Voyage Of The Odd Essay

It will be fairly obvious from my various updates that I am doing a lot of partying while I’m out here backpacking around Thailand and there is always interest as one traveller to another what budgets people are trying to stick to successful or not.

So here’s a typical days spending for me, taken from the 20th January 2009, while I was staying in Bangkok

• 300 Baht for Accommodation, a secure and clean hostel in central Bangkok which includes tea and toast for breakfast.
• 9 Baht for a small half litre bottle of water.
• 20 Baht for a 330ml bottle of Green Tea with Lemon.
• 6 Baht for some cheap instant noodles.
• 109 Baht for over baked rice with pork and olive and a pineapple iced smoothie in a Japanese style chain restaurant.
• 96 Baht for a four pack of Leo beer from Seven-Eleven.
• 20 Baht for the Sky Train to the Underground Interchange.
• 27 Baht for the Underground to the Railway Station.
• 10 Baht for a short Tuk Tuk ride to Sky Train stop.
• 20 Baht for the Sky Train Home

Total for the day: 617 Thai Baht which at today’s exchange rates is around £12.50.

I also paid an additional 611 for my train ticket to Chiang Mai, but since it’s over night it means on the day of travel I don’t have to pay for a room, which keeps the travel costs down, and I normally wouldn’t have quiet so much to drink, but it was the inauguration of President Barack Obama that night and so I stayed up later then I had otherwise planned. Of course, “I wouldn’t normally, but…” happens fairly frequently when travelling! There was also a one off fee of 100 Thai Baht for my wi-fi internet connection, which I can keep using if I stay here again.

When I did my inital budget I was looking at the same amount of stering getting me about 750 Thai Baht, which would have been a much more comfortable budget, but such is life and the upshot of the failing pound basically means that I can realistically stay out travelling for five months, rather then six.

So there you have it, life out here really is cheap! With a little bit of creativity such as getting instant noodles for cheap-cheap, hanging out and having a couple of beers with banter can work easily into even a small budget.

Brave New Traveler

I can’t recommend reading Brave New Traveler enough, while many of the blogs I have in my reader I just read the articles as they come, I will specifically look for new items from here daily.

Sample Article: Travel Is About Who You Meet, Not Where You Go

BackPackers.com

I haven’t been reading BackPackers.com for that long but came across it following a recommendation on Ask Meta Filter, there are some interesting articles from time to time, and if you’re interested in festivals around the globe they do mention a healthy number of them.

Sample Article: Doer, Watcher, or Wanderer: What’s You Backpacking Style

Vagabondish

One of the first travel blogs I started to read at the same time as Brave New Traveler, regular postings and some really good information keep me coming back time and again to read the articles in this blog.

Sample Article: A Practical Guide to Vagabonding and Long Term Travel (Part 1)

The Travelers Notebook

There is more of a commercial slant to some of this blogs posts, dealing with aspects of photography, bloging, podcasting and such, but that doesn’t mean it’s not got some interesting and useful entries for anyone interested in travelling.

Sample Article: Five Rules for Recognizing and Avoiding Travel Scams

Other Blogs

Gridskipper: The Worldwide Travel Blog

I actually came across this one while sorting out the links for this post, but it looks interesting so I’ll be following it from now on.

The Life Less Traveled

While not just travel related, this new blog focuses on people doing extraordinary things, and shows a lot of promise which I am following with interest.

On Tuesday 6th of November 2007, something in me flipped and any number of random dreams and plans for the future all came together in a spark of inspiration, I was going to drive around the world in a camper van called “The Odd Essay”.

This of course, is a crazy idea. But it’s not actually impossible. In fact, people do it all the time, world travel is easy these days, and not even that expensive in the grand scheme of things.

I do have a number of minor obstacles to over come, firstly, actually driving around the world is a little trick, since I don’t drive. Then, I need to find the vehicle that will take me around the world. I also don’t have a passport, so, I need to get one of those. And then I do actually need to fund my travels.

So I’ve set a date for my departure: Tuesday 6th January 2009.

That gives more then a year to get ready, and gives time to fit two warm up expeditions, Land’s End to John O’Groats sounds like a fun warm-up, perhaps in August so I can stop by the Edinburgh Fringe, and catch a couple of music festivals along the way. Then later in the year a trip around Europe really test the Odd Essay and prove that I can drive out of the country. Hopefully coinciding with when my little sister is doing a term studying in Finland so I can visit her.

There are any number of reasons why I want to set out and do this, and I’ll expand on them in later entries but for now the more I think about it the more I keep coming back to “why wouldn’t I?”