Don't forget to budget.

Before you travel, lay out everything you have packed. Then take out half the clothes, and take double the money.

It’s true. Of course travelling can be done on a budget, and it is a great feeling when it is. Spending nights parked up for free, cooking over an open fire, scrumping fruit and vegetables from fields at the side of the road to provide food. It is a genuinely amazing experience and leaves you with some great stories to tell.

But it’s also not always easy. Especially when you aren’t camping, or taking your accommodation with you, and instead are crashing in hostels and hotels along the way.

You might be able to get some real bargains on the accommodation front, with beds in shared dorms going cheaply all over the world, and travellers utilising the amazing resources of websites such as AirBNB, it’s always possible to find a safe place to lay your head, especially if you’re not demanding luxury.

However, there are some things that you just can’t make any cheaper, no matter how hard you try. A big one; transportation.

There are many sites out there claiming to know all of the best travel hacks, from ‘Skyscanner’s’ cheapest month option, through to the ever-faithful, waiting to book your flights on the next celestial alignment, on the third Wednesday of a month, at 6.43am.

But however much these ‘hacks’ can scrape you a few pennies here and there (which is never a bad thing!) there are some elements of transport which are just out of control. Such as local train and bus journeys.

In our recent planning for our upcoming trip to Spain, we were careful. Choosing to stay in hostels rather than hotels or apartments meant that we averaged less than £14 a night on accommodation (which during the Easter period of one of Spain’s busiest regions was pretty good going), and taking only our rucksacks to save on flight costs, we made sure that we would be able to see Spain in the best, way, without having to deal with a huge bill at the end of our trip.

After booking our accommodation, we checked the price of travel, just to see how much cash we should be carrying on us (all accommodation is done through a travellers card), only to find that some of our train journeys (I’m looking at you Cordoba-Granada) were far more expensive than we had expected!

We searched around, comparing buses and trains, in order to find the best deals (weighing up length of time travelling – and not exploring cities) but with the trains being run by a national company, and the buses being extremely limited, there’s not much that can be done on the price, outside of getting the most awkward train times possible.

Of course, it hasn’t changed our plans, but it has made us more aware of checking such prices during the main planning stages next time. Public transport is not always as cheap as we think it is going to be and can be, as it is in this case, an extra cost that can come as a bit of a shock!

For the most part, we are going to take it as it comes. We have a very good idea of how much a bus and train will cost between each destination, and so all costs are accounted for. But if we find a cheaper, or more convenient offer, while we are on the road, we will take it. 

However, there is still a couple of lessons in this experience. 1. Don’t assume transport will always be cheap. 2. Always be prepared to take half the clothes, and double the money.