Speaking of low cost traveling, there are few more methods you can use if you want to make a beautiful holiday but you don’t have much money to spend in it.
Think about it for a moment…what are the greatest expenses every holiday has to fight with? The ones you really can’t avoid, both when you are abroad or in your own country?
That’s it, a place where to sleep and 2/3 meals a day. You can’t surely enjoy any holiday without these two things (nor even survive, actually), and people running touristic business know it very well and ask you a lot of money for them. So the best recipe for a good budget holiday would be finding a way to save on these main expenses, right?
I’ve already explained some very interesting methods to achieve that in this article: basically you can exchange room and board with some working hours per day, and all the money you’ll be saving can be invested in other kind of activities or in longer holidays. But what if you don’t want to spend some precious hours of your holiday working, and you are just looking for a traveling adventure, solo or with friends?
In this case, you can pretty much cut those costs as low as the ones at home if you opt for a very spartan, uncomfortable but real fun accommodation: a tent!
Wild camping in Abruzzo
I chose myself this kind of holiday this year because I really wanted to have a nice and adventurous time with my boyfriend, but we didn’t have much money to invest in it. It seemed a very nice idea since we would have been able to combine 2 different things: an “on the road” holiday, a very interesting choice if you want to see different things and have a lot of freedom, and a budget holiday, as we wanted to avoid spending a lot of money with hotels.
Let’s start immediately stating a very important thing, maybe the most important of all regarding this kind of holiday, cause it will impact the most over the overall costs you will incur in; everything depends on which country you’ll decide to spend your holiday in, because only a few allow “wild camping” legally.
Welcome to my place
The only ones I can be sure about are the northern regions of Europe: NORWAY, SWEDEN, FINLAND, and so on…these are usually cold places where you’d never think go camping would be a good idea, but actually during summer months the weather is mostly very pleasant, so you should think again: if you are looking for a place where to enjoy pure, wide and uncontaminated nature, and meanwhile camp without spending anything, these countries are the right ones for you.
Regarding ENGLAND, SCOTLAND AND IRELAND, the matter grows more complicated as the rules are not that clear, but according to Internet’s advices it seems like wild camping is tolerated, or at least there should be some specific areas where it is legal and free.
Out of Europe, too, the situation is uncertain, but it seems like if you are traveling to NEW ZEALAND, AUSTRALIA, JAPAN, ICELAND AND generally CENTRAL AMERICA you won’t have any problem wild camping, or at least finding a place where you can pitch up your tent for free and legally (I got these info just looking in internet, especially here and here, so you’d probably better just ask Google about the country you desire to travel to and its policy about wild camping).
The point is, there are really few countries where wild camping is really TOTALLY LEGAL, and they are mainly Norway, Sweden and so on, just because they consider it kind of a basic human right (aren’t they cool?!?)…but anyway, in most of the other countries the legislation is very vague, and if you are smart enough not to annoy anyone, leave rubbish, make fires, make noise, etc…well, you’ll be fine camping almost everywhere in the world.
For example, my boyfriend an I decided that we wanted to know better our own country, Italy, which is universally considered one of the most beautiful in the world, but we didn’t know very well yet. So we decided to get a car, a tent, some sleeping bags and start driving along the eastern coast from the Marche region to Puglia…and so we did.
How to have the perfect wild camping holiday
You may have noticed that I didn’t mention Italy at all between the countries where you can camp for free…this is because it’s actually one of the places where it is more difficult to do so. Thanks to the high density of population on a relatively small space, and to the richness of touristic campsites in every italian destination, finding a good spot where to stop for the night can become pretty annoying and difficult…we did it only the first night, because we were astonished with the crazy prices of the campsites around us (in very high season, with a car and an electrical connection, a place where you can pitch your tent legally can cost you up to 20 euros per person per night!!! This way camping becomes useless for saving money, and just uncomfortable!), so we decided to ignore the rules and we found a nice spot on the beach, near the street enough to be safe, but pretty covered from it by a bush (unfortunately we found out later that bush had some terrible and painful spiky seeds, but that’s part of the adventure I guess…).
We waited until 11pm to pitch the tent up, and made sure to take it down early in the morning before too many people arrived on the beach, and we had no problems at all…as I said before, most depends on how you behave when you are camping: if you don’t make any mess, or trash, and if you don’t expose yourself too much to people’s eyes, you won’t have any problem wild camping almost everywhere in the world!
For the other days, we decided it was much more comfortable to spend some money and go to a camping site, and getting out of the most common touristic routes we were often able to find cheap campsites where to stay legally (in the Majella National Park we found one that costed us only 6 euros per person per night…I think this is a really good price and if you find places like that, you should take advantage of the obvious comforts of such a structure).
In the end, it was clear that our one-week on the road & camping holiday was a very good way to save money and see many wonderful and unexpected places (the best thing ever when you are traveling with your car and you have no fixed plan, is to see in the foreground a place that seems interesting and suddenly decide to explore it freely!!), but it was also obvious that if we had chosen a different country for the same kind of holiday (one with free camping, or at least a less expensive one…) we would have been able to make it last longer and see more places.
So, after reading this article you are totally out of your mind for this kind of holiday and you are looking forward to try it, right? But what exactly do you need to budget travel around the globe with a tent? How to have the perfect wild camping holiday? Which are the tools you CAN’T avoid bringing with you? Let’s see them together:
- Firstly, obviously, it comes your TENT: it should be as small and light as possible, so that you won’t get mad if you have to bring it with you without a car, and the easiest it is to pitch it up, the best your tent-time will be (remember that, when wild camping, you’ll have to pitch up and down your tent at least 2 times a day, and with a complicated tent this can become annoying!).
- Trust me when I tell you that ground is not comfortable at all (no, not even sand, really). So you’d better have a good MATTRESS, or after a few days you’ll find yourself in a hospital with a terrible back-ache! The best possible thing is to find a thick, big, comfortable air-bed, possibly a self-inflating one…I have an amazing one that comes with a small engine you can charge in the car, and I can assure you it literally SAVED our lives!
- When you sleep in a tent, you have to consider that a normal, simple summer storm can be very annoying if you have nothing to keep you dry…so before leaving buy a big, thick and resistant GROUND OILCLOTH, and bring it always with you: it will be totally essential if put upon your tent in case of rain (bring some strings so you can fix it to a tree, a post, a rock, or even your own car), and it will be very helpful under your tent to make it more comfortable, clean and soft, as needed.
- We said the greatest expenses when on holiday are room AND BOARD…so, if you don’t want to spend half of your money eating at the restaurant 2/3 times a day, you should plan bringing a CAMP STOVE: it should be small, light and safe, and it will enable you to save SO MUCH MONEY, for real! You’ll just have to buy something easy to cook and resistant to high temperatures, and you’ll be ready to go. The best food for this purpose? Pre-cooked rice or pasta. It’s not that bad, it’s kind of “healthy”, and it’s really easy to cook without needing many tools. Ah, of course it’s very important to remember bringing all the tools you can’t avoid using when cooking: a pot, a wooden spoon, pot holders, a sponge with some dish-soap, salt, etc. And you may consider bringing also dishes, glasses, forks and knives from home: of course you can buy plastic ones, but this is another way of saving money (and also the environment :) ).
- When you wild camp, you often have to be very WILD…it means you may not have the chance to have a shower for some days, and drinking water is very important to save. So why not bringing with you a BIG CANTEEN? I have one that can contain 5 liters of water, and it was essential in situations where we could not access running water. Remember to fill it in every time you have the chance, and you’ll be really grateful for this advice ;)
- Remember to bring some good SLEEPING BAGS: even in summer, nights outside can be pretty cold, so it’s always better to have them with you!
- Bring with you LIGHTS: of any shape and color, they’ll be extremely useful for everything you may need to do when the sun sets. Especially helpful are the ones you can fix on your ear or on your forehead, because they will let your hands free for any work.
A dinner on the beach
Are you ready to leave now? Please share with me your “best practices” if you are used to this kind of holiday, or feel free to ask anything about it. I’m still a beginner, but I think this is a really nice way of traveling, but it’s very important to be well prepared and organized.
Have wonderful holidays, I will post soon some pictures of my holidays and some advices about what to do and see in Italy :)
Xox,
Girl with a suitcase.