In the days of the intrepid explorers, getting from point A to point B was a death-defying experience. And you had to be either very wealthy or be financed by royalty.

Think how far we’ve come in the past century, just with commercial flights, rental cars, subways, and air-conditioned buses. The staggering thing, though, is how far we’ve come in the past 20 years. My still-young wife traveled to Poland while in college. She had a visa applied for in advance, a currency exchange quota that amounted to more than she could spend, and trouble finding anyone who spoke even a few words of English. Hard for the summer backpackers in Krakow to imagine now I’m sure.

Twenty years ago, there were no scrappy airlines like Southwest, JetBlue, RyanAir, and EasyJet. I just got a flight from my home town to New Orleans for $106, during Jazzfest no less. In 1984 dollars that’s what–$20?

And ten years ago, the Internet was just getting started. Remember the days before instant information access, instant price shopping, and worldwide travel message boards?

It’s easy to forget that progress comes one change at a time though. Here are a few new developments that are making it easier for international travelers to get around.

Direct Bus Service from Thailand to Laos
Starting in April, travelers can take a bus directly from Thailand to the Laos capital of Vientiane, and vice-versa. The 80-km trip from Udon Thani will set you back about $2. Details here:

Direct Flights to Vietnam
Through a variety of code-sharing agreements, travelers will soon be able to fly directly to Vietnam from Paris, Frankfurt, and a variety of US cities.

Goa-Mumbai Catamaran Service
Travelers to Goa from Bombay/Mumbai now have a pleasant alternative: an 8-hour trip by catamaran. It’s not cheap by Indian standards (around US$42 economy, $55 first class), but I’d plop that money down in a heartbeat to avoid the bus trip.

Venice-Istria Ferry Service
Fancy a trip to newly-hopping Croatia? You can now take a catamaran directly from Venice, Italy during the warm months. For a zillion ways to get to and around Croatia, click here.

Cheaper Eurail Passes
For US visitors, a European rail pass is cheaper this year, despite the big fall in the dollar. (Almost makes up for those $15 lunches you’ll be having in Paris.) For a rundown on what’s a relative bargain and what’s not, see this column.

Now get outta town!

Would you like to sail down the Nile, go trekking in the Himilayas, or go white-water rafting through gorges in the Andes Mountains? Have you dreamed of riding a camel through the desert, island-hopping by boat in the tropics, or climbing to the top of a volcano?

“Yes,” you sigh, “but I can’t afford it.”

Well, if you’re going by the prices in one of those glossy adventure travel brochures, you’re probably right. You’ll need to have a very fat bank account indeed. But if follow in the footsteps of long-term travelers and book locally, all of these adventures are easily within your grasp. So are boat rides down the Amazon, African safaris, and cycling through Patagonia.

Booking Here, Booking There
The difference if what you can afford often boils down to where your money is going. In general, the more people that are involved in a transaction, the more a service is going to cost you. So if you book an adventure trip through an agency in your own country, you’re paying the agency owners their profit, you’re paying the employees who will accompany you on the trip (and covering their expenses), and you’re paying the local tour company at your destination who will be doing the guiding and supplying the equipment, with their margin built in as well. Add that all together and a typical “adventure tour” of two or three weeks can easily run $3,000 to $4,000 per person, not including airfare. With airfare the trip might top ten grand for two. If you’re flying somewhere especially far or difficult to get to, it’ll be much higher. Pull out the first few transaction points, however, and you’ll pay a fraction of that.

Let’s take a fairly typical example that I’ve experienced first-hand, which is a three-week trip trekking the Himalayas on the Annapurna Circuit of Nepal. This trip is exhilirating, breathtaking, and inspiring. It’s also dirt cheap or ungodly expensive, depending on how you go. Like first class airline passengers, two people walking side by side are sometimes paying thousands of dollars difference in price.

What would it cost you to do this on your own?
When I did my Annapurna trek, I had come over to Nepal on a cheap flight from India. Us three guys carried our own packs and stayed in the lodges that are scattered all along the trail. We usually got an early start and consequently got one or two of the best lodge rooms in each village (less than $1 each). We ate our fill at each meal ($1 – $2), bought the odd Snickers bar or beer here and there, and always got dessert after dinner. After three weeks of trekking, we had spent less than $200 each, including the bus to and from Pokhara. There’s no need for a guide, but had we hired one, it would have cost us another $50 or so each. Add another $50 each if we’d wanted a porter. Let’s say we paid all their meals and gave them a fat tip at the end. We still couldn’t have spent more than $500 each if we had tried.

Along the way, we met many travelers who had booked with a tour company in Europe, Canada, or the US and paid anywhere from US$1,200 to $3,900. That included a few hotel nights in Kathmandu and Pokhara, but otherwise they were experiencing much the same thing as we were. Their loads were lighter, but the ones who paid the most were sleeping in tents, not lodges, and it got pretty cold at night. A few of the French groups had a gourmet chef along, but that meant set meals prepared at one time, not the “whatever, whenever” choices we were getting off a menu. On this trek, there wasn’t much point in a guide, but they had someone to ask questions of if they wanted. The downside was that the pace of the group was the pace of the group—no going off on their own, following their personal rhythm or speed.

A few days after finishing my trek, I joined up with a whitewater rafting trip. I asked around to find out who was the best operator in Kathmandu, with the best guides and the best equipment. After I found out, I booked a two-day trip with Ultimate Descents, traveling down the steepest, fastest river open to the public. My price? $80, including meals, transportation, and one night’s lodging in a riverside guesthouse with a bar. (No, I didn’t bargain.) By now, you probably know the rest of the story. Beside me were many people who had booked overseas, with this side trip part of a very expensive package.

I’ve seen this same scene play out around the world, whether it was hiking up volcanoes in Indonesia and the Philippines, taking a weeklong tour through the hilltribe areas of Vietnam, or touring the Mayan ruins in Mexico. Same experience, very different price tag.

Who Should Book Ahead?
So does this mean you’re automatically a sucker if you book your adventure trip from home? No, because there are certainly good reasons for doing that. If your schedule is very tight and you need to get back to work, it makes lots of sense to let someone else work out all the travel details. You’ll get around faster if you’re on charter buses as a group. If you’re somewhere like rural China or Uzbekistan, where the language barrier is an issue, having good guides or translators can be a huge help. And if you’re the type who likes to let others make the decisions or prefers to travel with a built-in group of companions, an organized tour makes sense.

If you book with a reputable agency, the food will probably be good and hygenic, your guides will speak English well, and your hotel rooms will be comfortable–some will even have character. If something goes wrong, you have someone at home to complain to afterwards.

Also, a group tour can sometimes make your flight cheaper. There are some bargains out there, if you find agencies like Traveland. As I wrote this, they were offering a 7-day Peru package for under $1,000, with airfare. The flight portion alone would be at least $500 on your own. Plenty of other agencies offer good values, including Canada-based Gap Adventures. Check web sites like Travelzoo for specials and check the ads in magazines like Frommer’s Budget Travel and Outside (US), Outpost (Canada) and Wanderlust (UK).

However, if you have some time to nose around after you arrive somewhere, and you’re wise in the ways of travel, think about waiting until arrival and putting all your money into the local coffers. You just might save enough to pay for your plane ticket home…

Quick, name the last three travel magazines or newspaper sections you read.

Now, think hard and try to remember how many articles you saw about traveling on a tight budget.

Those two answers probably sum up everything you need to know about why people travel the way they do. Where I live in the US, Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel has done a good job of showing the mainstream reader how to get a better deal, but its circulation is dwarfed by that of Travel & Leisure and Conde Nast Traveler, magazines that are really aimed at the most affluent citizens of the one of the world’s most affluent countries. Big city newspapers such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune contain some great travel writing, but only a fraction of the typical Sunday travel section pays more than passing attention to finding the best values. It’s a little better in Europe and Australia, but most publications still tilt disproportionally toward expensive travel—after all, that’s where the ad dollars come from.

This was true even during the travel slump and worldwide recession of the past few years. You see lots of luxury, luxury, luxury, as if every traveler boarding a plane is on their way to a five-star hotel and a spa treatment. Over time this warps readers’ perceptions and makes them think every vacation has to cost a fortune.

A fellow travel writer calls these swanky publications “travel porn” and I can’t think of a more apt description. I once saw a cartoon in a men’s magazine in which a woman is standing next to a pot-bellied man in an easy chair. “Why do you watch that stuff?” the woman asks, pointing to a pornographic movie playing on the TV. “Because it makes me feel like everyone in the world is having a wild and crazy time,” he replies. “Well, everyone except me.”

The idea of fantasizing about a life you can’t lead yourself is a big part of the “armchair traveler” appeal of glossy travel magazines. A typical issue contains dozens of advertisements for diamond watches, luxury sports cars, and handbags that retail for over a thousand dollars. Between the ads are stories about resorts we have no business frequenting unless we’re in that lofty portion of the population who has more money than they have time to spend. It’s nice to look at the stunning photos and read about locations if that’s as far as it goes. For too many non-millionaire tourists, however, they look at those stories and think that’s how everyone travels-everyone except them. So when they pick up the phone or log on to make travel reservations, they go in with the mindset that travel is, and should be, expensive.

Next time you leaf through a travel magazine, take a look at the non-travel advertisements. Do those products match up with the way you live your life? If not, try a different magazine-and a different kind of travel.

Some great magazines for independent travelers got killed off when the recession hit, including Escape, trips, and Big World. A few good ones have stuck around however:

Outpost
Published in Toronto, with a Canadian perspective. Was always great, but is now hands down the best travel magazine in North America for thinking, independent travelers. Insightful and culturally sensitive writing, with a view from the ground, not from the Four Seasons balcony.

Transitions Abroad
I’m biased since I have a regular column in here, but it’s a great resource. Created in 1977 as the “antidote to tourism,” it is the definitive guide to working, studying, or volunteering overseas. They also publish some brief travel articles that provide plenty of no-nonsense advice. The publishing company is known for some very helpful books and directories for those planning to live overseas for some time. Click here to subscribe or check a quality bookstore or library for a copy to see for yourself.

Modern Nomad (Update – this one’s gone)
Only published in fits and starts, but this magazine manages to combine an experimental edge with a corresponding usefulness for all nomads. Not afraid to tackle taboo subjects and is open-minded enough to cover Asbury Park, NJ and Vietnam in the same issue. Also contains interesting book and world music reviews.

Frommer’s Budget Travel
This is a corporate magazine mostly geared toward package tourists, and a lot of articles are about the usual suspects (Italy, the Caribbean, etc.) but it does focus on independent overseas travel a fair bit. You can subscribe for next to nothing by checking the Web subscription sites, so you’ll certainly get your money’s worth from the web links and resources alone. Has some good info about value destinations and how to get good airfare and hotel deals.

Wanderlust
This UK magazine is a great find if you can get a Europe-bound friend to pick it up or you live near a magazine store that carries imports. (Or if you live in England of course.) Literate travel articles, great travel book reviews, and beautiful photography, but all the while still remembering that most travelers aren’t living off $500 a day.

* If you have another good magazine to recommend, post it in the comments below!

Of course there are dozens of good Web magazines for independent travelers. Here’s a link to quite a few of them.

If you want to live like royalty on a pauper’s budget, you need to change your address.

“I’ve never been a budget traveler and I’ve never paid top dollar,”  my friend Steve said to me last week while we sipped a few cold ones in a thatched-roof Mexican bar. “I prefer to do luxury at a bargain price.”

That’s why he was on vacation in Mexico, and why he ended up buying a house there a few years ago. After hiring the best architect in town to restore and update an old colonial, he ended up with a fabulous place that cost about one-fourth of what it would in the US. His property taxes are $22 a year—with 10% off for early payment. A weekly maid visit costs about 15% of what he pays in the US. And a set lunch at the restaurant on his corner costs less than $3, including a soda.

His family gets all their dental work done in Mexico, where a US-trained dentist performs excellent work at a fraction of the price. One woman I met there had flown down for a week to get some bridge and crown work done. After airfare and a week’s hotel stay, the tab was still far less than it would have cost her at home.

Expats living in cheap countries abroad know this formula well. Whether they do it full time or just part of the year, what would be meager amount of money at home allows them to live in relative luxury abroad. I used Mexico as an example, but there are certainly cheaper places than that, including most of the rest of Latin America. In at least a dozen countries in Central and South America, US$2,000 a month would allow a couple to live like a king and queen.

If your needs are more modest, you could live pretty well on half that amount. You could rent a nice house or apartment for a few hundred bucks and have plenty left for food and frolicking.

The same formula applies to travel as well. Living in Germany or Austria is expensive. Travel in Germany or Austria is very expensive. In the Czech Republic, wedged between the two, living expenses and travel expenses are both cheap.

To find out where the travel bargains are, get a copy of The World’s Cheapest Destinations. Residency issues aside, you could live in these places for cheap as well. For a regular e-mail about bargain property abroad, subscibe to Offshore Real Estate, a newsletter sponsored by EscapeArtist.com.

Where do you go on the Web if you want to find a great deal?

The Internet is a beautiful thing. Now that I have it, I can’t imagine life without it. At least a dozen times a week, it answers questions that would have taken ten phone calls or a day in the library before. But there’s a downside. The world’s largest library can be as intimidating as, well, the world’s largest library. If you’re a budget traveler, you need to have a good set of bookmarks/favorites in your web browser.

Everyone has their own set of key sites, as they should. And no list is going to be anything close to comprehensive. But these are the ones that, for me, offer dependable info and solid results I can depend on. If someone took these away and I had to go back to traveling the old way, I’d feel lost.

Some of these are only really applicable to US and Canadian travelers, so I’ll start with the international ones.

Everything you wanted to know about somewhere and weren’t afraid to ask
- If you haven’t been to Lonely Planet, you’re probably feeling like a lonely traveler. Go there, get info, ask questions, get answers.
- At the Rough Guides site, the message board is not as lively, but there’s still a load of good info. An especially great resource if you want to find out about local music before you go.
- IgoUgo has a zillion journals written by people who have been there, done that, and stopped to write about it. Virtual Tourist is a similar site that is a bit more schizo, but has more info on hotels/hostels and a better message board.
- JohnnyJet is basically just a collection of links, but what a mother of all links sites it is! If you’re trying to find something that concerns travel, there’s a good chance it’s here.

Budget Travel Articles
Everyone is going to have a favorite (feel free to post them at the bottom), but here are mine:
Transitions Abroad
GoNomad
BootsnAll
PassPlanet

For the Americans and Canadians (or travel in those places)
These sites will easily save you hundreds of dollars if you’re going on vacation rather than a long-term trip.
- Most people know about Priceline for airfares, which can be a bit of a pain, but for hotels they’re a godsend. First, go to BiddingForTravel and see what other people have paid. Follow their instructions, get in the ballpark range, and SCORE! You can easily pay half what you see on Expedia or Hotels.com. Hotwire is also worth checking out before you book a hotel or rental car.
- No one travel site always gives you the best deal on hotel rooms. Use Travelaxe to search multiple sites at once, then book at the one with the best rate. I just used this to book a hotel in New Orleans during Jazzfest and the best rate came from some obscure site called Hotel Kingdom. Whodathunk?
- A similar site, but for rental cars, is BreezeNet. I’ve also used them myself for bookings and found deals I couldn’t match anywhere else.
- Want to see the weekly airfare deals for your home airport? Sign up for Smarter Living’s weekly newsletter.

Now get outta town!