I am a high school teacher. My school district is one of the lowest paying big-city school districts in the country. Up until about three years ago, when teachers in my district and the rest of the state marched on Sacramento to demand more funding for education, California ranked 48th in the nation in per-pupil spending - this at the height of the dot.com boom…… Bottom line is: I don't make that much money. My trip accommodation looked to be the most expensive item of my trip.

This would be the trip of a lifetime. I was planning on a 7 - 8 month around-the-world journey. I would have to plan and spend wisely. For Europe, hostel living seemed to be the only affordable option. I could conceivably get a bed in a dorm room for $16 - $25 a night. Luckily, there are many many hostels all over Europe from the big cities to little villages high in the mountains.

I did not have time to read the guidebooks thoroughly enough before the trip, so I could not research and book many hostels in advance of my leaving. I probably would not have anyway, as I wanted to be flexible to change destinations and dates en-route. The only hostels I actually did book were for the first nights in the three cities I would fly into:
London - September 3
Kathmandu - November 27th
Bangkok - December 23

Most of the hostels, hotels, guest houses and backpackers (Kiwi for hostels) I did stay in, I booked on the road a few days ahead of arrival. Throughout the trip I always tried to have the next night's accommodation booked ahead of time - this was especially important to me if I was arriving in a city after dark - something I always tried to avoid.

My main criteria for hostel selection was: lockers big enough to store a backpack, a small number of beds in dorms and proximity to transportation and the city's sights I wanted to see. Price was not really an issue as most hostels were about the same price.

If possible, I booked hostel rooms on the internet, as calling long distance was tedious, time consuming and problematic (many hostels close for the afternoon) - though calling was not that expensive with international phone cards. Only a few times were phones the only way to reach hostels in towns I would visit.

If I was planning on spending more than two nights in a town or city, often I'd book just the first two nights, thinking that if I found out on the first night that the hostel was not that great, I could find an alternative the next day.

I had never stayed in a hostel before and didn't know exactly what to expect but, as it turned out, most of them were OK...... though some were lousy and some were great. The internet information about them and Lonely Planet guidebooks helped a great deal in my being able to find the good ones, though the Lonely Planet did steer me way wrong in a couple instances.

In general, hostel living is much what you would expect. Sleeping in bunks in a dorm room affords no privacy and is often noisy with snorers and the young party crowd coming in late at night. I often appreciated co-ed dorms because there was less number of possible snorers than in an all male dorm. In Europe many hostels included a breakfast for free or minimal charge. Though some of the "breakfasts" were little more than milk or juice and white bread toast & jam with corn flakes......many had delicious and much bigger spreads. The toilets and showers were always a big concern and question mark for an obsessive-compulsive like me. But I seemed to managed OK - having perfected a technique of using one arm against the wall to hold myself hovering over the toilet seat without having to actually sit on it.

I only stayed in two hotel rooms in Europe - one in Siena, Italy when the nearest hostel was 7 miles and poor public transportation out of town and one in Vienna when the price of the room (which included a great continental breakfast) was a only couple dollars more than the hostels.

Somewhere in my online pre-trip research when I was looking into homestays I came across the organization - Servas, which was formed in the early sixties to promote peace and inter-cultural exchange and understanding through homestay hosts around the world. Luckily, I stumbled back across the Servas bookmark in late August, with enough time to be interviewed for certification as a Servas traveler and with enough time to overnight Fedex the application and request Servas host lists for 15 countries (@ $25 deposit for 5 lists).

The way Servas works is… first you are interviewed by a local Servas interviewer (volunteer) and then they send their comments and your application to the head office in your country for approval, along with any request for lists that you have made. You pay an initial membership fee of about $70 dollars and send a $25 deposit for host lists for five countries (or more for more $s). The country lists are all in the same basic format, with hosts arranged in regional areas and then by town or city. Each individual host listing includes their name, age, address, contact information, directions to house by public transportaion, other family members, their occupation, their interests, smoking or non, whether they are just day hosts or are willing to accept overnight guests, how many days ahead they need requests and other comments.

Servas travelers contact possible hosts and if accepted, they are only expected to stay two nights. It is recommended that traveler not expect to be fed and to offer to buy hosts dinners (I always did).

I received the 15 lists I requested three days before I was to leave but did not have time to look through them and copy contact information - even if I did know all the towns and cities I would visit…which I didn't, as I still did not have enough time to reread the guidebooks and plan, with all the other pre-trip business I had to attend to. So I only packed the list for Switzerland because it was thin and light and I knew I would be spending at least three weeks there. I copied 3 email addresses for Auckland from the New Zealand list and put it in the box of camping supplies I would have my friend Allan mail to me when I was to arrive in Auckland. The remaining lists I gave to Allan and asked him to email me three contact email addresses for each town or city, as I emailed and asked for them throughout the trip. Turned out that Allan did not have time to do this so he gave them to my friend Marty who also did not have the time (once he saw how much it took) so he gave them to his roommate Nicole, who also did not have the time - so I eventually had them sent to my brother in North Carolina - who did have time.

The first three contact email addresses I was actually able to get get were for Paris. None of them panned out. Out of about 40 email and phone contacts I got from the Switzerland list that I carried, I was able to get 2 hosts who were home and would be able and willing to host me. This 1 out of 20 was a ratio was to hold up throughout Europe. I had much better success in Japan and New Zealand with 3 successful hostings out of about 6 contacts for Tokyo and Kyoto and 1 successful host out of 5 for Auckland.

If I were a short-time traveler and knew exactly where I was going and when I was going to be there, the Servas service would have been a lot better to use. However, because I was traveling for a long time and had purposely built a lot of flexibility into my itinerary and only knew where I was going and when I was going be there a couple days ahead of time, I had much less success with so little notice to potential hosts. If the lists had been in an online database where I could have searched for hosts with my specific criteria and then got better matches and email addresses which I could just click on to contact or email - it would have been so much better.

As it was, even though it took a good deal of time on my part and that of my brother, I was able to find 6 hosts in Europe..... the experience of meeting and talking with the hosts and spending time with them, made the money, time and effort worthwhile. I became a traveler and not just a tourist and really did exchange inter-cultural information. And...... the home cooked and restaurant meals I was invariably treated to were so wonderful and different and something I would never had the chance to taste if I was ordering from a menu on my own.