Robert Caplin’s basic camera kit is not exactly what you’d call frugal. A professional travel photographer, he carries a pair of Canon 5D Mark II camera bodies ($2,700 each) and at least four lenses, valued at $1,500 a piece. But this 26-year-old, who shoots everywhere from his home in New York City to Cuba and Ecuador, and has been published in National Geographic, ESPN The Magazine and The New York Times, still knows where to save money. Read more…

Ingo Fast

In the five months since I wrote about cheap ways to phone home in “Staying in Touch Internationally, on the Cheap” (March 24), much has changed in the world of making affordable, even free, calls while traveling. And not all of it is good.

Here’s a short version of the telephone setup I described in March: As soon as I land in a new country, I buy a local SIM card (usually $2 to $25) for my unlocked mobile phone, so that I can easily and cheaply call local numbers and so that local people can reach me.

But the real trick is how folks back home can reach me. I use Skype, the popular Internet phone software, not only to make low-cost international calls but to receive them. I set up its call-forwarding feature to direct calls to my new SIM number, so that anyone who dials my home number in New York City will instantly reach me wherever I happen to be.

Right after I wrote about this system, Skype released Skype for the iPhone, which has come in handy when I’ve been abroad and had access to Wi-Fi. (Skype for iPhone requires Wi-Fi and does not work over 3G or other cellular networks.) It’s a lot like the PC or Mac version of the software: a simple interface, contact list, virtual keypad. The call quality is good enough, as are Skype’s international rates. Read more…

Matt Gross for The New York Times My current shoe of choice, the SkyRace OT trail runners.

A little over a year ago, I met a Frenchman coming off the ferry from Dover, England, to Calais, France. He was in his 60s, with a distinguished but relaxed air, and he switched effortlessly and seamlessly between English and French as we spoke. He carried no luggage. He wore a light, finely woven cashmere sweater and spotless khaki pants, and his shoes — well, he didn’t have any. His feet were entirely bare.

As we shared a taxi into Calais, he explained that he’d given up footwear roughly 40 years ago and that, generally, people he encountered didn’t know how to react. From the ankles up, he was an elite traveler, staying in nice hotels and flying first-class. From the ankles down, he was a caveman (though perhaps better groomed). But he was a guy who simply did what he wanted. He preferred to go barefoot, in the same way he preferred to return home from London to Paris via the long route — train to Dover, ferry to Calais, train to Paris — instead of the two-hour-plus Eurostar. His money, his life, his feet.

This man has been on my mind lately, as I’ve been traveling around Vancouver and the Gulf Islands for my next Frugal Traveler project. As on most trips, I’ve covered a wide variety of terrain: I’ve been hiking up mountains, relaxing on beaches, walking through shopping centers and even eating in a quaint French restaurant. Each of those activities has its own ideal style of footwear, whether it’s tough boots or flip-flops or shiny oxfords. Read more…

In my romantic travel daydreams, I imagine myself marching off into the hills of Patagonia with nothing in my backpack but a change of underwear and a piece of flint. In reality, however, I — and most travelers today — bring gadgets. Lots of gadgets.

From iPods to noise-canceling headphones, from digital cameras to GPS trackers, they take up space, can consume electricity and distract us from actually enjoying the trip. Gadgets also tend to be expensive, small and easy-to-lose. But gadgets can be both useful and cheap — they can help even budget travelers make the most of their adventures. Here is a list of the 10 gadgets, all under $50, that I either own or have been lusting after.

1. Last summer, when I was hitchhiking across northern Cyprus, a British couple wanted to give me a ride from our hotel. The problem: Their car wouldn’t start. Luckily, I was carrying a Leatherman Skeletool CX, which has pliers, which I used to tighten the battery leads and get the car going. Now I don’t go anywhere without a multitool. I’ve used it to slice goat cheese in Monaco and reattach a suitcase wheel in Vilnius. This week, however, I’m planning to lay aside my Skeletool for the Leatherman Juice C2, which not only costs less ($31.99 at Amazon) but has more tools, including a corkscrew. Read more…

Matt Gross for The New York Times

Last month, I outlined my methods for planning frugal trips, from setting up Google News alerts to reading local novels set in my destination. Many readers wrote in with tips of their own, including Web sites I’d never heard of or had yet to try. So I put them to the test.

Up first, the battle of the booking sites. Reader Haskel suggested Mobissimo.com, whose fares, he wrote, “are very often cheaper than those on Kayak. It is a must-stop Web site for me.” Whitney, meanwhile, suggested Vayama.com, writing, “it has negotiated deals for international flights, plus the ease of use of the site is wonderful.” Mark considers SideStep.com “awesome,” while Michael Madison calls Dohop.com “a must-go site.”

The search engine Bing.com

I’d heard of these before, but I figured I’d pit them against one another — along with Bing.com, the recently relaunched, somewhat travel-focused search engine from Microsoft. The challenge: My next big trip, from New York City to Vancouver in early August. Whose algorithms would reign supreme? Read more…

Matt Gross for The New York TimesMy key research tools: books and a long list of websites.

As the Frugal Traveler, I’m on the road three to six months out of the year, and all that wandering takes not just stamina but organization as well. From researching destinations to booking flights and hotels to actually figuring out what to do when I arrive, I have a long list of Web sites and other resources — some well known, others less so — that I use to learn what’s new, interesting and inexpensive. Since so many are planning their summer vacations, I thought I’d share my tried-and-true process. It’s less about secret Web sites and exotic booking strategies than about sheer thoroughness. Read more…

Maurice Tsai/Bloomberg News A shopper looks at the Acer Aspire One PC.

Laptops on airplanes are hardly an unusual sight these days, but when Heather Poole pulled out her computer on a recent flight from New York to Los Angeles, she got a surprising reaction from the flight attendants serving drinks.

“They stopped service — they wanted to hold it, look at it,” said Ms. Poole, 38, a flight attendant herself, who also writes for the travel Web site Gadling.com.

The computer attracting all this attention? An Acer Aspire One PC, a tiny laptop that weighs just 2.2 pounds and is one of the most popular designs in the emerging category of netbooks, portable computers whose small size is matched only by their low prices. With powerful processors, 8- to 10-inch screens and compact keyboards, they typically cost well under $500; some go for as little as $200. Last year, an estimated 14 million were sold, according to DisplaySearch, a market research firm.

Read more…

Matt Gross for The New York Times When I offered advice on Twitter about food in the Twin Cities, I posted this picture of the Hmong food court at the International Marketplace.

Not long ago, I was sitting in the central jury room at the Kings County Supreme Court in Brooklyn, waiting to find out if I would be deciding some poor soul’s fate, when I looked at the clock: it was 11:20 a.m. Lunchtime would soon arrive, and I had no idea where to eat.

My Twitter page at at twitter.com/frugaltraveler.

So I did what any modern, technologically with-it wanderer would do. I turned to Twitter, the microblogging Web site that lets you post very short messages online and is, for better and for worse, growing at an incredible rate.

“Need a jury duty lunch recommendation for downtown Brooklyn,” I wrote on my account, via my iPhone. “Something cheap fast good?” I added in a link to my exact location on a Google map. Hey, at least I wasn’t Googling during deliberations.

Ten minutes later, another Twitter user, “n8s8e”, wrote back, “Grab a burger and Cajun fries at Five Guys on Montague St.”

Read more…

Skype on iPhone.

By sheer coincidence, last Wednesday’s post, “Staying in Touch Internationally, on the Cheap,” came just as a flurry of Skype-related developments were about to hit the news cycle. On Sunday, a Times article by Brad Stone, outlined the Internet-telephone giant’s aggressive move from computers toward mobile devices. Soon, the article said, users of everything from the Blackberry to Google’s Android-based phones will be able to use Skype software and make calls at Skype’s reduced rates.

For users of Apple’s iPhone, “soon” is actually now. As of this morning, Skype for iPhone is available as a free download at the iTunes App Store. Most of Skype’s original functionality — voice calls plus instant messaging — is there, but Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP, calls can only be made via Wi-Fi; Apple unfortunately prohibits them from its partners’ cellular data networks.

Read more…

Matt Gross for The New York Times My set up for inexpensive, international calls.

In Venice, a city of odd spaces, Gianni Colombo’s walk-in art installation “Spazio Elastico” (1967-68) at the Palazzo Grassi contemporary art museum, is one of the oddest. A nearly lightless room subdivided into rectangles by thin elastic cords that glow white in the dark and ever so slowly shift position, it’s as disorienting as a hall of mirrors, only without the mirrors.

And so, when my cellphone began to ring as I stood lost in Colombo’s funhouse, I almost chalked it up to art-induced hallucination. I realized the sound was real, and hurried out of the artwork and over to an isolated corner to answer it. It was my uncle, Gary, calling from Connecticut just to see how my daughter, Sasha, was doing on her first trip abroad. We chatted (even though I hate talking on a cellphone in a place like a museum), and four minutes and six seconds later we hung up.

Throughout the call, neither Gary nor I was particularly worried about the cost of the conversation. That’s because, over the past few years of traveling internationally, I’ve developed a system that not only lets me make inexpensive local calls but also allows friends and family back home to reach me cheaply. It’s a little complicated, but bear with me and I’ll explain.

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Regular readers of the Frugal Traveler may recall my experiments with using GPS. Back in 2007, when I drove cross-country, I hung a Sony GPS-CS1KASP from my rearview mirror; it tracked my progress for 12,000 miles, recording every wrong turn and gas station stop with remarkable accuracy. (Zoom in deep to the cross-country Google map, and you’ll see what I mean.)

The ATP Photo Finder.

Last summer, however, I had less luck when I attempted to geo-tag my photos — that is, automatically add latitude and longitude coordinates for future journalistic and archival use — as I traveled around Europe on the Frugal Grand Tour. The ATP Photo Finder, green block outfitted with a GPS receiver, which I carried hooked to my belt, rarely worked at all, and when it did, the coordinates it returned were miles off base.

Unable to afford a camera with integrated GPS, like the Ricoh 500SE (over $1,200), unwilling to go down a step in quality with a geo-tagging cameraphone like the Nokia N78 (around $350) and unready to abandon my trusty Panasonic Lumix LX-3, I was about to give up on geo-tagging entirely. That would have been a sad concession: providing accurate location data is an important part of what I do (or try to do) as the Frugal Traveler — and there are a growing number of fellow travelers for whom geo-tagging is an attractive option.

Read more…

Traveling frugally means more than just cadging free bar snacks in Bologna or hopping low-cost flights between third-tier European airports. To keep costs to a minimum, you have to plan well in advance, and that means getting your finances in order.

The Frugal Traveler’s wallet.

The first thing you’ll want to do is apply for a new credit card. See, most card issuers charge fees for overseas transactions. American Express, for example, adds 2.7 percent to every overseas transaction (up from 2 percent last summer), while Bank of America, Chase, Citibank and HSBC tack on 3 percent, according to Curtis Arnold, who runs CardRatings.com, a Web site that tracks credit card fees.

Read more…