Love thy neighbour & love thy nature: Wild camping & Warmshowers
It starts with a willingness to be flexible and making sacrifices on life’s comforts for the adventure. Of course, if you have the budget and inclination, you could stay at hotels, Airbnb’s & other paid accommodation for your trip. But this could add up pretty quickly for the average person’s budget on an extended trip. This is where wild camping and the website Warmshowers comes in.
Wild camping is where you set up camp overnight in a secluded location for free. Warmshowers is a community website where complete strangers host each other (I often explain it like ‘it’s similar to Airbnb, but for free’)! This blog is just a breakdown of my own experiences of the two methods.
Love thy nature: Wild camping
The premise for this is simple: you set up a tent and sleep for free in the wild. The image at the top of this blog will be the focus of this discussion on wild camping, as this was my set up back in 2018 when I rode around northern Europe for 3 months (you can read more about that trip here). As you can see, the word picturesque hardly does it justice. But guess what? This campsite in Denmark was completely FREE. It was a government park which had signs at the entrance stating people could only stay for 1 night before having to move on while ‘leaving no trace’. What made it even better, is that only 500m away was a public toilet. That is one of the key parts ‘leave no trace’, meaning no litter or waste is left behind; thus, the area should look as if no one was ever there when you leave. ‘Wikicamps.com.au’ has an extensive database of designated locations to camp around Australia. There is nothing quite like sleeping out in the wild. However, it’s not all fun and games. While camping around Europe, there were a number of times I was woken up by wild animals rummaging around my tent, flooded out in a thunderstorm, or woken up in a fright with shotguns going off in the middle of the night from people hunting. Let’s just say, I didn’t have sweet dreams those nights.
Love thy neighbour: Warmshowers
As mentioned at the start, the basic premise of Warmshowers is fellow bikers hosting each other for free through the platform, and the example I always give is ‘it’s like Airbnb but for free’. I joined Warmshowers in 2018 after it was recommended by a fellow bike touring enthusiast I met while teaching English in South Korea. While I was skeptical at first, mostly due to the trials and tribulations I experienced on Couchsurfing; it turned out to be a conduit for some of the most meaningful encounters I had on my trip around Europe. Being hosted by and hosting complete strangers is a truly beautiful experience. There really is something extremely special and altruistic about being hosted by complete strangers, particularly in a world that can often seem more divisive and selfish. The last person I hosted on Warmshowers was a German guy called Sebastian, before he continued on his journey to Perth via the infamous Nullarbor. We had brilliant chats about touring, travel adventures, and bicycle pannier set-up options.
Here is a link to the page if you want to read more or join the community: https://www.warmshowers.org/
For my 6-month trip from ‘South to North of the Southern Hemisphere’, these will be my two main forms of ‘accommodation’.
I hope this now clarifies how I will ‘live on a bike’ as far as accommodation goes. The next blog post will discuss the contentious topic of MONEY, and how I budget for extend trips.
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