My Best Tip for Budget Travel? Stop Trying to Travel Like a Tourist.
The best way to travel on a budget is surprisingly simple: stop trying to make every trip impressive.
Somewhere along the way, travel became another form of consumption. We collect destinations, photograph landmarks, book the hotel with the infinity pool, and return home exhausted from having had such a wonderful time.
I’ve learned to travel differently.
Some of my most memorable experiences have cost very little. Walking through a city without a particular destination. Eating what the locals are eating. Taking a train instead of the scenic tourist transfer. Sitting in a neighborhood café long enough to become part of the furniture. Getting slightly lost and discovering that the best meal of the trip was hiding behind a door I would never have found on a travel app.
Copenhagen taught me the pleasure of wandering without urgency. London gave me museums, parks and streets that can entertain you for hours without requiring an admission ticket. San Francisco gave me hills, beaches, fog and neighborhoods that were best understood on foot. Mumbai, of course, requires very little money to provide an entire day’s worth of sensory overload.
And then there are the trips that don’t go according to budget—or plan.
I’ve had luggage disappear. I’ve travelled across cities and countries for visas. I’ve moved a dog across continents. I’ve booked things that looked perfectly sensible until reality got involved.
Those experiences taught me something that has very little to do with money.
Budget travel is really about knowing what deserves your money and what doesn’t.
Spend on the thing that will make the experience possible. Save on the things that merely make it look impressive.
Sometimes that means a tiny room in a brilliant neighborhood instead of a beautiful hotel miles away. Sometimes it means a local meal instead of the restaurant everyone has photographed. Sometimes it means taking the cheap train and watching the landscape change outside the window.
And sometimes, the most expensive mistake is insisting that the itinerary must go exactly as planned.
I’ve come to think of travel as a particularly good rehearsal for life. You make a plan, buy a ticket, pack your bag—and then discover that the universe has misplaced your luggage.
You can spend the rest of the trip being angry about it.
Or you can go find dinner.
That philosophy—of finding the story inside the disruption—runs through About Life Choices & Potholes, my memoir about migration, ambition, belonging, and the curious things that happen when life refuses to follow the itinerary.
Travel light. Spend selectively. Leave room for getting lost. The best parts rarely make it onto the original plan.
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