Don't try to tell me that you haven't been looking for any hack on the internet, because I myself spent hours reading articles on the internet about "How to travel without money" and "How to quickly save money for travelling" and so on only to find out that they are useless. Unfortunatelly, there's no special trick to save a lot of cash in a short period of time and travel forever, even though it would be awesome! Even though I can't tell you about a new and secret way of earning money for travelling, I will give you a few tips on where to work, how to save effectively and mostly how we planned our trip to Australia. Everyone looks on the Internet for hacks how to save money, but there really isn't any. I get questions like “Have you won a lottery or what?”. That would be pretty awesome but unfortunately it doesn't work that way. The answer is work and save, work and save. And after you can travel. You do have to make quite a lot of sacrifices for a trip like this, but it is definitely worth it.
We spent the whole summer (nearly six months in the end) working as waiters in Brighton, UK to be able to save enough money for our trip. I wish I could say it was easy, but to be honest it was pretty tough. While all our friends went to parties a few times a week and had fun and could buy new stuff, we mainly sat at home saving money and planning our trip. What should you do before you leave to experience new places and how to save money? We bought our tickets quite late, because I had to go back home to get a new passport. When I managed to do that, we applied for our working holiday visa online which costs about 440 AUD. We got the visa in exactly 25 minutes after we sent the application, so you really don't have to worry about that, even thought it usually takes a few days. As for a bank account, we opened a joint bank account with the Commonwealth Bank and that took us about 5 minutes. They are make everything easier here because they are used to backpackers! Just to make a comparison, I spent nearly a month trying to open an account back in the UK. Regarding the transfer of our money, we used and app called Transferwise which is a great thing to do. It saved us about 600AUD (300 GBP) for the transfer. You should definitely not transfer your money overseas with your bank, the charges are too big. Do not forget that the Australian immigration might check your account which should have 5000AUD in it when you enter Australia. The reason is that you have to have money to buy your ticket to get back home, which means you can either have all this money in your account or just the return ticket. We quit our jobs in the middle of October, went for two weeks to my partners home – Sicily and then for two weeks to the Czech Republic to visit my family. After this time spent with our families (which was mainly in the mood “why do you have to go so far” and it didn't make it any easier for us to leave) we flew back to London where our flight was from. Do yourself a favour and spend some time browsing through www.skyscanner.com trying to find the best way to fly to your destination, it can save you a lot of money. We saw that most of the flights had two or three stops, usually in Bangkok or Denpasar. The cheapest ticket was with Garuda Airlines flying from London-Amsterdam-Jakarta-Denpasar. What we also did is that we went to the Garuda Airlines and looked for various possibilities of our flights too. You can either choose a oneway ticket, return or multiple city. Multiple city is a great choice because you can combine the cheaper possibilities to get to your destination but also stop in a nice place on your way there. Since all the flights stopped somewhere, we thought that it could be a good idea to stop at Bali for two weeks. We backpacked around the area, but I will write about that I a different article. When we got to the Gatwick Airport in London, they told us some bad news. There was a volcano erupting in Lombok near Bali, which meant that the main airport in Denpasar, Bali was closed. They made us sign a paper saying that we are aware of the problems and that we might get stuck in Jakarta if the airport doesn't open in time for us to fly. Which is of course what happened. Nearly any of the staff in Jakarta doesn't really care about tourists, so you do have to make it very straight forward for them that your are not willing to wait 3 days for another flight (as some people that we met their did). After a lot of arguments and moving from one desk to another, we finally got onto a flight that was the same day. We were pretty lucky because we waited just about 10 hours to catch our next plane for Bali. Regarding our travelling plans, we didn't have any. In Bali it wasn't a problem, it's small and you always work something out. For Oz we had just a rough plan, knowing that we will land in Perth and we wanted to go around the south coast to the east, but it is probably much better to make precise plans, research on the Internet for all the places you want to see and put them into a map. It will save you all lot of money on fuel and also some energy. As a conclusion, in my opinion it is not hard to plan a trip like this and do all the organising, but for me it is something that I really enjoy and it always gets me all exited for the trip. I think of it as a big part of travelling which has to be fun too. I know there are travellers who travel without any plans and just go where the road takes them, but before doing that you really have to be sure that you are capable of it. So, plan your trip wisely and hit the road!
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Who am I?I am a female backpacker from the Czech Republic. WonderlostBackpacker is my blog where I share stories and photos from my travels. I hope to keep you inspired on your journeys! Read more here
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