Spendthrift Shoestring

Grand Tours, Kosovo, & Macedonia

It was exciting to see the Frugal Traveler's Grand Tour series round-up in the New York Times yesterday. Matt Gross emerges from his mammoth zig-zag across Europe with some great tips. He proselytizes the following budget gospel: choosing apartment rentals over hotels; shopping for food at supermarkets; signing up for volunteer opportunities; journeying by bus; hitchhiking; and, finally and most delightfully, exploring Europe's outer edges. This is just about the best single how-to article I've seen in the NYT travel section in quite some time. It's full of practical information and is also downright inspiring.

I suspect that I was especially excited to see the above article in light of my very exciting—and very frugal—upcoming trip, which kicks off tomorrow. I'll spend a few days in Haiger, in the German state of Hesse, meeting some mostly distant relatives. That won't really be the frugal part though. Keep reading.

After the family reunion extravaganza, I'll head south. I'll fly Germanwings to Pristina (€150 one-way). From there I'll move on to Ohrid, Prilep, and Skopje before flying back to Germany from Thessaloniki (on Air Berlin, for €100.) The most expensive hotel among the bunch will run €60 for a double, and the cheapest (in the bunk room of a monastery) will cost nothing at all. My hotel in Pristina will set me back €9 for the night; my guesthouse in Ohrid will run €12.50 per night per person.

Macedonia, a country I visited for the first time last summer, is a budget traveler's paradise. In the next multi-installment counterintuitive European Grand Tour Reconsidered feature, in say 2009, it should really be covered.

Happily, I've picked up some assignments for my own trip, and will link when appropriate.

Over and out.

Weekend UK Travel Media Highlights

I found it funny—or something else short of ironic—that the travel sections of two UK newspapers this weekend contained features on two places I wanted badly to find a way to visit during my stint here in London: Northern Cyprus and the Faroe Islands. It turned out to be either impractical or too expensive to make journeys to these spots during my time in London, but they both remain at the top of my list of places to visit as soon as schedule and finances allow.

In the Sunday Telegraph yesterday, Alistair Fraser's "Fresh tracks in the forgotten North," is an adventure travel feature focused on hiking, beaches, ruins, Nicosia, and the territory's unique cultural situation. The north of Cyprus is full of deserted beaches and easily accessible ruins. It's also got a little bit of an outlaw atmosphere; without any extradition treaties, it's thought to be home to a fair number of criminals on the lam. Obviously, the prospect of a solution to the island's partition is a great cause for hope, and I would love to see continued movement in this direction. That said, I hope to visit before its coastlines get developed and its unusual atmosphere dissipates entirely—both likely scenarios in the event of reunification or federation.

In yesterday's Observer, Ruaridh Nicoll writes about the Faroe Islands, which he visited with his father-in-law, James Watt, who spent part of the summer for two decades painting in the Faroes. It's a very nice feature, weaving an acknowledgment of the Faroes' modern, rich Nordic credentials in with a sense of its quiet and insular particularities.

Also in the Observer: an "Instant Weekend" feature on Pristina by Sophie Middlemiss and an ode to no-frills campsites by Kate Edgely. The former makes me excited, again, to visit Kosovo in September; the latter just makes me wish I had camping gear with me in London, not to mention lots and lots of idle time.