Cheap and Easy Travel

If you live in a part of the world that is cold at this time of year, your thoughts might be turning to the idea of a winter escape. What could be better than leaving the snow and ice behind and heading off to a sunny, colourful location? Then how about lovely warm, relaxing Gambia, with its delightful beaches of white sand where you can watch the multi-hued fishing boats bob by on a blue sea? Gambia offers some great windsurfing too.

If you like to enjoy the natural environment, then one of the things that you must see in Gambia is the Abuko Nature Reserve, where in amongst the fantastic plants, you can spot interesting lizards, monkeys and the most beautiful birds. There are also various safari excurions available where you can go to the Presidents Wildlife and Nature Reserve, and even visit a school and a village to see what local life in Gambia is really like.

The capital city of Banjul is noted for its great eateries where you can try many delicous local foods, such as the famed Gambian stew. There are also restaurants catering for various international tastes. One interesting thing to try is domada, which is a dish made using mashed peanuts, and is a little reminiscent of satay. Banjul also has its famous Albert Market where you can find wooden carvings, jewellery and fabulous traditional rainbow coloured Gambian clothes.

If you live in the UK, you will find that many of the tour companies are offering really good deals to Gambia at the moment. One of the best that I found was seven nights bed and breakfast in a three-star hotel on the Gambian coast for only £393 per person, with Thomson, and this sort of price is representative of the deals on offer at the moment from the UK travel companies. Given that eating out in Gambia is very reasonable priced, a holiday such as this offers very good value for money.

Winter has well and truly started in the UK, it’s getting colder, and greyer – but every cloud has a silver lining! The silver lining in this case is the fact that breaks to other parts of Europe that would be expensive in the summertime, are at rock bottom prices at this time of year.

One example of this is the short breaks that P&O offer from the UK over to Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Bruges – at the moment these are on a special offer of two for the price of one, meaning that two of you can go for a total of sixty-six quid! Now surely that blows the winter blues away?

Sailing from Hull in the north of England, you are away for two nights, sleeping onboard ship in an ensuite cabin. The ships are great fun to be on, with loads of onboard activities and entertainment, and top class dining. There are buffet style breakfasts and dinners, and you can buy these in advance. After dinner you can relax in the Brasserie, or one of the stylish and comfortable bars or lounges. There is even a cinema, and if you are feeling really lucky you can try out the onboard casino. There is live entertainment for the all the family, and a host of shops where you can find plenty of top quality goods at great prices.

The trip includes return coach transfers to your chosen city, so all you have to do when you arrive is step off the ship onto a bus, and you are then taken to the city centre, where you get a full day of looking around and shopping.

The three destinations on offer between them have something for everyone. Amsterdam is famed for its magnificent canals, and wonderful museums. Rotterdam is a bohemian and international city with a fast pace of life. Bruges is a relaxing small city, with an abundance of medieval architecture, and is wonderful for Christmas shopping, with its quaint little shops selling lace, chocolates, and other fancy goods.

So, which will it be?

Here’s wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

London is such a great place to visit, and yet the thing that puts off any budget traveller is the prospect of the cost of the accommodation. But help is at hand in the form of YHA London Earl’s Court. YHA stands for Youth Hostels Association, but the truth of the matter is that you do not have to be youth in order to join – just young at heart. The YHA is part of the internationally renowned Hostelling International, which has hostels offering a reasonable standard of accommodation all over the world.

YHA London Earl’s Court suffered a fire in 2006, but now has been completely refurbished. The hostel has a new cafe, ensuite rooms, and Wi-Fi access to the internet, which is handy for posting all those travel photos up onto your blog for family and friends. The hostel even has a courtyard garden where you can sit out in the summer and relax.

As for the location, Earls Court is a vibrant area, full of young travellers and students, with a great variety of shops, cafés, restaurants, pubs and bars. The Hostel itself is a lively place with lots of people to talk to and things going on.

If culture is your thing, then Earls Court is ideally located for visiting the museums at Kensington Museums, such as the Science Museum, with its great interactive displays, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, with its magnificent displays of fashion and of art.

The building has 24 hour access, with a fully equipped kitchen where you can do your own cooking, bicycle hire, a lounge with freeview TV and a quiet reading room. The accommodation is provided in single-sex dormitories or private rooms (subject to availability).

The hostel is open all year round, with 24 hour access.

Prices start at £24.50 for adults, and £20.50 for the under eighteens.

I’m not entirely sure why these cheap railway tickets, that you can get in Japan, have the name Seishun Juhachi Kippu, which literally means “Youthful Eighteen Ticket”, but I think it has something to do with the age eighteen, the implication being that this is some kind of youth fare. But rest assured that you can use these cheap travel tickets at any age.

So, the first thing to know about Seishun Juhachi Kippu is that you can’t buy them all year round, they are available only three times a year during the school holiday seasons. They give you five days of unlimited travel, anywhere in Japan, on the local and rapid JR trains for only 11,500 yen, which given Japan’s prices, is really saying something.

The local and the rapid trains are the slower trains, so as long as you don’t mind stopping at all the stations on the way, this way of getting about provides good value for money.

The ticket consists of one small card with five spaces, one of which gets stamped for each day that the ticket is used.

Using these tickets, a friend and myself had five enjoyable day trips away from Kyoto one summer, including trips to Kobe, and to Himeji Castle.

If you are in Japan for a vacation, and you are there at the right time, the Seishun Juhachi Kippu can provide a bargain method of covering long distances over five days, and I met one woman who had traveled from Tokyo up to Hokkaido by this method. The advantage of Seishun Juhachi Kippu is that they are available to anyone, and you don’t have to order them in advance.

A hostel with a name like “Sleeping with the Enemy” tends to grab your attention. Sleeping with the Enemy is in fact a collection of communal houses in Sydney, run in a manner similar to a hostel, offering “clean, safe and secure accommodation”. The houses are aimed principally at providing a base for travelers who want to stay in Sydney for some time, the minimum being one month.

One house, known as The Zoo is within walking distance of Darling Harbour and has the luxury of its own swimming pool in the back garden. The house known as Number 69 is in the Bohemian village known as the Glebe, which has plenty of reasonably priced cafes, where backpackers and the like tell stories of their recent travels. Despite being so hippy-ish, the Glebe is only ten minutes away from Sydney’s central business district.

The houses have sleek modern furnishings, and clean, well-fitted kitchens – in fact they remind me of the Big Brother house.

With rates starting at only $120 (Australian dollars) per week, all bills inclusive, Sleeping with the Enemy offers a reasonable standard of accommodation at a budget price, which is handy if you want an extended stay in Sydney.

If you want to stay at Sleeping with the Enemy, then your first move is to organize a house tour – presumably at this you can then discuss arrangements, and perhaps they also decide whether you will fit in or not.

There is now a Sleeping with the Enemy in Cairns too, and there is one to open soon in Melbourne.

In the middle of Manhattan, The Gershwin is one of New York’s most interesting hotels. Located just off 5th Avenue, in a 13 storey building, the hotel is run by pop art fans, and this is evident when you see the walls - each floor of the hotel has walls lined with the prints of a different artist. You can find Andy Warhol, Stefan Lindfors, Banks Clayton, Billy Name, Michael Lin, and others.

And one of the nice things about The Gershwin is that it offers a wide range of accommodation all under one roof, from Superior, through Standard and Essential, to Auberge. What this means is that not only does The Gershwin offer some nice hotel rooms, including an executive den, and a family suite, but also nicely designed, wooden beamed dorm rooms with bunk beds, where you can get a bed for $49 a night – and that includes tax! There is even a floor reserved for up-and-coming models who are trying to make it in The Big Apple.

The hotel is currently awaiting a permit to open its own restaurant, but there are loads of great places to eat nearby.

The hotel has wireless internet access, color TV, air conditioning, and a host of other services. You can even reserve online, and there are special deals and packages available.

But The Gershwin is also more than just a hotel, it is a venue, and holds performance, music and poetry readings in its Living Room. They even have Artists in Residence – which is pretty impressive for a hotel.

So if you want to stay in New York City, and still have some money left over for some great meals, shopping and entertainment, how about the The Gershwin?

For UK residents the weather is starting, just starting, to bite with that winter cold, so what could chase away the winter blues faster than a break to the lovely island of Majorca? Thomson are currently offering breaks, leaving at the end of this month, for a total price of as little as £376 per person, for one week of self-catering at the Fiesta Sahara in the lively resort of Magaluf.

Magaluf is one of the party capitals of the European holiday scene, and is famous for its pubs, clubs, dancing, music and overall nightlife, as well as its lovely golden beaches, and year round sunny weather. It is the ideal location for a break if you enjoy relaxing and socialising.

The Fiesta Sahara is a hotel of comfortable holiday apartments, complete with swimming pool, in a central location with both the beach and main shopping areas nearby. Although the accommodation is self catering there are plenty of daytime activities and evening entertainment provided, as well as a poolside bar where you can buy snacks, breakfast and sandwiches all day. There is also a self-service buffet restaurant.

The complex also provides a bar with lounge, a TV lounge, activities such as volleyball and 5-a-side football. There is a pool table, table tennis, and also squash and tennis courts available in the nearby sports club.

Overall, this holiday looks like a great winter break. Deals such as this tend to go quickly, but a quick search of the major tour operators will turn up more bargains, and Majorca is one of the destinations that offer a reasonably priced package in the wintertime.

If you are a student then you have a distinct advantage when it comes to budget travel – that advantage is discounts! Basically lots of companies love to offer students discounts, the logic being that when you finally go into that well-paid job, that hopefully the university education will lead to, you will remain a loyal customer of the company, and think of them when you are shopping around for more costly goods and services.

Your student ID card from your university should already net you a whole host of discounts, but you also may consider investing £9 in the International Student Identity Card (ISIC), which, it is claimed, will net you some 32,000 discounts internationally. It’s worth bearing in mind though, that the card you got free from your university or college, may well also get you these discounts.

The ISIC card includes the worldwide free-call Emergency Help Line, and gives you a small bonus credit on the ISIC phone card and global SIM, so, it may be worth getting just for these factors.

Apparently 83% of cardholders said that they would buy another one, and people reckoned it was worth it due to the number of discounts available, with cardholders reckoning that they saved a total of £110 when last travelling.

All full time students are eligible for an ISIC card. You have to be able to prove your date of birth, and have a student ID from your uni or college. You can even get the ISIC on a gap year, all you need to do is provide a confirmed place via UCAS.

At nine pounds, the ISIC might be worth it if you are going to do a lot of travelling, but it is worth bearing in mind that you will still get a lot of those discounts with your regular, free student ID.

Scandinavia is such a fantastic place to visit, with its vast rural areas, its clean and quiet towns, its vibrant metropolitan areas such as Stockholm, Helsinki, Copenhagen and Oslo, where you can always find a good night out and more besides. But the thing that always puts the budget traveller off Scandinavia is its expense. Like most countries that have a very good standard of living, the Scandinavian countries tend to be a bit on the expensive side for the visitor.

But the good news is that the Scanrail Pass is here to make your budget stretch further, from the fjords of Norway to the lakes of Finland, from the red painted houses of Sweden to the lush green fields of Denmark.

Basically the ScanRail pass covers Swedish Railways, Norwegian State Railways, Danish State Railways, Arriva in Denmark, Finnish Railways, Connex in Sweden and Norway, and even the Berlin Night Express to Sweden. And if that’s not enough, the pass also covers a number of small railways including the fantastic Inland Railway of Sweden, which runs from Mora to Gällivare. Travelling on the Inland Railway is a holiday in itself - running from central Sweden right up to beyond the Arctic Circle, this railway was originally developed for freight, but runs tourist trains in the summer, with lots of stops to drink coffee and look at interesting features.

So, how does the Scanrail Pass work? The options are that the passes can be bought either for 21 consecutive days, or for 5, 8 or 10 days within a two month period.

Prices range from €165 to €370, depending upon whether you count as youth, adult or senior, and also upon the number of days you choose. There are also reasonable prices for children’s tickets.

The Scanrail Pass opens up some great possibilities for travel within Scandinavia.

In Europe there is so much to see, London, Paris, Florence, Barcelona – I could go on. But the problem for those on a limited budget travelling around Europe, is how to meet the costs of getting around. One good option for getting from place to place, in my opinion, is Eurolines.

One concern, particularly to travellers from North America, is the idea that bus travel tends to be a bit of a last resort, aimed at those who can’t afford air fares. Having travelled a number of times by Eurolines myself, I can testify that the buses are comfortable and clean, the journeys are pleasant, and the other passengers tend to be students, budget travellers, and those who, for one reason or another, are not keen on trains or planes.

When considering overland travel versus plane travel, a lot of people say that they like to see the views as they travel, and also that they enjoy the convenience of a journey that starts and ends in a city centre, as opposed to out-of-town airports, that tend to waste time. On Eurolines modern buses with reclining seats, you can just relax and watch the world go by. The buses all have toilet facilities too, so there is no need to anxiously wait for the next stop!

Eurolines serve 500 destinations in Europe, including all of the classic cities, and you can buy your tickets quickly and easily online.

For those planning a whistlestop tour, Eurolines offer two passes – you can have fifteen or thirty days of unlimited coach travel between forty cities. The fifteen day pass costs between €169 and €329, and the thirty day pass is between €229 and €439, with the prices varying according to whether you are youth or adult, and whether it is high, mid, or low season.

So with Eurolines providing the opportunity for reasonably priced travel around Europe, there is really no need to put off that European tour of all those great sights.