This is a good question. In travel, doing laundry can be a relatively expensive procedure if you hire people to do it for you. Many hostels have laundry services that charge between $5 and $15 per load. I am not joking. I have seen European hostels charging the upper end of this price range for the privilege of having your laundry washed in a machine.
Published onMay 14, 2009byVBJFollow me on Twitter here.
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This is a good question. In travel, doing laundry can be a relatively expensive procedure if you hire people to do it for you. Many hostels have laundry services that charge between $5 and $15 per load. I am not joking. I have seen European hostels charging the upper end of this price range for the privilege of having your laundry washed in a machine.
To beat this needless expense, I do my laundry when I shower. Each time I wash my body I bring in a few articles of clothing and wash them too. I then hang the clothes up to dry in my room and wear them the next day.
Doing laundry like this means that I have a constant supply of clean clothes coming in to blend with and replace the dirty, road-worn rags that are on my body.
The only trick to this is that I know that I need to ALWAYS wash some clothes EVERY time I shower or else the dirty laundry will pile up in my bag.
I also travel with very few articles of clothing – just enough to clothe myself two times over – so this means that washing them regularly is not a large chore.
I wrote a complete travel tip about doing laundry while traveling at, Travel Tip #4- Wash Your Laundry While You Shower
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I am the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. I’ve been traveling the world since 1999, through 93 countries. I am the author of the book, Ghost Cities of China and have written for The Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Diplomat, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. VBJ has written 3729 posts on Vagabond Journey. Contact the author.
Ghost Cities of China is a book which recounts the two and a half years I spent on the ground investigating China’s empty new cities. Pull back the dark veil on the New China and find out what the country is really all about.