Master Frugal Backpacking: Essential Tips for Sleeping and Camping Anywhere on a Budget
Frugal backpacking is more than just slinging a backpack over your shoulder, wearing the same shirt for a week, and doing laundry in sinks. It’s a way of living, of compromising with situations.
I remember during my early days of travelling, how a few habits or the little insecurities of my mind made backpacking so difficult for me. Though I could easily travel in rickety buses and eat at someplace totally disgusting, I was still not the right fit.
Every time I left home (or even before leaving) to have that grand adventure, I made sure that I find a roof at night and a toilet in the morning. And these habits always only curbed me from living my perpetual backpacking dream. It moreover curbed me from stepping out of the fray and travelling off the beaten path, because if you’re going to places where you can find hotels and guesthouses, you’re never going anyplace new.
I often get emails from readers claiming that they want to travel to unknown places, explore the unexplored, and do crazy things like their real-life hero Bear Grills. And the next thing they ask is: Is it safe to travel there? Would I easily find hotels? —and these little insecurities always play their part in stopping them from being a careless backpacker.
The more I travel the more I realise that there’re apparently only two things that stop us from going wherever we wanted – our inability to sleep and shit anywhere. But if only we manage to conquer these two born-out-of-comfortable-lives-in-cities habits, we can travel anywhere, and at any budget we wished.
I made camping a way to sustain this lifestyle for a while. And it is because of camping that I did some of the cheapest journeys in life – including my budget motorbiking trip to Spiti Valley that cost me less than five thousand Rupees, or wandering in the other parts of Himachal Pradesh, or even Northeast India on a budget of less than 500 Rupees a day!
At places where camping didn’t work, I stayed with locals, not worrying about a home-like comfort.
In the age of digitization and an active backpacking community, you moreover always have the option of using hospitality networks and getting free or cheap accommodation. All you need to do is not care about whether you’ll be sleeping on a comfy bed or a tiny couch, whether the toilet seat in somebody’s home would be clean enough as yours.
Because backpacking, my friend, is no luxury travel! It’s a way of living!
And this mind, and those habits, well… they can be trained!
