Hitchhiking can bring such an enormous sense of freedom & illuminate the wondrous extent of human generosity to strangers. It can also plummet you to the depths of despair, & illuminate the dull ache of boredom that nibbles at your toes when all you’ve got is time on your hands.

Setting out on their trusty thumbs and desire for the unknown, Tina & Darren hit the highroads & lowlife of Fortress Europe in search of adventure & a comfortable ditch in which to rest their weary heads.

Squatting in the Bushes is crammed fuller than their backpacks with d.i.y. travel tales, personal reflections & socio-political ramblings. With top tips for cheapskates & freeloaders, & thoughts on national identities, it will leave you questioning your own ideas of what travel is all about.

From fun & frolics with Food Not Bombs in Finland to days of dandering with a donkey in sunny Spain, they encountered many people along the way. With more than a sideward glance towards history, Stonehenge, Normandy, Versailles, Berlin, Warsaw, Auschwitz, filled their brains with information and ideas.

Squatting in the Bushes is a tale of freedom, a document of travel, a testimony of personal growth & political yearnings.

Why is national identity so important to us?
(Take a look in the Politics/Sociology shelves in your local library and you’ll find a multitude of books on the subject that’ll probably bore the pants of you). Maybe it’s just the way the gears in my brain churn but it’s a question I found myself asking over & over (to both myself and others). So many first encounters are coloured by ‘where are you from?’ and the baggage and perceived notions that come with that.

Too many conversations in Slovakia to be a coincidence where preceded with an apology for the state of the nation/corrupt politicians/command of English (regardless of the fact that my command of ‘their language’ was non-existent). It was too frequent to be a coincidence & I couldn’t help wonder if there was some kinda national inferiority complex. Why do people feel responsibility for the state of ‘their nation’? Northern Ireland is a pretty fucked up place with all its shenanigans & goings on, but I don’t feel in any way embarrassed by it, & I can’t envision myself apologising for it either. If anything I’m proud to have come out of it as the well-rounded person I consider myself to be.

Our friends in Morocco were shocked to hear I didn’t know the words of ‘my’ National Anthem & I was reluctant to learn ‘theirs’ (although eventually I joined in – as it’s catchier than the soldiers song or the sash or god save the queen). In Lithuania we took part in a long discussion trying to pin down a distinction between national identity and nationalism. We spent many hours trying to tease out the distinction between a healthy sense of place & cultural identity, and the type of nationalism that leads to the belief that one group of people are better than another. Why is it that the culture so important in binding one group of people together can play such a detrimental role in keeping people apart? In Poland we visited Auschwitz to learn how this nationalism manifests itself in its most extreme form. But everywhere we went we we’re subjected to these ideas of nationalism in subtler forms.

Why is it that with our white faces & Irish passports we travel from Morocco to Spain/Germany to Poland/Estonia to Finland with ease whilst the people of Morocco, Poland or Estonia do not have these rights? Does their nationalities make them less valuable people? Is the glorious freedom of the ‘new world order’ not available for all? How much longer can we allow lines on a map – the concept of borders - dictate & tear apart our lives?

Not much longer – I hope.
 

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Yesterday we managed to get up early and take the bus to Salisbury and from there to Stonehenge. I had a terrible sense of eagerness about me. I’ve wanted to visit this area for years, not only the magical mystical stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury, but also the crop circles, the white horses and the Salisbury plain.

Stonehenge for me wasn’t exactly disappointing but more pitiful. The rush of the ever-present motorway noise can never be extinguished or disguised. I found it quite shocking really that you were expected to pay in to see something that you could already see. It’s even more bizarre that people actually did queue up and pay in the admission prices. Hello! Open your eyes! I preferred to look through the wire fence.

It’s hard to get a feeling for a place and all its history when an audience surrounds you and they are there trying ‘to get’ something too. Streams of people arrive in coaches, queue up, pay in, go ‘hmmm’, take a picture and leave 10 minutes later moving on to the next item on their list of ‘must sees’. In this environment there isn’t time or space to establish a relation or understanding. Evening or night time would be better as I’m sure there’s not too many night tourists.

After another few bus journeys, we found ourselves in the wee village of Avebury which is surrounded by a ring fort not unlike the Giants Ring in Belfast. This indeed was a joy and rectified the mis-adventure of Stonehenge. I had an idea of what Avebury looked like what with the mountain of tourist literature and postcards available at every glance and easy to lose to memory. I was immediately delighted by the place, and the surrounding yellow fields of rapeseed. The road entrance was accompanied by stone dotted wild flower fields. The mound came into view as the bus drove inside the circle. Darren looked as pleased as I did. All I wanted to do was kick my shoes jump about and wander the circle. After our picnic I did just that.

The stone circle inside the mound wasn’t complete but smaller stones were placed in the position of what was thought to be the original outline of the stones. There were huge odd shaped boulder rocks, some taking on the appearance of humans and creatures, at least in my mind’s eye anyway. The weight of history indeed forced these rocks down heavily into the grass. There were only a handful of people wandering about. It was so great to feel the earth beneath my feet. The surrounding fields of yellow were dazzling, the sun shone and white clouds kept the rain at bay. I let loose on the camera and felt justified in photographing as much as I could, the child in me longing to hold on to and capture that knowledge and memory that something gives pleasure and happiness. I think we’ve realised that the great green outdoors gives a greater sense of fulfilment than city life.
 

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It was the end of an intense week:

New friends, new ideas, new energy.
We were immersed in Food Not Bombs. In the ills of this world & the ways in which we could make them better. Partying, cooking, sauna-ing, cycling, bin hoking (dumpster diving), banner making, t-shirt printing, dancing, playing, drinking & talking.

We had meetings/talks/discussions/workshops on anarchism, the food industry, veganism, freeganism, anti-militarism/conscientious objection, globalisation/anti-globalisation movement, homelessness, ecology, on whether or not to have ketchup with meals, & the merits/pitfalls of soya. Some of us were ‘old hands’ in these discussions, some of us where new to it all with a hunger for information. Everyone had something to learn, everyone had some assumptions/preconceived ideas challenged & reconsidered.

For me it was a beautiful time. The FNB/AKL/Tempu  crew were inspiring to be around. There was energy in the Food Not Bombs workcamp that for some time had been missing in my life. I will try to take that energy with me.

Friday the 20th July was a busy day. I’d awoken broken/bruised & hung over from too much beer/dancing & a cycle crash the night before (the party lifestyle was too much for me!) We started off the day as usual with breakfast & discussion, and then got down to work chopping & cooking. We were serving food in (I think) Rastila, a suburb of Helsinki, so it was almost an hour’s cycle from the Peace Station where we were staying. Just like the day before, there were around 200 people who queued to get some vegan stew & bread. Some of them were homeless & hungry, most on a low income, a lot of them elderly, a lot alcoholics, some people were just curious & surprised to get food for free & a few were just pesky hippies & friends of the FNB crew. Helsinki is probably one of the ‘richest’ cities in Europe, & it’s kinda alarming & indicative of the type of economy/society we live in that so many people live in poverty.

As my Finnish is limited to ‘hyvää rouaka’ (‘enjoy your food’) & a few other choice phrases it was difficult to communicate with most people beyond the obligatory nods & smiles. However I met one woman who used to live in England. She was one of ‘the original flower children’ & still kept to her hippy ideals. She told me how she lived on welfare benefit of some kind & as Helsinki was so expensive & geographically spread out she found it difficult to get out & around as much as she would like to. She really appreciated what FNB were doing & I was dead impressed when she told me that when some local trees were gonna be cleared to make way for luxury apartments she chained herself on to them in protest.

Anyway we served the food & then it was back to the Peace Station to quickly prepare for the next activities of the day – the G8 demo. The G8 were meeting in Genoa & we were taking part in a large solidarity demonstration in the city centre & at the Italian embassy. (That’s in solidarity with the anti-G8 actions, not the G8!).

The demo was pretty colourful, with around 300/400 people taking part. There was some great street theatre going on & we took over the streets of the city centre & marched to the Italian Embassy. Someone from the Finnish equivalent of the Socialist Workers Party tried to give a speech (which I was happy not to understand!) The Embassy was annoyed for sometime & police & security had a hard time keeping people out of the grounds & off walls etc. Nothing exceptional happened, but there was a good feeling & we met a lot of cool people.

Back at the Peace Station we were all knackered, & having dinner along with some friends we picked up at the demo. Some of the guys were following the events from Genoa on the net and were bringing reports every couple of minutes. It was a good day, everyone was having fun & it felt empowering to be involved in these events.

I think it was Hanke that brought the news that someone had been shot dead by the Italian police/military. There was a stunned silence, a sense of disbelief. A lot of us had friends in Genoa & there were tears in the room. We’d all felt connected to a revolution that was happening. Happening not just in Genoa but also within us, within this group of people & within other groups & individuals in towns, villages & cities throughout the world.

But we didn’t expect this.

Capitalism is brutal. Everyday hundreds of people die as a result of the inequalities inherent in the global economy. Sometimes it’s directly by a bomb or by gun. Sometimes its because a government has been forced to restructure its economy away from basic healthcare to increasing exports. Sometimes it’s the slow suicide of depression/pollution/alienation. We all know this.

But we were not prepared for the death of this man. Shot in the head. It could have been one of us. It was not abstract. It was not far away. It was here & now.

After some time, we got to planning. It was difficult to know how to react to this, but we all agreed that we had to do something.

In the morning we had planned to spend the weekend on a nearby island ‘eco-village’, but we postponed the trip so as we could take part in the action in the city centre. About 50 people sat in a circle in the main square in Helsinki. Like us, most people were stunned & seemed unsure of what to do.

We (the FNB work campers) staged a die-in through the busy shopping streets. We dressed all in black and wore black armbands & walked slowly & soberly through the streets in silence. I guess we looked like a performance arts troupe, & attracted a lot of attention. Then we died. One person screamed & dropped to the ground & then we all did. We lay motionless on the ground for a long-time.  In this time our bodies were chalked around & messages about the G8 chalked on the ground. We slowly arose and continued our funeral procession to another busy spot & started all over again.

I’m not sure what this meant to people in the city. Maybe a futile gesture? But to us it was important. Important not to let the moment pass, unnoticed, uncommented on.

The rest of the day we spent on the eco-village. We cooked food in the fire, drank beer & got whipped with birch leaves in a wood sauna, swam in the lake, had a naked sheep shit fight (Ireland Vs Poland), talked round the fire, & rowed a boat through the night sky.
 

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Saturday 8 September, 10.50pm, Krakow
Friday was our planned trip to Oswiecim/Auschwitz. We just about made it in time but after all our rushing and being late there was no bus waiting for us when we got there, it turned up 15mins late. There were only tourists on the bus and I wasn’t surprised when mid-journey the driver had to stop and ask another driver the direction to Oswiecim. My mind grew a bit imaginative or rather over imaginative as we approached Oswiecim. I think I was nervous and afraid of what I would see, and didn’t really know quite what to expect. At the same time I had an image, a worse case scenario, and idea that it would be horrifying, disgusting, brutal, inhuman, shocking. It was all those things and worse but most of all it was surreal. ‘Now, if you will follow me to the gas chambers please…’ I could hardly believe my ears as the tour guide led us directly to the crematorium and gas chambers. It was hard to digest.

Even though I know about the holocaust, have seen pictures, video footage and read text, it still seemed very surreal to me, and that is from someone who doesn’t deny the holocaust. It’s hardly surprising that people do deny its existence, its happening as an event, and dismiss everything as a fabricated story of the most twisted kind. This is because as a bystander/onlooker/observer it seems like and feels like a story. How could something like this, so horrendous, vile, and incredibly disturbing be real? How could anyone, a human being, commit or bear witness to such atrocities against another living person. All logic and morality cannot but process this information as story, as fabrication. This is the only way it can be made sense of.

The more time that elapses in history the easier it is to come to this conclusion, the easier it is to forget. They say it can never be forgotten, it is a world heritage site and a living testimony so as ‘it will never happen again’. When I hear the words my heart becomes heavy as I know that terror continues to happen throughout time – the genocide in East Timor, ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, apartheid in South Africa, the bombing of Kosovo, sectarianism and punish beatings in N Ireland, economic sanctions in Iraq and Cuba, religious persecution in Tibet, oil plunder in Nigeria, refugees in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Algeria, Kuwait, Indonesia… the list continues. Terror happens and continues to happen from generation to generation albeit in a different form, perhaps in a more sophisticated way but people are still tortured, raped, murdered. People are still harassed, intimated, persecuted and punished for their beliefs, whether religious/political/ethnic difference or mere existence. The forces of oppression remain as strong as ever. In some ways we have and demand less freedom than before. The evidence and testimony of places like Auschwitz, Treblinka or Dachau are a frightening example of the capabilities of a human being and the evils of fascism, of dictatorships, of anti-Semitism, of prejudice, of hate.

The enormous piles of suitcases, spectacles, hair, shoes, toothbrushes, and shaving brushes which represented the people who had been stripped of their possessions, were nothing short of incredulous. The canisters of the lethal poison Zyklon B were even more obscene. Each can responsible for the death of thousands of people in the gas chambers. It’s hard to believe that anyone could be gassed and burned at will. It’s even more difficult to comprehend that thousands of people were gassed and burned as part of Nazi government policy to exterminate Jewish people. Despite the fact that our time was limited and we had joined a guided group tour by mistake (but very worthwhile nonetheless), it was still possible to feel unnerved, sombre and have a pessimistic view of mankind. It’s hard to believe that we as humans could have overcome this era when you are reminded of today’s world or war, nuclear weapons, famine, refugees and death.

Stepping into a room used as a gas chamber and another as a crematorium was more than strange. The air smelled odd and the walls held a thousand secrets, the cries of those betrayed by hatred. I looked up into the false shower hole where the Zyklon pellets would have been placed and the poisonous fumes introduced into the chamber and my whole being shivered for those who perished in that room. Hundreds of bodies simultaneously struck down by murder, bodies that weighed heavily on the floor, hardly cold when they were replaced by fresh deaths. The guide told us that it took one hour to burn a single body in the crematorium. I was surprised at the resilience of the human corporeal existence and tried to understand the psyche of the people that worked in that room continually throwing dead bodies into the fire. As World War II progressed, bodies were burned en mass in extermination camps. This image of naked and shaven bodies been burned in a funeral pyre reminded me of the unsightly tv and newspaper pictures of dead sheep being burned in England due to foot and mouth disease. I did not want to visualise the human equivalent any longer.

Some of the walls of the buildings were lined with photographs of men and women, both young and old. To me this was more disturbing than anything else I had seen. You had to look at the pictures on the walls, you had to look into their eyes. You could not but see that pained look of horror and fright on their faces. You knew their fate. It made me feel very uncomfortable seeing the faces of thousands of victims persecuted because of being Jewish, Polish, gypsy, gay, pow, resistance etc. It made the whole experience real and grounded me in reality. I had to leave those rooms.

The ‘wall of death’ was more like a wall of silence. My instinct was to touch it, to feel its bullet holes, its history, the power it held. I realised that that power came from the people who were forced to stand in front of it and receive the bullets of their perpetrators. A family approached the wall while I took a photograph. A young girl reached out to touch the wall and was reprimanded for doing so. I’m not quite sure why she wasn’t allowed to feed her curiosity, her intuition for reaching out and touching a wall that held so many secrets. Perhaps the wall was deemed a sacred place, and a ‘disrespectful’ mortal touch could bring untold social disapproval and anger. Perhaps it was the tainting of childhood innocence with the memory of genocide.

I was intrigued by the sight of a group of Jewish schoolboys who paraded around the grounds with an Israeli flag. Their ‘Jewishness’ impinged on me for several reasons. Firstly they were all dressed in blue school jumpers with a star of David emblazoned on the front and Hebrew writing on the back. Secondly their cloth skull caps was the ‘uniform’ of Jewishness which I most recognised, and a couple of boys wore Israeli flags around their shoulders. The fact that they were in a place which held so much significance for their religion and culture was also prominent in my mind. I found myself staring at their ‘Jewishness’, those emblems and symbols that stuck in my mind and made me wonder if their visit was a type of pilgrimage. A historically vile place that had become sacred in their psyche, in their culture. I looked away to examine my own religions background to think if Christians too would regard this as a sacred place and would want to pray for all the souls, a place of pilgrimage to remember the dead. Later on I heard the sounds of singing along one of the pathways in the grounds. The singing became louder as we went to investigate. The school group walked along in rows, arms around waists and shoulders, waving their flags and singing a passionate melancholy. At first I took it as an unnerving display of nationalism, now I see it as a sort of grieving process, a pilgrimage to exercise themselves of the ghosts of the past, to mourn their dead everywhere.

I left Auschwitz not seeing everything I wanted to see, not reading everything I wanted to read or walking among the buildings, looking at the barbed wire. It was all too rushed, too big, too surreal, too lacking in emotion, yet informative and well meaning. I needed time there to absorb and contemplate everything – information, sights, sounds, atmosphere. In some ways it told me nothing I didn’t already know, but being there in your head falls short of seeing with your own eyes the testimony that lives on. In some parts of the world everyday is an Auschwitz. Just because we can’t see or don’t know about it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

To the rest of the world Auschwitz was a non-entity until it was ‘liberated’ by the Red Army in 1945 and the world was faced with its horrors, as it could not be hidden any longer. Between 3 and 4 million people, mainly Jews and Poles, were murdered between 1940 and 1945 in Auschwitz. I remember the silence in our group as we sheepishly followed the guide around the grounds. I felt my tongue heavy in the base of my mouth, dry and unwielding. I could not speak or ask questions. In those brief couple of hours I almost forgot how to speak. The feeling seemed to be mirrored in the group as silence gave way to sombre faces. On the bus journey home my silence gave way to quiet contemplation in my head.
 

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Moroccan hospitality will warm your heart but it will rot your teeth.  Today was awash with sugary sweet tea, sweet bread a sweet treat called ‘swoof’ (consisting of almonds, honey, cocoa and lots of sugar which tastes a little like sweet crumbly halva), and of course the sweet sweet taste of friendship.

We spent 5 days in the small town of Azrou. The bulk of this time has been spent bathing in the light of new friendship. Dancing, singing, drumming, and arsing around with our new friends Abdeali, Moulay Ali, Mustapha, and Ali. Such a nice bunch of guys and such a chilled out and relaxing place it’s been invigorating and uplifting after Fez.

Friendship was struck as we stood opposite each other on a bridge. We were watching sheep eating rubbish around a market under pine trees and I guess they were just hanging out. We exchanged shy smiles. (Abdeali has got to have the highest odds for the cutest smile of our journey!) When we broke the ice, and stopped being awkward gimps it was off to Moulay Ali’s mums for tea (sweet tea) and our first taste of ‘swoof’.

Our Francais is ‘petite peu’, our Arabic ‘shui’ and the guys’ Englais was ‘no habla’ but we managed to communicate, get an Arabic lesson and organise a meeting for the next day. The next day the guys arrived with Mustapha who spoke ‘a little English’ quite well! And was such a beautiful sensitive and sincere guy, he stole my heart.

We visited a market they described as ‘not a lot’ but turned out to be vast and contained everything that is Africa: noise, smells, sheep, chickens, cows, cafes in tents –dirty enough to eat your dinner off, more plastic keek than you can shake a stick at, vegetables galore, real coffee beans, junk, gamblers (and pick pocket friends), games to test your strength a snake charmer – who wasn’t charmed when I exclaimed that for the price he wanted for his show I’d be wanting to eat the cobra… - vessels made from recycled tyres cookers and lamps fashioned from oil drums, music, fabric, second hand clothes too much more to describe and of course carpets.

The market was vast and we spent most of the day there and bought some veg and lentils (getting a better price than normal with the help of our new friends), we got some nuts which seemed like a cross between chestnuts and acorns and tasted good, & rumbled back to town amongst trucks and donkeys and Berber women laden down with the spoils of the day.

In the evening after relaxing, doddling, and lentils and rice, we met the guys again. Setting off to dander aimlessly and hang out we ended up in a park being silly and eventually disintegrating into the universal language of music.

Starting off quite sober with a serene swapping of songs, with our repertoire from Ireland and around the globe, and their songs in Arabic. Then it got into jams, and vocal percussion and dancing and leaping, falling over laughing and several hours later I had committed the heinous crime of teaching my new friends the birdie song….

We sang and danced and arsed about, did the locomotion, the Monkees walk, Finnish folk dance, sang praise to Allah, and lamented broken hearts until there was nothing else to do but go home and go to sleep.

In the morning we set off trekking in the mountains and forest in search of the famous Azrou monkeys, to cook a picnic and of course to sing and dance. The forest was beautiful cedar and pine gnarled and twisted, sporting shaggy manes of lichen and moss, the ground was covered in white rocks with occasional red and yellow ones. I think our singing kept the monkeys at bay.

Cooking food was fun. Abdeali couldn’t contain his laughter when he saw our cooker. He just couldn’t believe how small it was (Ahem), and broke his hole  laughing. (Apparently in the forests of Azrou size matters). Neither of the guys had cooked before and were impressed by my ability to chop vegetables, pour boiling water and throw spices into cous cous. We made a carrot and cauliflower ‘tajine’ that Abdeali stirred and Mustapha spiced. They really enjoyed their first experience cooking and were dead chuffed with themselves. Tina took some pictures to send to their mums. Digestion was aided with much singing and amazing percussion from Mustapha on our improvised tin can darbouka.

The view from the top of the mountain would have been breath taking if our breath had not already been taken by the climb to the top of the mountain. We drank spring water and panorama, danced and sang our way down again just in time for darkness, lentils rice and sleep.

Our last day, I felt sad.  We sauntered off across the fields to find a fish factory that was closed when we got there. & Instead sat by a river and sang songs. Ali also joined the gang, and he’s a shit hot bendir player. He tried to teach me lots of rhythms, though I couldn’t quite manage the technique. My fingers just don’t work in the same way as my percussive friends. (My little finger and his bigger neighbour just lack any independence or mind of their own – and seem dam right lazy!)

There was a cold wind blowing, so we walked and hitched a lift in a van full of fertiliser back to town. We spent the evening visiting the homes of Abdeali and Mustapha; a beautiful over dose in sugar rush and hospitality.

In Mustapha’s we had a disco with his cassettes & the guys taught us how to dance Moroccan style, which by our standards is looking a little silly & awkward & dancing in a way that’s so stupid it’s cool. (Think Bill Cosby). Ali is the king of moves & faces (dancing, as with much of life the face is as important as the moves). Mustapha played a tape with him singing & someone else playing keyboards, which was slow and beautiful. I felt emotional to be saying goodbye to new & natural friends. We rounded off the night with a game of pool in their local haunt, in which Tina caused quite a stir by being the only woman (& quite a shark at pool). Then dandered & doddled/hugged & kissed said our ‘mas salamas’  &’ masharvins’.

I wished I lived in a world where I could believe that one day my friends could come & visit me.
 

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Travelling can be an expensive business, luckily for us it wasn’t. In fact it probably ‘cost’ us less money to travel around than it would to spend the same time stationary in Belfast. Money can be a stumbling block when embarking on any project or adventure, (as I write this we have no funds to publish/print this book!) but learning to be innovative, creative, & managing not to let cash (or lack of it) become a limiting factor in your life can be empowering.

In Belfast an oft-chanted excuse for not doing anything is lack of money. The amount of times I’ve heard people say that they can’t do anything or go anywhere because they’re skint  is a bit too frequent to be believable, as if your whole life ends just cause you’re short of a few quid. Not having any money doesn’t stop you breathing or talking and it certainly shouldn’t stop you having fun. There are plenty of things you can do for free and you just have to reorganise your social life so it doesn’t involve forking out  to go to the pub or an expensive club. In other parts of Europe where there is next to no social security people are generally more creative, you often see people collecting cans/bottles to cash in on refunds. I guess as they say ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. There is a much bigger culture of skipping, squatting, scamming & stealing. Maybe the Northern Irish culture of waiting for someone else to give a hand out to you has sunk into every level. Something to remember is that money is useful but it’s not essential.

It is entirely plausible to strike out into the great unknown with nothing but sunshine in your pockets, & many of my friends & heroes do this all the time. Trusting upon the ingenuity of the human spirit & the kindness of strangers. A big problem with money is that too much or too little of it can create an unhealthy obsession. Money is useful & can be a great plan B, & can occasionally dig you out of holes. When you just need that beer, pastry or to sleep in a bed & have a shower, or to take a bus or train it proves quite useful. We each saved around £1500 (for Darren mostly saved off social security ‘benefits’, and for Tina spending 4 brain numbing months doing a 9-5 admin job at BIFHE), & I guess it was useful. & just about had a few quid left when we returned home.

Some practical tips on how to get by with next to no money.

Voluntary work
When you work as a volunteer you buy into a different kind of economy. Hopefully an economy where people come first & money comes last. Having spent years in Belfast doing voluntary work, I’ve met loads of friends & I can’t think of a country in Europe where I couldn’t phone up someone for a floor or bed to sleep in. For this I heap much praise upon a group of people known as Tools For Solidarity, who host several international workcamps a year & provide short & long term placements to international volunteers. Being involved with this group has meant meeting and developing friendships with a never-ending supply of international volunteers.

There are many ways to exchange some of you time/labour for a place to stay/food. SCI & EYFA also co-ordinate longer term volunteer placements for under 26 year olds in Europe & you can even receive pocket money/expenses. & You can do all sorts of work with Car Busters, Corporate Watch, ASEED, Gluaiseacht etc. WWOOFing has got to be one of best ways to get away, get fed, get ‘housed’ and learn something in the process. When you’re woofing most of your basic needs are met (food, water, shelter, brain stimulation etc) and you soon realise that you require fuck all money and sometimes feel you have to spend it you cause you have it (impulse buying, mindless shopping, consumerist urge etc etc!)

Friendship Organisations
We’ve already mentioned 5W, & if you’re a single male don’t fret, as Servas is a similar organisation where hosts offer their homes & hospitality without asking for financial reward, regardless of gender. They’re both friendship organisation with the idea of promoting international cultural exchange and spreading peace and diversity.

Punk rock/ anarchist/ squats
Just like with voluntary work you meet people through all circles. If you’re a punker & you turn up at a gig it’s worth e-mailing someone in advance from the local scene & tell them your coming & usually you’ll find a floor to crash on & someone to show you a good time. Likewise being involved in stuff like zines & distros & whatnot you make good contacts & friends around the world & there’s a general feeling of solidarity within the international d.i.y. conspiracy. Squats are usually home to a mixed bunch of individuals from various nationalities and the common language can be English so don’t let language put you off setting up camp somewhere. Look for the squat symbol or failing that a crusty with a dog on a string should be able to give you more info about an area!

Food for free (or at least cheap!)
We’ve mentioned Food Not Bombs, skipping/dumpster diving, finding your food for free. Most supermarkets have a bin somewhere usually at the back or at the side of the building filled with goodies! (& Unlike Belfast there isn’t usually barbed wire & CCTV). It’s quite common to find a sack load of bread in the bin outside a bakers shop at then end of the day, so have a look. Closing time at markets is a good way to pick up on an ingredient or two for a meal. Supermarkets often sell off bread, fruit and veg for a fraction of the price near shop closing time so it’s worth checking out for bargains. Of course (depending on the time of year) the countryside abounds with fruit, nuts, berries, mushrooms and other edible plants that are available on the side of the road, in the forest, in fields etc. So take a good look around you before you buy in a shop or market. It’s useful to have a field book for identifying mushrooms, berries and plants, as there are many poisonous types around. Most places in the world have a Krishna community and part of their religious obligation is to provide free vegetarian food to the needy. So go along to a temple and get well fed and you can engage in a little meditation and song if you’re up for it.

Obviously food is a lot less expensive (& generally a dam sight more tasty & definitely a damn sight more vegan) when you cook it yourself. Investing in a good camping cooker will pay for itself many many times over. Some handy food we’d generally have floating around at the bottom of our rucksacks was lentils & rice, which are cheap and light to carry, nutritious & with some spices makes a great meal. We also carried at least one ‘emergency’ packet of noodles each, which are very handy when you get stuck hitching in the middle of nowhere & provide that much needed pick me up when your spirit it lost. Other food that’s usually cheap, cooks fast with little energy & is generally available are; pasta; cous cous, poppadums, & oats (when you get your porridge for breakfast your set for the day).

Sleep for Free
If you can’t afford a cheap hostel, campsites are the next best budget way of somewhere to sleep. You’re primarily paying for somewhere to leave your stuff, a hot shower and a safe place to sleep, a lot of the time that’s exactly what you need. In cheap hostels it can get cramped with 6 bunks in a tiny room or a bit too social with 50 or 100 beds in a single sex dorm so camping gives you enough space in a more social setting.

Friends and acquaintances are not to be sniffed at and that feeling of meeting a familiar face when you’re on the road is a joy. People go out of their way to be friendly and hospitable and that welcome feeling is priceless. They are worth their weight in gold as the saying goes.

Of course you can also rough it with a sleeping bag/plastic bag under a tree, in a ditch, on a beach/dune, under an olive grove, in a cave, a forest, a tunnel, wherever you can find. It’s free, it’s easy, but it can also be scary and cold! I wouldn’t recommend it in a town or city as there are too many opportunities to be robbed, beaten up, freaked out etc, it’s generally safer in the countryside (though it’s not infallible)

If you’re desperate you can also check out your local police station or homeless shelter for a bed for the night.

Travel for Free
Obviously hitching saves a lot of money, & although we didn’t do it on our trip it is possible to hitch the traffic boarding ferries & cut down on travel expenses further. Some people even hitch fishing trawlers that may go much further distances. Getting lifts with lorry drivers (quite difficult with two people, apparently due to insurance) is great as you can tap into their CB  network to get lifts with other drivers along the way. A friend of ours even hitchhikes with his bike that means that you don’t have to feel stranded by the side of the road when you can’t get a lift.

Other travel tips are scams. There are loads of ways to scam cheap buses, trains etc. The simple jumping trains/metro/trams is quite popular. Other people had made up fake interrail passes, or by amending rail tickets using milk and brake fluid. Some punks we met travelled all the way from Germany to Spain by borrowing diesel for their truck from machinery on building sites.

Money for Free
Of course there are times when you may want to generate some cash. Apart from begging, or miraculously finding money on the ground, busking is probably one of the more popular methods, & can be hard work &/or great fun. It also works a lot better in rich tourist countries, but in bigger cities you’ve got more competition from professional street performers, & a higher likelihood of the populous suffering from busker fatigue. It is also useful if you have something to sell (apart from your body/soul!) so being creative with hair wraps, drawings, photographs, cd’s can earn you enough for your next meal or ticket out of there. The local police may or may not be friendly and might be unsympathetic to your cause and move you on. It is not uncommon for people to just offer you money (with no strings attached) because a) they want to help you out, b) have been in that situation before, c) believe in karma d) feel guilty for their riches. There is nothing wrong with accepting money from strangers or friends, if they didn’t have it to give they wouldn’t offer it and remember you reap what you sow.

Give & Take
Call it karma, call it anarchy, call it what you like, but what goes around comes around. So it should go without saying that hospitality should be returned. Offering a bit of space on your floor, food in your cupboards, check e-mail, a hot shower, wash clothes etc. Little presents for hosts are also generally appreciated, books, zines (especially if you do your own) & of course we littered the continent with devils bit scabious cd’s.

Now what’s stopping you?
It is an amazing feeling that you can just walk to the edge of your city, stick out your thumb & you’re off. If you’re up for it you can just set off with the clothes on your back & a plastic bag & the world is your oyster. If you’ve got an itch you should scratch it.
Just do it.
 

Top of Page

There’s a big world out there. & It’s ours for the taking. Only thing is it’s a lot of other peoples too. But that’s cool; I’ve no problems sharing my world. Have you? Many people have already begun to question the authority of lines on a map, & refuse to accept that the value of human life is somehow diminished or increased in accordance with nationality, religion, sex(uality), skin colour, or economic means. In every continent & every country groups & individuals are questioning & opposing the economic, political & religious forces that oppress & dominate us.

One thing all of these groups share in common is that there is no single answer, no single ideology, or way of life to which we all must adhere. We are all different & slowly but surely realising that our diversity is our strength. What we have in common is the feeling that we’ve been cheated by the monoculture & dull conformity of global capitalism: The absence of liberty in ‘neo-liberalism’, the shackles of slavery/ poverty complicit with ‘free trade’, the feeling of emptiness that comes with a world full of ‘consumer choice,’ & a ‘new world’ order that’s full of the same old shite.

The multinational conglomerates & their puppet interstate bodies the IMF, WTO, World Bank, NATO, NAFTA, European Union, pursue their agenda of controlling the world its people & resources, in the name of democracy, for the gain of the few.  They promote a globalisation where many perspire & a few prosper.

It’s now time for us to reclaim the international community from the bottom up. To come together as diverse communities of dissent who share burning passion to create something better. To come together not to enforce a dominant ideology on one & all, but to share common ground, swap solutions, to agree to differ, scheme plot & act, to create colourful revolutions that challenge & subvert ‘the powers that be’.

As it happens this is already happening. If you’d like a ticket for a free ride in a world without borders then it’s time to get involved.

There’s a lot more to do.
 

Indymedia: www.indymedia.org
Peoples Global Action: www.agp.org
Anti Border Campaign: www.noborder.org
European Social Consulta: www.europeanconsulta.org
 
 
 
 

Squatting in the Bushes daaa #9 116 page A4 book £6/10euros/$10 + 2 IRCs available from direct action against apathy

 

squatting in the bushes extracts