PART 3: Where You Lose Money
(What to do, What NOT to do, What I wish I’d done)
Visas
There’s no gettin around visas unless you happen to have citizenships in multiple countries (Thailand citizens have a lot of free access around SE Asia). Going back and forth between Thailand and surrounding countries could be interesting because of Thailand’s free 30-day visa and their cheap airfare from Bangkok and their land border checkpoints with Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia and Myanmar.
I do recommend using up the entirety of your visas for obvious cost-saving reasons, and because the longer you stay in one area, the cheaper it becomes with more knowledge and experience.
I’m all for seeing a bunch of different countries, but places like Bhutan might not be worth shelling out the exorbitant amounts of money for their required tour packages.
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Wait, how would “spending $0” be feasible with visas? Well, it’s not. To make it truly sustainable, you’d have to either have some sort of passive income, some legit connections in each country, and/or keep your English teaching skills brushed up by teaching some online classes while traveling. You can even pick up part-time work at some tourist-heavy locations like I did in Vang Vieng for a time. (I just hung out at “Space Bar” for a four hours a night and got paid $20; kind of a shabby wage, but considering I didn’t consider it working, I viewed it pretty favorably)
Travel, Flying
I’m not a huge fan of flying. And not even the actual airport/flying experience. I get easily frustrated with booking them. Search all the cheap flight booking articles and websites you desire, airline companies have their algorithms dialed in to squeeze as much money as they can out of you. I avoided this mainly by traveling by land when I could. I also tried keeping my plans open as to nab cheaper flights with unsold seats, but it did backfire on me once.
Long gone are the days of standby flights. Airlines will take losses on unsold seats rather than risk setting any sort of precedent that unsold seats will become cheaper close to the date of departure. That being said, there are flight deal newsletters you can sign up for such as Scott’s Cheap Flights, or airlines promotional email lists.
Overall I recommend using Google Flights/Skyscanner/Momondo to track down dates/airlines that look cheaper and then booking directly with the airline. Also, stay open and creative to how you can get around. It’s easy to get locked into one date/route that you are hounding, waiting for the price to drop. There are likely many other viable options like flying out of a different airport, making a stop over in some other country beforehand, or taking entirely different modes of transport.
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If you’re back in the West for whatever reason, StudentFlightDeals is worth checking out. My sister booked a roundtrip flight to India for less than $400, which for whatever strange airline industry rule is cheaper than a one-way ticket back.
Don’t want to “spend” any money at all. Look into credit cards that offer travel miles you can accrue over a few years and BOOM, major travel expenses = 0!
Ground Travel
-Cheap Buses/Trains
Depending on the country, it might just be worth it to pay for public transport. It can be really cheap. There will almost always be an unnecessarily expensive luxury travel option that everyone will assume you want to take.
-Motorbiking it
Good with small engine repair? See if you can work on one in exchange for borrowing it. It’s all about getting creative. Whenever you constrain your imagination to typical things a foreigner should/would be doing, you end up doing these things, which in turn costs you more moolah.
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-Hitchhiking
I could write another article on hitchhiking tips and my experiences. Hitchwiki.org is a good source of knowledge. For the most part, I had a really kush experience hitchhiking. There are definitely intricacies to it. I once managed to hitchhike from Luang Prupang, Laos through the Boten border crossing and up to Kunming, China in around 3 days time. Challenging at times, frustrating at others, but overall fun and rewarding. I never ran into any trouble or felt like I was endangered at any point. Keep in mind I am a Caucasian male with all of the stereotypes associated with being one. And trust me, there’s no being shy while hitchhiking unless you want to be doing it for a loooooong time.
One thing that did bother me about it was that I had to resort to lying in a sense to get some people to read my hitchhiking letter by saying I didn’t have money, which didn’t exactly align with my morals. It’s a blast, though, trust me. Even the small cultural exchanges you experience with people that don’t end up giving you a ride add real value to your overall experience. Quite a few meal and housing offers with this as well. Weirdest experience hitchhiking… I once had to drive an old truck from Yangon to the Thai border through the night and into the afternoon because the original driver was too tired and inept to safely do it himself. Did I mention I never felt endangered during my travel experiences? XD
Food
I shouldn’t have to explain this in too much depth. Food costs vary heavily. It’s cheaper than Western fare, but if you’re eating fairly decent food three meals a day, this adds up quickly. Luckily, you can pretty well cut this cost out IF you’re flexible. I’ll say straight up that most of you likely aren’t. But if you happen to be fairly practiced at fasting and/or “fat-adapted” to a ketogenic diet, I would say it’s possible to have this section be a negligible cost. Also, eat street fare. Ask locals for recommendations. My diet in Vietnam was essentially bananas, Bahn Mi, and Phở, and I loved every minute of it.
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If you’re crazy enough you could attempt to couple ketosis with intermittent fasting and packing a bunch of suuuper energy dense foods like coconut oil, ghee, nut butters, trail mix, etc. Couple this with finding potable spring water, foraging for fruit/nuts which is not as difficult as it sounds being that everything grows prolifically in SE Asia. Consider bringing vitamin/mineral supplements as well. Just some food for thought…
Entertainment
I’ll leave this section short as this is another highly variable expense. Unless you’re going extreme, spend some dough! Have fun! Just make sure it’s on what makes you happy. Truly ask yourself this before you begin your travels and throughout. Or be unaware and continuously spend bookoo bucks on a bunch of tourist money grabs…the choice is yours 🙂 It’s actually funny how minimalism puts this into greater perspective. You truly appreciate the power of your money in a new light. What did I splurge on? Cheap massages ($5/hr in Myanmar), clothes/fabrics in India, fancy authentic food I’d never tried before.
Final Nuggets of Wisdom
- On one hand, comparing your countries currency relative to the one you’re in is a good thing. It makes you realize how little money you’re actually spending. But at the same time, I find it just as beneficial to adapt quickly to the area’s own economic environment. For instance, paying $5 for a nice pizza at a restaurant feels good, but so does paying $.50 for just-as-delicious street food next door.
- I found ATMs were the best option for “carrying money”. Especially if you can get a Schwab or similar bank account back in the States that reimburses all ATM transactions. Then you could theoretically carry small amounts of daily expenditure cash and withdraw more as you need it. Just don’t be a scrub like me and forget to use a VPN when registering online for an account back in the States…
- Always choose local currency conversion when using an ATM. You will be getting close to the market rate rather than whatever your bank decides to charge you.
- Consider/do research on the specific city you’re going to if possible. Some cities are golden for cheap and healthy food, toiletry restocking, souvenirs, etc. (Chiang Mai)
- Learn the language more than your average tourist! Learn specific full-sentence phrases. People instantly connect and respect you more for even trying to speak/learn their language. It puts you a cut above the rest in all aspects of opportunities while traveling. Ingratiating phrases like “This food is delicious!” or “Thank you very much” also add another layer authenticity to your exchanges.
- The Power of Why
I stayed with a middle-aged British bloke in Chiang Mai and he had written a book and was in the process of developing an online seminar that had to do with this concept he called “The Power of Why”. He explained it to me in greater detail but it essentially boils down to locating your personal internal motivation and harnessing it to go out and achieve! I realized that it pertains very well to traveling, among a myriad of other things.
Why are you really traveling in the first place? Is it just to say you’ve been to all these different countries? Is it to have new experiences? Is it to eat a bunch of delicious ethnic cuisine and be lazy? Whatever your motivations, being honest with yourself like in the above section on entertainment, will save yourself a lot of grief and dissatisfaction. If you know you don’t like hiking all the time, don’t get roped into doing it with other backpackers because it seems like what you should be doing. You have a unique opportunity out there to be doing whatever it is you like without any risk of long-term judgement. So go crazy! Party it up! Be a selfie-maniac or an adventure survivalist. Just be true to yo’self! This will make you way more satisfied with your experience, in my belief.
*Insert Inspirational Ending Here* Just go out and do it! Disregard all of my advice and you will have just as valid of an experience as myself or anyone else has had traveling!
