Backpacking Across 3 Continents On A Shoestring Budget

If you are interested in backpacking and aren’t lucky enough to have a trust fund, firstly: join the club.

Secondly, don’t fret. There are a few ways to fund your long-term travel.

1. Save a lot of money.

2. Become very resourceful at scrimping along the way.

3. Follow the lead of Kach Medina Umandap and Jonathan Howe, the industrious couple behind Two Monkeys Travel, and opt to work while traveling on a small budget.

Medina, a 26 year old Filipina, and Howe, a 30 year old Brit, are proponents of “sustainable travel”, meaning long-term travel, where they work and explore at the same time.

This approach has led the couple to visit 13 countries – Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, India, Maldives, the United Kingdom, Peru, Bolivia, Chile ­– on three continents together, since they first started traveling full time in April 2013.

“In Asia, you can end up on what they call the ‘Banana Pancake Trail,’ going from place to place on overnight buses. You don’t get to spend that much time anywhere,” says Howe, when explaining the benefits of slow travel. “If you live somewhere, you can get a house, spend some time, you make a short term life there.”

Medina, the other half of Two Monkeys Travel, explains that the couple usually chooses their next country, travels to the destination and then decides if they want to stay. This allows them to be more flexible with their budget, as they can then gauge the cost of living in a place with how much money they can make.

Right now the couple is in Arequipa, Peru. Their next stop is Costa Rica, after which they will make their way back through South America to Antarctica.

“Financial costs can always be reduced. The real cost is time and if you have enough of it, you can do anything,” says Howe, in an email. He explains that oftentimes, their biggest costs will be incurred when they have to be somewhere at a certain time.

An added bonus of the slow travel approach is that it is easier to save money by staying longer in one place. Oftentimes, rooms at hostels will be cheaper if you rent them for a chunk of time, instead of paying a premium for a hostel every night. Or you can use a service like Airbnb, where renting a room or whole house for a week can end up being much more cost-effective than a hotel room.

While the idea of slow travel sounds pretty sweet, it might not seem affordable to most, as it requires a big budget to be able to quit your 9 – 5 and embark on the open road. This is why Kach and Medina work while they travel.

“Get the skills first. I prepared beforehand by getting my TOEFL before going to Asia. Asia is definitely the best-paid place to teach English in the world, ” says Howe.

The couple spent seven months in Hanoi, Vietnam teaching English, before deciding to move on to India. Although they saved money from their time in Vietnam, they decided to “invest in new skills” in India, so that they could continue to make money on the road. Howe and Media are both certified TOEFL instructors, as well as Tantra Yoga teachers and Ayurveda massage therapists.

“In South America, teaching English is not that well-paid, so offering massages is a good option because there are many tourists,” explains Medina. She recommends sticking to the cities, as oftentimes big tourist destinations will already have a whole industry set up and it can be hard to break into the market.

“Massages and yoga blend into the travel really well, because you are only doing it when you stop somewhere for a couple of days or a week or a month,” says Howe.

“It is definitely a big thing for a person to arrive in a place, completely without an introduction and have to try and figure out what they are doing and to make money all of a sudden,” admits Howe. “You find out that you are really adaptable. You just start to make a list of things you need and find your way around the city.”

The couple recommends using websites like Workaway or WWOOFIng to find work before arriving in a new city. However, some of these sites require an initial fee to join, so be careful before signing up.

“ If you want [to find a community] for free, join the Facebook group for each expat community ,” says Medina. “When we moved to South America, neither of us spoke Spanish. [And we found exactly what we needed to know] from the local Facebook group for the expat community.”

In addition to teaching yoga, giving massages and teaching English, the couple boasts a gamut of jobs, from waiting tables to volunteering at hostels to appearing on a local Vietnamese reality TV show.

One word to wise? If you are interested in sustainable travel, stop volunteering, says Medina. She believes that if you are interested in long-term backpacking, it is important to invest in real skills like travel blogging or jewelry making. No one wants to be cleaning dishes at hostels forever.

In addition to traveling slow and working on the road, the couple has come up with a few extra-thrifty ways to save money on the road. Their most innovative? Hitchhiking.

“If you hitchhike, then you save a lot of money and you get to experience all of the landscape, the people, the weather and everything else along the way,” says Howe, in an email.

The couple explains that while hitchhiking can be a risky proposition, there are some ways to mitigate risk on the road.

“Always trust your gut instinct; if it feels bad, walk away, there’s always another ride just around the corner,” writes Howe. They recommend hitchhiking with a travel buddy and have found that male-female travel buddies tend to work the best.

“The most important thing when hitchhiking is to smile and wave, because far fewer people want to share a car with a miserable person. It’s the same with everything; smiling makes you more approachable and makes other people feel relaxed and comfortable,” writes Howe. “Although it sounds obvious, make sure the driver knows where you want to go, even if you have a sign. We hitched a ride in the back of a pick up truck in Chile and assumed that she had seen our sign, but about an hour later she pulled into the airport, 30 minutes past where we needed to turn off!”

The couple hitchhiked in Patagonia, Chile, where the cost of buses is around twice as much as in the rest of South America. They recommend hitchhiking with a tent and camping gear, as sometimes it can be very remote and you have to wait for a long time for a ride.

However, if hitchhiking is not for you, there are other ways to save money on transportation costs.

“In Central America take buses to save some money. The buses will likely have live animals on them and be recycled yellow school buses from 1980 with painted graffiti but they are very cheap and generally get you where you’re going on time,” writes Lee Abbamonte, who in addition to being the youngest American to visit every country in the world, also runs a hit travel blog.

For Southeast Asia, Abbamonte recommends flying between destinations, as there are many budget airlines available.

No matter how you pinch pennies on the road, remember, the key is to balance budget against experience. No one wants to be the backpacker in the hostel who eats Ramen every day, missing out on the local cuisine in order to save dollars on a budget.

“When it comes to [balancing] budget against experience, it really depends on your own definition of what the best experience is,” writes Howe. “For us, the best food is usually in the cheapest places; cooked outside or on a gas stove, sitting on stools next to the street, where the atmosphere of local life going on around you adds to the experience of eating the food. I can probably find amazing Thai food, cooked by the best Thai chef in a fancy restaurant in Bangkok, but the shouting and the buzz wouldn’t be there.”

Alexandra Talty is the Chief Editor of StepFeed, the homepage of the Middle East. After leaving New York City in 2013, she used her personal finance (and journalism) skills to travel the world, before settling down in Beirut, Lebanon. She is also on Twitter.