Top 10 Tricks to Slow Travel the World Cheaply

In this report, we discuss our Top 10 Tricks to Slow Travel the World Cheaply. After 14 years of slow traveling the world, the last 4 years with Qiang, we both have learned a few things that we hope will save your time and money.

Part 1 of this video presentation. (Scroll down for the resources promised in this video.)

Part 2 of this video presentation (Qiang’s Channel).

Transportation

Flights: Skyscanner has a feature that shows you the lowest airfares for each day of the month for most airlines around the world. Save 30 to 40% per airfare.

Ground Transportation: Use local buses, trains, and ferries to move between cities within a country as you slow travel around a country often for as little as $10 per person. Book a week early to get a big discount on buses. You can actually see the countryside if you travel at ground level. If you fly you will see very little of the country. We also use ground transportation whenever possible to move between countries on the same continent.

Food

Restaurants in Main Locals Market: We find the main market in a new town and we eat at the family-owned restaurants. These are the restaurants where the locals eat. These are not tourist restaurants with $8 USD entrees, but family-owned local restaurants with entrees from $2 to $4 USD in many cities. You feel like you are immersed in the culture and learning about life. It is more adventurous and much cheaper.

Cooking at Home: We get apartments with kitchens so we can buy food in the local market and cook at home. The savings on this varies. For example, in Latin America, you can save more money cooking at home. Whereas in SE Asia, the food carts are so cheap and delicious you will find yourself eating out more.

Packing Lunches for Day Tours and Bus Rides: In places where restaurants are more expensive, we make a nice meal the night before and pack it with us on a day tour the next day. That could save substantial money and provide healthy food choices. This works for tours, picnics, and long bus rides between cities where your food choices may otherwise be limited and or expensive.

Food Carts: There are many people like us traveling the world on the cheap, so when you arrive in a new town, search on the words “Cheap Eats” and the city name. Qiang uses this technique to find the highest-rated cheap food in any new city we visit. These family recipes are more likely to be the actual food that people eat in that part of the country, whereas, the tourist restaurants often just serve what tourists are expecting to eat in that country. Tourists expect Spaghetti in Italy, and Tacos in Mexico, so when they are presented with real local food, they don’t know what to eat. So you learn about the real food culture of a country when you eat in family restaurants. Here is Qiang’s YouTube channel where you can watch her eat real local food from each country.

Tours: Tours are often sold to tourists for $50 to $100 USD. They pick you up in a nice van and take you to the famous spots. Then they take you to very expensive tourist restaurants and often receive kickbacks. But we are often able to ride on local buses to these same places for less than $1 USD. Plus we do research about the best places ourselves first and what we learn is often more interesting than what the tour guides will say on the tours. Plus we pack a lunch rather than eating in the expensive tourist restaurants. That can easily save another $10 per person.

I like to study whatever town we are in and make notes about the history and the buildings where things happened. Then I throw my notes together and make a Google walking map. Then as I visit each place on the map I share what I have learned. I call these my old town walking tours. I include these in many of my retire cheap in paradise reports.

Accommodations

Longer Stays: Staying longer in each city gives you bargaining power. In one example, a place that was listed online for $70 USD per night, she was able to negotiate a rate of $17 USD per night by booking for a month. Here is How I find perfect apartments traveling the world.

Slow Traveling

When we get to a new continent, we decide what countries we want to see on that continent. Then we stay on that continent until we have seen all of those countries. So you only occasionally take an expensive intercontinental flight after you have seen everything on that continent, and then are moving to another continent. Additionally, you stay in each city for weeks or months, and you travel on the ground between cities and countries whenever possible instead of flying. So a bus, ferry, or train may only cost you $10, $20, or $50 dollars which is often cheaper than flights. But even more importantly, you get to see the countryside when you travel at ground level instead of a mile high out of an airplane window. There are more slow travel tricks and tips on My YouTube Slow Travel Video Playlist.

Ride-Sharing Services

Ride-sharing services like Grab, Uber, and Lyft, allow you to get from place to place without negotiating the price in a local language and without explaining to a driver that doesn’t understand English, where you want to go. Plus, the prices can easily be half the price you will be quoted by a commercial taxi service to tourists. When a commercial taxi driver sees you are a tourist, they often charge double or more. You avoid that with ride-sharing services.

Vehicle Savings

In many western countries, people drive cars with $300 car payments and $100 insurance payments. So when you get rid of your car(s) and start slow traveling the world, you are immediately saving $400 to $600 per month in payments, insurance, repairs, tires, gasoline, parking fees, and speeding tickets.

In the retire cheap in paradise countries around the world it is not unusual to be able to cut your in-city personal vehicle costs by as much as 80% per month. By traveling around in local buses, collectivos, tuk-tuks, scooters, and bicycles, you easily save another few hundred dollars per month.

Walkability

When you first get to a new city, do your best to try to stay in a central walkable area so you get to know the layout of the city and the rhythm of life there. This will allow you to get to know the central markets and best family-owned local restaurants, and how the locals live.

Later if you find some really cool neighborhood you want to live in that is more remote, you will already know where to go when you take the local transportation back into the central part of the city.