Camping in the Wild: Europe

One of the recurring problems for the WorldWalkers in Europe was how to find a good camping spot every night. At the end of the day’s walk there was not much time to look for a perfect place before dark in those heavily populated areas.

by FERENC IVANICS
To be able to walk many dozens of miles you need a a good night’s sleep. To have a good night’s sleep you need to find a good camp site. When the weather’s not on our side we sleep in our tents, so we have to put them up. To put up the tents, to drive the stakes (pegs) into the ground we need to find proper soil, a more or less flat area with enough space for our tents. We cannot neglect the opinions of the local authorities either, walking for a good cause doesn’t mean that they always overlook the illegal nature of camping in the wild.

We’d recommend places near less traveled roads, grassy stripes at the edge of fields or forests, these were our favorite places.


In Hungary we camped many times on cultivated fields. It’s OK if it’s not recently seeded, you cannot really do any harm to the crops. Once, after a longer stage we had to find a camp site when it was well into the night. While assembling our tents we discovered that it wasn’t such a good idea camping on the field right next to the road... It had been recently fertilized with completely organic fertilizers. Next day we spent hours wiping the horsecrap off of the bottom of our tents.

We celebrated our last night before crossing the Hungaro-Austrian border in the field you see on the picture above. It was a fine place to stay, plain, comfortble. We slept like babies, not disturbed by the fact that it was raining during the whole night. To our surprise, thanks to the clayey soil we spent a few hours taking down the tents with pounds of slippery mud on our feet.


Our experiences in Austria were fairly similar until we reached the Alps. The mountain meadows were like luxury hotels compared to the fields, and they were quite common. Quiet, calm, silky smooth grass, putting up the tent was a child’s play. No one felt offended by our stay, we had a good time there.


In Germany we got used to camping in vast forests instead of meadows. These camp spots were just as luxurious as their Austrian comrades. Cheery clearings, milennium oaks, calm, just like in Goethe’s poem, the Wanderer’s Nightsong.

Wanderer’s Nightsong II

Up there all summits
are still.
In all the tree-tops
you will
feel but the dew.
The birds in the forest stopped talking.
Soon, done with walking,
you shall rest, too.

One night, our sleep was calm until we started to hear some kind of snorting and the noise of breaking branches in the middle of the night. The noises were getting louder and their source was getting closer to us, it was getting quite scary in the woods. And we became even more scared when we figured out that a hog herd was passing around our tents. They were feeding on the acorn of the millenary oaks. We got awake and alert in a moment. Those minutes in the dark felt like a lifetime, but finally our noisy and hungry guests left our home.

In France we got used to another unexpected difficulty. According to our plans we should have had arrived to Spain by then to spend the colder winter months there. But we started the tour with a month’s delay and winter cold had arrived early that year. We lived our coldest night in November of 2007. The skin of the tent was frozen stiff even before putting it up. We were unable to get a sleep in 25°F cold. We had all our clothes on, yet spent the whole night awake, shiwering. By morning there was ice even on the inside of the skin of the tent.


Our cheap tents and sleeping bags weren’t able to protect us from the cold, we managed to get along with proper food: fatty, high calorie meals, good French red wine.

Spain welcomed us with mountains and rocky soil, absolutely inapt for camping. But when we reached the orange and tangerine plantations of Valencia we arrived to heaven, almost. Fortunately orange thiefs rarely carry tents with them and almost never spend the night on the crime scene, so we weren’t mistaken for them, had no trouble with angry orange farmers.


Though our main interest was to find a place to sleep, we ate tons of oranges as well. And it radically changed our metabolism. :) Once a local farmer surprised us during a breakfast, we were a tiny little bit scared, but he was telling us: ‘tranquilo, tranquilo’. Even though we didn’t know what the words meant, we got the message. Orange prices were so low, it wasn’t even worth to harvest. Anyways, Valencia provided us with bed and breakfast. And oranges from Valencia are the best oranges in the world. We mean it!
WorldWalk’s photos about Europe
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