way of saving money is to catch a cheaper local train to the border or just beyond, then switch to a local train in the new country. Fiddly, but saves €€€.

5. Buy a local SIM card with plenty of data. Everyone should know this by now, but you should never be tempted to use your smartphone’s data roaming capabilities while overseas. Telstra, Australia’s biggest telco, charges about $15 per MB while you’re roaming; to put that in scarier context, that’s $15,000 per GB – about the size of the average movie download.

Instead, drop into a local telco when you arrive in a new country and ask for a SIM card with plenty of data allowance, or pick one up before you go from a local company which imports them. It's well worth doing this when visiting Australia in particular, as free wi-fi is not so common here.

6. Get a stored-value cash card loaded with foreign currency. You can obtain one of these from a bank before you go, rather than withdrawing cash via your credit card once there. Although withdrawals from these cards still attract fees, they’re generally much lower and easier to understand than the fees charged on credit card withdrawals.

7. Take advantage of tax-back schemes. Some countries allow travellers to recoup the tax they’ve paid in the country while visiting or working, subject to various rules and limits.

8. Take out travel insurance. I know, it’s counter-intuitive – insurance costs money. But it can save you a truckload of expenses if you should be robbed or injured. Insure yourself with a company with a good track record, and check the fine print first to make sure the cover is what it seems to be.

9. Haggle (if it’s part of the local culture). In plenty of countries, the locals are happy to negotiate the prices of goods. But you should only haggle if you’re serious about reaching agreement and buying the thing, and you should always remain good-humoured during the process.

10. Aim for the free days. Sometimes local museums will have a day of the week when entry is free (this is common in Poland, for example). It does mean you’ll be there in the company of a crowd, but it’ll save you money.

11. Eat standing up. In some places, restaurant dining is vastly more expensive than eating at a street stall. When we first visited Berlin in the 1990s on a tight budget, I remember living off stand-up kebabs.

12. Shop at supermarkets. An obvious one – you can save plenty of money by self-catering. And while you’re there, pick up some muesli for use with my final tip…

13. Buy a fold-up plastic bowl. Camping stores sell these origami-like sheets of plastic, which magically fold and tuck to form a usable bowl [pictured above]. I carry one of these flat in my backpack (with a lightweight spoon), for those days when I’m exhausted by nightfall and just want to eat something quick and easy in my hotel room. It’s brilliant.

This post was sponsored by Taxback.com. Visit its site for information about how to apply for tax refunds after you've been working in Australia.

Light Packing Revisited

Way back in May 2008 I wrote a blog post on light packing, listing the items I take with me on Lonely Planet assignments to Poland.

It's still one of the more popular posts on my blog, receiving many visits and comments.

Four years on, I'm planning to travel to Poland again and things have changed. Technology, in particular, has moved on and has allowed me to reduce my packing even more.

I still travel with cabin luggage only, stored in my trusty High Sierra backpack purchased in 2005 (pictured above, packed and ready to fly via Ryanair from Poznań last year).

So it's time for an update. Here's what I'll be taking with me this year to Poland (with sidetrips to London, Stockholm and the eastern Czech Republic):

Clothing:

• 3 shirts (2 t-shirts + 1 with a collar)
• 3 pairs of socks
• 3 pairs of underwear
• 2 pairs of trousers (1 jeans, 1 black)
• 1 bathers
• 1 fleecy top
• 1 scarf
• 1 woolly hat
• 1 jacket
• 1 pair of boots

Tech:

• iPad
• Apple wireless keyboard
• iPhone
• Mophie Juice Pack battery case for the iPhone 
• small tripod & Glif tripod stand for the iPhone
• chargers for the above, plus an AU > Euro power adapter
• headphones

Other:

• folder with printouts of Lonely Planet text by city
• clipboard
• pens & 2 notepads
• foldable bowl and fork/spoon
• Crumpler satchel
• toiletries

Of course, a fair few of these items will be travelling on my person rather than in the backpack.

So what's changed since 2008?

Threads and tech

The clothing is much the same, based on my "rule of three" - I've found it's the perfect mix for a late Polish spring, adaptable to hot humid days and cool chilly ones. My one indulgence is the pair of bathers, because I do just occasionally stay at a hotel with a swimming pool.

The tech is quite different. Out goes the Sony Vaio laptop, Olympus digital camera, Palm PDA and Nokia mobile phone; in comes the iPad, wireless keyboard, iPhone and Mophie battery case. Clearly that's a big reduction in weight, especially when you factor in the fewer leads and chargers required.

Paper goes digital

Physical books have completely disappeared too, present instead in digital form on the iPad and iPhone. Though I have been known to pick up the odd undemanding novel from the local bookshop chain EMPiK as I potter around Poland.

Unfortunately I still need printouts of the previous edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook I'm researching. I'd love to have all this on a waterproof tablet with a long battery charge, on which I could make quick marginal notes with a stylus. One day perhaps, as the tech matures.

Image reduction

Where's the camera, you might wonder? For years I've taken photos on a simple compact digital camera, and had plenty of them published. Now, with the camera of the iPhone 4S approaching the quality of that of my digital camera, I've decided to use that for my photography instead.

It's a bit of a leap and I'm aware it has limitations, but I trialled it recently on a week in Thailand and it was quite successful. The bonus of being able to automatically back up images via hotel wifi to iCloud each evening is an added incentive. It'll be interesting to see how it goes.

Bowl food = soul food

The other item that might raise eyebrows is the foldable bowl. It's a clever item you can buy from camping stores, a flat circular piece of plastic which magically folds into a usable bowl. It's for evenings when I'm completely exhausted and just want to eat something simple in my hotel room - I pick up some muesli and milk and use the bowl for them. Bliss.

What do you think, would this work for you or is it too restrictive? Do you have light packing tips you'd like to share?

Poland 5: The Bearable Lightness of Packing

On the train from Gdańsk to Toruń yesterday, I shared my compartment with an English-speaking Polish guy who turned out to be Tomek, the head instructor at a Krav Maga self defence academy in Łódź. Krav Maga is, apparently, a hand-to-hand combat system from Israel.

All interesting, of course, but what Tomek really wanted to ask me about was how I packed so light. He'd noticed my backpack on the rack above my head, knew from our conversation that I was from Australia and was touring Poland, and his interest was piqued.

To clarify, the backpack isn't one of those huge ones that seem larger than the backpackers they're attached to. It's cabin luggage sized. And it's the only luggage I ever take with me when I travel, whether locally or overseas.

Tomek, who travels a fair bit for his business, said he wanted to travel more lightly, but the problem was in choosing what to leave behind when he finally got around to packing. To which, I laughed carelessly and shared my secret with him (and now you): the "rule of three".

After years of travel, experimenting with less and less luggage and still complaining about how heavy it all was, I finally had this vision in Italy in 2001. Not that I put it straight into practice... bad habits die hard. But nowadays I swear by it.

The solution came by finally pinning down an ideal number of items of clothing, not to be deviated from. And that number is three. I pack three of the core clothing items in my backpack (actually two, as I'm wearing the third items onto the plane), with some variation on other items.

Here's an outline of my clothing packing for this Lonely Planet trip:

• 3 shirts (2 T-shirts, 1 with collar)
• 3 pairs of socks
• 3 pairs of underwear
• 2 pairs of trousers (1 jeans, 1 black)
• 1 fleecy top
• 1 scarf
• 1woolly hat
• 1 jacket
• 1 pair of boots

You can see it covers all the seasonal variations for spring in Central Europe, and I have worn everything on the list at some point in this trip. If it gets unusually cold, I could wear layers, but so far it's been textbook: cool nights and mornings, sunny warm days.

The single pair of footwear is a necessary element, as footwear is so hard to pack; they're solid black walking boots but look fine in a restaurant as well. Speaking of which, that's the point of the collared shirt and the second trousers: for wear at concerts, parties or meetings at the Australian Embassy (all of which have happened this trip).

In addition to clothing, I have the following:

• toiletries
• ultraportable laptop computer which weighs just over 1 kilogram
• the Lonely Planet Poland guidebook
• folder with papers, maps etc
• mobile phone
• camera
• PDA
• leads and chargers for the above
• stationery items
• foldable bowl and fork/spoon
• small satchel

As I mentioned above, several of these items are carried on my person rather than going into the backpack. If you're wondering about the folding bowl, it's a miracle of design that allows me to have a simple meal of muesli in a hotel room from time to time.

Once off the aircraft, the satchel leaves the backpack and stays over my shoulder even when moving between cities. It only goes back when I need to get on a flight. And for reading material, I download a bunch of novels from the Web to read on my PDA (either paid-for downloads, or works available free because they're out of copyright).

You'll have noticed an obvious point: if you're going to travel this light, you need to wash clothing more often. Sure, but I think it's well worth the trade-off when I'm walking with a smile and a light step to the train station, with my easily manageable backpack on my back...

[For my April 2012 update to this blog post, click here]