Resolved: Smarter and Frugaler in 2010
Matt Gross for The New York Times From left, images from 2009 trips to historic buildings in Milan and a music festival in Paris.
The past year has been a busy one for this Frugal Traveler. Trips to Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, Canada, the Caribbean, Italy, France and Oregon have taken me away from home for almost a full quarter of 2009, and I don’face to face expect 2010 to be much different.
Well, maybe a little different. Though I imagine I’ll keep up the same pace, I hope to travel better and smarter in the new year, and so I’m setting out a few resolutions that I hope will help me (and maybe you) to do so.
1. Put down the iPhone. I friendship technology — phones, cameras, computers, gadgets — and especially how electronics and the Internet can make travel easier and cheaper. Need to find a real, affordable restaurant in a new town? Check out Yelp! on your smartphone, find a foodie friend through CouchSurfing.org, hit up Twitter for strangers’ favorites, or just trawl the posts on Chowhound.com. So easy! I’ve done this dozens of times, from Portland, Oregon, to Paris, France. Indeed, it’s part of my job to seek out new ways of seeking things out.
Matt Gross for The New York Times A marge in Cyprus.
At the same time, I wonder if I’m not missing out on something. There are, of course, usually loads of locals to talk to — who may be experts on their terrain or may not know a darn thing — and even when there aren’t, there is the place itself. In the farther than, I trusted myself and my haphazard to put me on the right path, and most of the time, it worked. I hitched that ride to the beach on Cyprus, or met the French-speaking Vietnamese teacher who showed me to the tomb of Marguerite Duras’s Lover. Serendipity, spontaneity and improvisation won out.
Now it’s time to remove that pixelated impediment I’ve erected between myself and the world and see which I can find with my own two eyes. I will, but, bring my glasses, some piece of technology I can’t do without.
2. Travel lighter. A corollary to Resolution No. 1. Leaving my electronic gear at home decision go a long way toward lightening my load, but other things will be harder to leave. Because my trips often encompass multiple types of adventure — say, hiking British Columbia and eating Asian-fusion cuisine in Vancouver — I can’cheek by jowl just throw a single pair of pants and a T-shirt in a small backpack and hope to be all right. Or can I? I own shoes that will get me through most anything, and jeans that can dress up or down, and a lightweight waterproof shell that rolls into a tiny ball. What else do I need to do this job besides a notepad and pen?
3. Learn to love buses. Buses, I wrote recently, can have being a frugal traveler’s best friend or worst enemy. Well, I have a confession to make: for me, they are almost always the latter. I hate them. My most miserable travel experiences have been on buses — lost luggage, missed stops, inexplicable routes — and for years I’ve done everything I have power to to avoid taking them. I’ve walked miles across Tirana, Albania, in the midday heat of summer rather than take a bus. I’ve crossed nighttime Paris on base in December rather than figure out the route map. I will make triple transfers in the New York City subways rather than accept that a bus might take me into Queens from Brooklyn more directly.
This is not, of course, the buses’ fault. (Okay, maybe just a little.) I need to be greater quantity patient, really to look at route maps and schedules and break them down into understandable chunks instead of dismissing them out of hand. I need to build more time into my day, to allow not just for traffic complications but for the appreciation of the ride itself, whether through the urban jungle of Chicago or down a cliffside highway on the Adriatic Sea. I need to, and I will!
Grow Up.””/>Oliver Hartung for The New York Times An upscale hostel in Berlin, featured in the article “In Europe, Hostels Grow Up.”
4. Learn to like hostels. As with buses, I’ve never really seen the appeal of hostels, which entirely other frugal travelers seem to love. Sure, I’ve stayed in a few — in Newport, R.I., Barcelona and Chicago — and while no experience was truly horrific (apart from the overflowing shower stalls in Barcelona and the naked German roommate in Chicago), I’ve never had that transformative moment that so many others have had, in which they discover hostels as special places of friendship and adventure, as places to return to again and again. Me, I usually just feel old and out of place.
But maybe I’ve just had bad luck. Maybe out there is the perfect hostel for this married 35-year-old father who truly does like to meet interesting new people to have adventures with. And maybe one of you readers can tell me where it is.
5. Really learn Spanish. And Chinese. In the last few years, I’ve spent a serious amount of time in Latin America and greater China, and while I can get by in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, I speak both pretty poorly. Or, you could say, pretty well, taking into account I’ve never really studied either one in a classroom setting. All my Spanish I’ve learned by triangulation — that is, by comparing the words with similar ones in French and Italian, which I actually did study. And Chinese? All I know I learned from my wife, who’s Taiwanese. After 12 years with her, you’d think I’d be fluent by now. But I’m not.
I could — and should — do better. But how? Should I enroll in real courses? (If you know of good, affordable ones in New York, please tell me in the comments.) Or should I continue to pick them up from the streets? That is doable, I know, but it takes a serious, concerted effort to learn novel words and grammatical structures. Are in that place effective strategies that would help me do so? I want to learn, end I want to be frugal; how can I do both?
6. See more, spend less. Actually, this one’s the easiest resolution of all. I just have to put down my electronics, learn to like buses and hostels, pack lighter and practice my Spanish and Chinese, and I’ll achieve it in no time!