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Editor's note:
Today Salon Travel launches Rolf Potts' "Vagabonding" column, which will appear here every other Tuesday. In the best backpacker tradition, Potts is wandering around the world on 5 cents (or so) a day -- so you don't have to.
- - - - - - - - - - - - By Rolf Potts But in reality, Chad was an earnest, mostly harmless Canadian backpacker who was only trying to be helpful. "Where are you headed?" he'd asked me when I first met him. Since we were taking the Chao Phraya river ferry through Bangkok, this seemed to me like a perfectly legitimate conversation-starter. "The train station," I'd told him. "I'm going up to Phitsanulok for the night. It's a good midway point to Chiang Mai, and I hear they have a great youth hostel there." "Yeah, the hostel in Phitsanulok is as good as you'll find anywhere. Free toast and coffee in the mornings. Just be careful with the tuk-tuk drivers at the train station." "Tuk-tuk drivers?" "Yeah, they're all a bunch of hard-asses. If you're a Westerner, they won't take you anywhere for under 100 baht. You're better to just get off the train one stop early and walk to the youth hostel. Save you a lot of money." In retrospect, I suppose I could have kept things simple and brushed off Chad's advice. After all, 100 baht amounts to less than $3. But for a budget traveler such as myself, an insider's tip on how to save any amount of money is a forbidden fruit too tempting to leave hanging.
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