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.

Wired News is carrying an interesting article about Tracking Air Fares and systems to predict ticket prices. It’s a fairly interesting read and highlights the key things to do in order to get cheap flights, but it doesn’t offer much more then the common knowledge that is already circulated around many travel resources and blogs.

Personally, I’ve been using Kayak to search for tickets as they have some very handy features that make repeated searching easy, and in the search results offer a chart of pricing history which you can use to help pin point when the cheapest times to travel are.

The two most important things to keep in mind when looking for cheap flights are simply be flexible about when you travel, and when you see a cheap flight, book it right away as it won’t stick around for long.

Even using Kayak’s email alert system to get emails about cheap flights I find a lot of the tickets I get told about have raised to a higher price by the time I get to them, so if you are planning on traveling, just looking for tickets isn’t enough, you need to be ready to grab the bargain when you find it.

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.