As we tumble merrily towards economic oblivion, everyone is on the lookout for cheap holidays. Being a born skinflint, I heartily approve of this. Cheap is good. But cheap is not quite as good as free.

So what are your options if, like me, you find that no money-off holiday deal ever gives you quite as much money off as you’d like? Can you really have a proper holiday for nothing? You certainly can.

Sure, your options are limited, but they do exist, and there are more of them than you might think. As Marx might have said, once he’d stopped chuckling at the death throes of capitalism: tightwads of the world, unite!

We have nothing to lose but our money (we keep that in a sock under the bed, so no worries there); we have the world to gain. Or, at least, as much of it as we can hitch to. Here’s how to go about it.

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COUCHSURFING

There can’t be many of us who haven’t slept on a pal’s sofa. The problem is, we might have plenty of pals in Bracknell, but our address book is a little light on Provence, Tuscany, Bora Bora or wherever it is we’re set on for our next holiday. As the bumper stickers say, though, there’s no such thing as strangers, just friends you haven’t met yet – and to find them, go to one of the free couchsurfing websites. There, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to let you breeze in, doss down and swan off in the morning for absolutely nothing (although fair’s fair – it would be good if you made dinner and did the washing-up).

The whole thing is rather heartwarming, relying as it does purely on trust and good-will: you’re plunged into your host’s world, so it’s pretty much the opposite of being a passive, disconnected tourist. The biggest site is www.couchsurfing.com, which has a staggering 800,000 sofas on offer just about everywhere in the world – with 115,000 in America, 46,000 in France, 1,200 in South Africa and even a few in Antarctica. By joining, you also put your own couch online, but there is no obligation to put people up if you don’t want to.

A little caution might be in order – while most hosts have good motives, a few of the blurbs read suspiciously like lonely-hearts ads – but a system by which members vouch for each other helps to sort the genuine from the dubious. Other websites worth a look include www.hospitalityclub.org and the endearingly titled www.globalfreeloaders.com.

WILD CAMPING

Camp sites charge fees. Assuming that you go camping to get back to nature, they’re self-defeating, too: you leave your crowded street of brick houses and drive for hours to a field where hundreds of people have created more crowded streets, only this time the houses are made of canvas.

Wild camping is the real thing: you hike into inaccessible wilderness and sleep with nothing but the scenery, rabbits and stars for company. It’s completely natural, completely wonderful, completely free – and, in most of England and Wales, completely illegal, unless you have the permission of the landowner.

In practice, wild camping is tolerated in some remote areas of national parks, so long as you are out of sight of buildings, keep well away from livestock, don’t make fires, bed down for one night only and leave the place as you found it.

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