Part of the great romantic appeal about hitchhiking, particularly across Europe and borders and linguistic and political and cultural divides, is the possibility of getting splendidly and serendipitously lost.

Mind you, this fanciful prospect is the flip side of getting hopelessly and desperately lost and not liking it one bit.

I propose a compromise — bring a phone. A good phone, mind you, with Google Maps. The astute reading this will point out that this isn’t a compromise at all but a complete discarding of the element of risk to which I say not true — the battery might run out. You can fine-tune the serendipity levels by keeping the phone off or not until you need it.

If you live in Europe and you’re hitching to other European countries you already know that roaming costs are extortionate and if you’re coming from North America you’ll find it out soon enough. I have a solution for that, too. Buy a SIM card for every country you’re in. Few and, so far as I know, no countries in Europe don’t have a discount prepay SIM provider from whom you can get a native number over the counter at almost any store.

For between €10 and €20 you can get a SIM with that much credit and if you’re careful how you use it (meaning, just don’t) you’ll have plenty of data credit if and when you need it. This means avoiding the temptation to surf the net while waiting for a ride which requires a degree of self-restraint so elevated that if you manage it you’ll also, as byproduct, achieve nirvana. So you might want to buy a little backup credit when you buy your SIM.

For hiking in the UK, Germany and Spain get a Lebara SIM (one for each country, of course). In the Netherlands get Hema or even one of the mainstream carriers like Orange. In France look for Bouygues (Lebara operates in France, too, but doesn’t offer data). Alternatively, if you’ve got a European postal address you can order a Belgian SIM from the Dutch/Belgian offering Mobile Vikings whose data plan works in both countries and beyond that has very reasonable, non-rapey roaming charges. Note though that Mobile Vikings can’t be bought in stores and can only be topped up online so if you run out of credit and your only way of getting online is your phone then your serendipity risk has obviously somewhat elevated.

A good traveling phone charges quickly and holds its charge for a long time, which means that at this writing there are no good traveling phones on the market. There are a couple of not entirely useless traveling phones, though, and I’m going to recommend the Samsung Galaxy Mini. It’s small, cheap, and durable, it charges reasonably quickly and the user experience is so poor that you’ll be tempted less often to play with it to while away the time between rides.

Remember that Google Maps employs GPS to find your position and GPS uses your battery like its bitch, so use it sparingly. Even if you’ve got plenty of charge the maps application itself is very data intensive so, really, until you need it just try to forget you have a phone.

This is most emphatically not an endorsement of Craigslist. I hear enough stories of people getting ripped off or having unsatisfactory anonymous sex to know better than to associate my good name with the world’s largest classified ads website.

It’s purely anecdotal that I’ve had several exceptional addresses in Amsterdam entirely owing to Craigslist and you should definitely not do what I did when booking your vacation accommodation in this amazing city.

So strongly do I feel that you should eschew my advice that I’m saying so in spite of all the advantages to having your own Amsterdam apartment for a few weeks in the summer. Firstly, it’s much cheaper than a hotel and on a par with a hostel. Of course if you’re traveling as a couple or group it becomes even cheaper again. Now subtract the cost of eating out as opposed to having your own kitchen and you’re starting to liberate a significant portion of your travel budget for whatever it is that people spend their money on in Amsterdam.

For all intents and purposes, renting out your property in Amsterdam is illegal. The federal and municipal governments are so implicated in the relationship between landlord and tenant that they dictate how much can be charged for an apartment based on a complex formula combining surface area with the state of the floors and age of the plumbing and proximity to, I don’t know, a bordello. Any profit that unlikely remains is taxed at slightly over 100%. That’s mostly made up but the effect is quite non-fictionally a dearth of rental property in Amsterdam in spite of the government’s energetic efforts to do Jack-shit about the problem.

Additionally, once you’re in an apartment you can’t be made to leave and there are hundreds of thousands of tenants enjoying rents that were negotiated decades ago and they’re not going to give that up so when they move in with their girlfriends or take a job in another city they sublet their apartments, which of course they’re expressly forbidden from doing.

Consequently there’s a massive black market for apartment rentals in Amsterdam. Everybody does it, including those whose job it is nominally to enforce this apparently immutable set of counter-productive laws. There are literally more people subletting flats then there are flats because the sublet chain can run as much as five deep (to my personal knowledge — doubtless the actual record is much deeper).

The one thing you want to avoid when renting out your flat, particularly for the short term, is renting it to someone who wants to live there. The risk that a fellow Dutchman will simply choose not to leave or in some other fashion upend the delicately balanced chain of sublets is too great and so the ideal tenant for summer rentals is you — the tourist who just wants to pay cash, live in Amsterdam for a little while, and then go away.

You still shouldn’t do it though. I had two huge advantages when I rented my flats in Amsterdam. First, I’m not a total moron and knew without asking that a three-bedroom apartment on Prinsengracht for €500 a month, payable upfront by Western Union, is concretely a scam. Second I was already there. That’s indispensable. It makes it almost impossible to plan from, say, Minnesota, but I’m afraid it’s the only way. Well, the other only way is to have someone you trust check out the property but they’d still need to actually be in Amsterdam. What you must absolutely not do is pay any money anywhere but standing in the flat with the keys in your hand.

If you can manage that, though, you’re going to get a bargain and you’re not going to get ripped off. Your Amsterdam landlord just wants someone to cover his rent while he’s in Thailand or at home from university for the summer or participating in clinical drug trials. The other hidden advantage of renting in Amsterdam is that everyone you meet is only slightly cooler and more easygoing than the last person you met. For me the experience was so consistently and thoroughly positive that were I to do it again I’d risk booking a hotel for a couple of days on the assumption that Craigslist would come through.

If you decide to do this thing that you shouldn’t do, try to choose one of the nice neighborhoods in Amsterdam, by which I mean any neighborhood in Amsterdam. Also try to pay on the black market courtesy and leave your vacation flat cleaner than you found it and maybe with a six-pack in the fridge.

A few weeks ago I updated hitchhiking for the internet age and introduced, particularly, www.carpooling.co.uk. So now you know how to get where you’re going and share the experience with someone who has a car and knows how to drive it someplace you want to go.

Consider this part two. You still need somewhere to sleep and as hitchhiking is to the Eurail pass, couchsurfing is to spending a night on a park bench or in the waiting room of a train station.

Like carpooling, couchsurfing has its critical mass website which you’ve probably guessed is www.couchsurfing.org. It’s very intuitive and you can ignore for the moment the social networking aspects of it. You mainly want to establish a fairly rigid schedule and start searching through the truly vast number of couches on which you can surf.

The top tourist destinations like Paris and Amsterdam have more offers than travellers and it’s a bit of a buyer’s market but even tiny, obscure towns and villages and resorts offer a surprisingly large number of potential hosts so don’t assume that you won’t find something where you’re going.

Couchsurfing seems, obviously, dodgy as all hell. Why are people offering free accommodation and what are they hoping to get out of it? Well, in some cases it’s not free and it’s not even a couch. Sometimes it’s a room and you’ll be expected to pay for it and yeah, it would be naive to think that those offering a bed aren’t at least sometimes hoping to share it. In most cases it’s what it looks like – cool young people who just like meeting other cool young people and this is in fact an almost guaranteed way of doing so. There are surprisingly few assholes in the free accommodation business and even fewer in the bumming around Europe hoping to make friends line. And usually those offering places to stay on couchsurf.org have used it themselves.

Never-the-less you need to leverage the filtering mechanism at least for dates and probably for “safety features” and, if you’re a girl, I strongly recommend that you limit your hosts to other females. The ratio of nice to not nice among women and men on couchsurfing.org is almost certainly exactly the same but there’s a comfort and commonality level that you have every right to decide on your own.

If you’re not a sociopath it probably feels a little awkward making demands on people offering you a free or almost free place to stay. So don’t. Let couchsurfing.org do it for you and read through the descriptions of the offers. The accommodation can be anything from a space by the radiator to your own studio and on occasion there may be a fee or you may be expected to provide a little hash. There may also be at least one thing to which you object, like smoking or the fact that smoking’s not allowed or cats or a “shared sleeping surface”.

If it needs to be said, couchsurfing is not for everyone. If you’re a couple planning your honeymoon or an executive attending a sales conference, get a hotel and leave the better couches to those who need them. But if you’re a band or hippy or backpacker or just a traveler with a positive perspective on adventure then even if you can afford something “better” give couchsurfing a try and in the unlikely event that it goes wrong it’ll still be a story to tell.