The Turk Who Loved Apples (23 page)

After I'd explained myself for half an hour, Hannity relaxed. “If it doesn't rain tonight,” he said, “be here at seven o'clock and we'll go up.”

That night, it did not rain. At seven the next morning, I returned to Hannity's plot, and he wheeled out his plane, a home-built ultralight consisting of hollow piping, PVC wings, and open cockpits. It weighed, Hannity said, about 250 pounds. It did not look all that sturdy, but I had to trust Hannity, even if Hannity did not trust the FAA, which he complained wanted too much oversight of rickety contraptions like the one he was just now firing up.

And then we were aloft! Cruising over the wide flat expanse of Columbus, tracing the line of the barrier fence between Mexico and
the United States, arcing toward the low Florida Mountains in the shrinking distance. Up there, supported by so little, my face buffeted by winds, I had a sense of how big the planet was, and how open. I'd asked to go up, and my wish had been granted. Did other travelers know this was possible? Did other travelers know how simple this was? And could I communicate it to them in a way that would make sense?

These were the eternal questions of life as the Frugal Traveler, and as the years went on and the stories piled up they became ever more vexing, mostly because they were not the primary questions my column existed to answer. Instead, I had my frugal tips to discover, develop, and sometimes invent, but after dozens of articles I didn't know quite how to come up with anything new. As I saw it, the way to travel frugally had been laid out sufficiently:

        
Air:
Search
Kayak.com
,
ITASoftware.com
, and (for international flights)
Vayama.com
for low prices. Use
AirfareWatchdog.com
to set up alerts on routes you'd like to fly, and if those routes are to well-known destinations like Beijing or Rio de Janeiro, look into a U.S.-based consolidator, such as
uschinatrip.com
. Buy the ticket directly at the airline's Web site whenever possible, and always join the loyalty program (and set up points-gaining credit cards; see
cardratings.com
for details). In Europe and Southeast Asia, fly low-cost carriers. Check in online. Be prepared to spend more than you want, and don't complain too much.

        
Lodging:
The cheapest option is to stay with friends, or friends of friends. The next cheapest is
CouchSurfing.org
, the international network of two million people willing (in principle) to give you their couches, floors, spare bedrooms, or guest cottages in exchange for no money whatsoever. (Yes, it's safe.) Almost as cheap is WWOOF, but you must be willing to plan your vacation around farmwork. Next up are services like
AirBnB.com
,
Roomarama.com
, and
Wimdu.com
, which let you rent rooms, apartments, and whole
houses around the world, like a user-friendly version of Craigslist. (Yes, they're safe.) If you don't trust these services, then you've got (in generally ascending order of expensiveness) hostels, motels, bed-and-breakfasts, inns, and real hotels. Again, join loyalty programs. Don't take TripAdvisor too seriously. Never wire anyone any money (ever).

        
Food:
Search
Chowhound.com
for recommendations, and Google your destination plus “food blog.” Buy ingredients at farmers' markets, small grocery stores, and supermarkets—and taste every free sample. Really nice restaurants often have cheaper menus at lunch or at the bar. Eat a bigger lunch and a smaller dinner. Skip breakfast, unless it's included with your room. Seek out church dinners. If you're Jewish, seek out Chabad House for Sabbath dinners. If you're hungry, seek out Sikh festivals. Eat street food. Eat fast food. Eat bad food.

        
Other:
Use Skype. Go in the off season. Unlock your cell phone and buy local SIM cards. Find friends of friends (of friends) through Facebook. Buy citywide multimuseum passes, or skip museums and go to art galleries. Make sure your credit and ATM cards don't charge foreign transaction fees. Take public transportation. Hitchhike, if it feels safe. Ride a bike. Walk.

So: There, in less than four hundred words, is everything you need to know about traveling cheaply—the sum total of my Frugal Tips, the material I spent four years, and hundreds of thousands of words, writing about in depth. To me, it all seemed so obvious, and repeating the same advice, week after week, in slightly different scenarios (today Paris, tomorrow Chiapas!) was maddening. Often, the advice boiled down to:
You want to save money? Then just spend less, and care less
. In a way, I felt like the copy editor I'd been at
New York
, only instead of offering the same grammatical and stylistic
advice to the same writers every week, now I was giving readers the same money-saving travel tips they would have learned from me long ago, if only they'd been paying attention.

To be fair, every once in a while some new system or business would appear, and I'd jump on it.
AirBnB.com
, for instance, was only founded in 2008, and I wrote about it as soon as I could. But for the most part, I was recycling the same tips and techniques. Worse, I was getting jaded about the whole experience—about what was supposed to be the best job in the world—and I resented my audience even more bitterly for making me jaded. I wanted to be friendly and peppy, enthused about each new discovery, but instead I'd turned dark and sour. Why couldn't I just enjoy myself?

Maybe because I felt I was failing to convey the subtleties of frugal travel. That is, none of my tips would mean anything to a traveler unless that traveler could prioritize. Would you sacrifice a four-star hotel room so you could afford three-star restaurants? Or would you subsist on Ritz crackers so you could stay at the Ritz Carlton? The answers, naturally, would vary from reader to reader, and depend on their level of travel experience. You don't know what you truly care about as a traveler until you've traveled widely—by which time you've doubtless wasted lots of money on things you now realize you didn't need or want. And those were things that I, as the everyman frugal traveler, couldn't warn you about.

Moreover, as frugal tips came to dominate my thought process, I realized I didn't give a damn about traveling frugally. Not that I wanted to go the luxury route, it was just that saving money was a secondary concern. Making friends, exploring unseen corners of the world, eating well, understanding how different people lived—those were the reasons I traveled, and the frugal aspect of it was just a means to that end.

But for too many of my readers, saving money was
the
goal of travel. Or it seemed that way. Maybe I was too sensitive, maybe I cared too much, but in comment after comment posted on the Frugal
Traveler site, readers complained I was spending too much money, that I was doing things wrong, that they could do it better. I wanted to respond to them, “But it just doesn't matter! It doesn't matter whether you save money or spend money. It's how and why you travel that matters.” But that's not the kind of thing the Frugal Traveler is expected to go around saying.

I tried to ignore the commenters, to dismiss them. Clearly, the naysayers were blindered idiots, convinced of their own skinflint greatness and oblivious to the broad range of travelers and interests I was attempting to appeal to. For them, frugal travel was about hostels, camping, supermarket meals—and nothing else. Their self-righteousness infuriated me, for I knew frugality carried no moral weight.

But the fans, too, bothered me. They'd praise a story, it seemed, solely because I'd visited the same place they'd been twenty years earlier; never mind that our experiences and insights utterly diverged, all they cared about was that I'd triggered their nostalgia of that Turkish honeymoon or that postgraduation Mexican backpacking trip.

I told myself and my friends I didn't care what people said or wrote. “Embrace the hate,” Ted from Saigon, by then my friend and colleague, told me again and again. But the truth is I cared. I wanted my audience to get what I was doing, and why, and to sign on to my nascent philosophy—to accept frugality as a mere premise, to open their eyes to the world it would unveil, and, ultimately, to cease thinking about money at all. And while some surely did, it was never enough. The high of publication was always followed by the low disappointment of feeling misunderstood.

Making this even worse was the guilt. I had, everyone agreed, the best job in the world, and yet all I could do was to look at the bleak side, to worry and moan over my failures, to discount the possibility that I might truly be helping people through my advice. What kind of ungrateful monster was I? Why did
I
deserve to travel constantly—and get paid for it, no less—while others scrimped and saved and waited for their once-in-a-lifetime shot at Paris?

Or maybe . . . Maybe I didn't deserve it? I might not be fucking up as my editors once worried, but maybe someone else could do the job better, with more energy and dedication than I could muster after four years and two hundred stories. I wouldn't, I knew, quit traveling or writing about travel completely, but I needed to get back to doing it how I wanted, focusing on what I felt was important: the unparalleled joy of bewilderment.

And so, as I had before and no doubt would do once again, I quit—while, I hoped, I was still ahead.

________

*
“How dare you call yourself the Frugal Traveler?” wrote a commenter named “Steve,” who said that in 1983 he and a friend had spent $6,400 (about $12,800 in 2006 dollars) on a six-month round-the-world trip. “Even with inflation your budget just for food and lodging is higher than that of the majority of American families vacations. We've been on several similar trips as recently as five years ago, without ever even approaching your bloated level of expenses. Shame on you, change your name to the Privileged Yuppie Traveler.”—Steve

*
No one at the paper ever discussed hiring me full-time. Once, early in my Frugal Traveler stint, I asked a copy editor if I should push for a job offer. “Why,” he asked me, “would you want to work in this vale of tears?”

L
ina's skin was dark, even for a Cambodian, and her kinky hair was pulled into two short ponytails. She couldn't have been more than five feet tall. She was sitting next to me at the Walkabout, an Australian bar in Phnom Penh, wearing a black sundress that seemed to be covered in thin, white, diagonal stripes—they were actually the words “sex girl” printed over and over again in very small type—and she had just offered to give me $40 to spend the night with her.

“I like you,” she said in English, faking a pout. “Let's go home.”

This was awkward. I gulped my Angkor beer and tried to figure out how to tell her no. This was going to be difficult, not least because I wanted to say yes—to take her to the apartment I'd rented by the river and strip her of that obscene outfit. But I had a girlfriend back home in New York, and I didn't want to have to lie to her. And so I told Lina the truth.

“I can't,” I said. “I have a girlfriend. I can't.”

She pouted for real now. My honesty didn't matter. Every expat in Cambodia had a girlfriend or a wife, and that never stopped them from taking home prostitutes like her. “But I want to,” she said. On the stool next to Lina, her Vietnamese friend Quyen looked skeptically down her nose at me.