Geekery: Budgeting for South East Asia

Remember when I said that we'd be doing our tour of South East Asia at a cost of $70/day (for 2 people!)? Remember when you thought, "That's insanely cheap, there is simply no way that is possible."? Remember when I proved you wrong? No? Well get ready because the data is right here!

Picture it: the waves lapping at the shore, the sun sinking into the South China Sea, a brightly colored drink in a pretty glass adorned with an orchid, half naked children running like mutant 2 legged crabs through the surf, a stray dog shoving his head into your crotch...the tip tap tip tap of fingers on keyboard, a beautiful color-coaded spread sheet. You can take the manager out of the project but you can't take the project manager out of the girl.

Much to Geoff's constant annoyance I spent some small amount of each day in paradise entering our expenditures into a Google spreadsheet so that I could hopefully come home to the wonderful fun of proving myself right. I also spent a similar amount of time each day raising my eyebrows and quietly fuming when Geoff ordered a second gin and tonic because how will we ever stay on budget if you insist on $6 in cocktails every day? (Of course, I have to acknowledge that it was either $6 in cocktail costs or considerably more in hospital fees from when he eventually broke down and strangled my OCD, penny-pinching ass -- so really gin was the more budget friendly option).

Before we get into the exciting data, a few caveats. There are for sure errors in my data and I have this fear that some crazy internet person is going to comb through it and email me copious notes about all of my mistakes. This is obviously a paranoid fantasy because while there are FOR SURE tons of crazy people on the internet who would do this, I am almost positive that I have yet to attract enough internet stalkers to have to worry about the crazies coming after me just yet. I only wish I was popular enough to have to worry about someone (or even multiple someones) OCD-ing it up on my lunch costs. But just in case, let me state that there are errors in this data. This is because I often didn't have access to wifi and thus was unmotivated to touch the computer (You mean I won't be able to read about funny cats? I'm out.). This is also because even though I sometimes like to pretend that I have a super-human memory, I still forget things. This is also because sometimes I cheated. Here is a list of ways that I totally cheated on the budget:

• I did not include flight costs. It is totally possible to recreate our trip using only buses and thus spending WAY less money but sometimes when you're on an overnight bus ride listening to the horn that the driver leans on once a minute as if to scream, "Wake up whitey, you're about to die!" You remember that you can totally afford a $50 plane ticket and that while, yes, this will totally screw the budget it might make up for that sin with a night of sleep and not being dead on the side of a highway in Vietnam.
• I did not include souvenir or gift costs so my firends and family may never know exactly how cheap knock off tshirts are in Bangkok.
• I did not include the cost of our scuba diving course because even though scuba diving in Thailand is shockingly cheap (we paid $278.43 each for the four day certification course with 4 dives) it cannot be done for $35/day/person and we had pre-approved that particular out of budget splurge. The budget and I thoroughly enjoyed the 4 days of free hotel room that came with the course.
• For the last 13 days of our trip I threw the budget out the window. These days were by far the most expensive on our trip. We lived it up in hotels built for very discerning Japanese business men and/or families of Germans. We drank singapore slings made with top shelf gin. We took taxis because we were too lazy (and fancy) for public transit. Sometimes we got into a tuktuk without even arguing about the price which means we paid 5 times more then we needed to and we didn't even care. We were the Mr. Howel and Lovey of Thailand and it was grand. Geoff wanted to continue recording the budget during these days of excess just for the hilarious comparison factor but I had to insist that we not do this because when the budget is in play I simply cannot stop thinking about how much more awesome the data would look if I just had one less mai tai, one less foot massage, one less bag of cookies from the mini bar -- and really, who wants to live like that?

Ok, enough blathering on to the data!

Days In Budget: 71

Hotel: $1,165.38

Food + Drink: $2,229.07

Travel: $604.71

Visas: $225.00

Tourism: $640.54

Local Transport: $361.03

Total Spent: $5,302.14

Daily Average: $74.68

Ok, so obviously we went over budget. It is difficult (nay, impossible) for me to type that sentence without following it up with a list of excuses which is exactly what I will do in just a moment here but first I will own it. We went over budget. That's ok.

Because, you see, we didn't have to. We could have quite easily stayed on budget. There are scores of days (46 to be exact) in my little spreadsheet that are happily under budget. There is even one day (February 17th) where we spent $25.15 -- thanks in part to that free hotel room that we got from our scuba class but mostly to the fact that sitting on the beach don't cost a thing. The problem was that when we went over budget we partied like Scrooge McDuck (if Mr. McDuck had been partying in Asia and if, instead of a pool full of gold coins, he had a really awesome tour of the Vietnam countryside followed by 3 cocktails OR a fancy sleeping car for his 12 hour train ride OR some sweet Laos visas). What I'm saying is that when we figured that we were going over budget anyway we seemed to say "well the diet is screwed for today, might as well eat an entire cheesecake." (This is an attitude that I have also employed in a less metaphorical way with actual cheesecakes and actual diets). Our most expensive day in Asia (3/8/2010) was a major blow out -- $198.50 -- we went on a tour of Angkor Wat which not only meant playing for a tour guide ($27) but also going to breakfast and dinner at the pricey establishments that our tour guide is getting kick backs to drop us off at, but more important than all that (which alone would have resulted in a $85.50 day) we bought our Vietnam Visas which (including delivery fees) cost a whopping $113.

In addition to the pain of Visa costs which made us consider looking into boarder crossing coyote services we spent a lot on getting from one place to another. For a while I even considered pulling all travel costs out of the budget since they were painfully expensive and since after a few Biere La Rues it was easy to convince yourself that travel wasn't part of a daily budget! And of course, there was the cheating. If we're not going to count flights why count pricey train rides or even cheap bus tickets?

I would also like to not count all of Cambodia. You'd think hotel rooms with bathroom walls that don't extend to the ceiling and towns covered with a thin layer of garbage would, if nothing else, be easy on the wallet but NOT SO! Since the country is much poorer then Thailand or Vietnam (Source) we kind of expected to live like kings -- but this was not to be. Part of the problem is that we spent a lot of time in Siem Reap visiting Angkor Wat and the surrounding ruins which are swarming with westerners and thus very expensive (ok, comparatively expensive... our average per day cost in Siem Reap was $81.92 which wouldn't even come close to covering our estimated cost of a night in our very own Brooklyn apartment (~$91)). The other part of the problem is that Cambodia is just hard and Geoff and I are comforted by the fancy. After a day of mourning the deaths of the past and turning away the legions of poor children we felt like we deserved some AC and our own bathroom. (Better people would probably feel like they too could do without but we are not better people).

Conversely we had been warned by many a traveler that Vietnam would be pricey but somehow it was by far our cheapest destination (possibly because we both would happily live off of $.50 Ban Mis made by an old lady on a scummy street corner). We scored in the north by visiting Hanoi and Halong Bay during the low season (downside: too cold to swim, upside: $6 rooms, uncrowded waters and not getting eaten by giant jellyfish). As far as I can tell the rest of the country is just always cheap. Our average hotel cost in Vietnam was $15.16 (compared to a trip-wide average of $17.66) and the hotels were markedly nicer than those in other countries -- we had AC, hot showers, complete bathroom walls, balconies AND CNN international! Over 22 days we had 24 meals that cost under $5. One day in Hue we had lunch for $.78 -- granted it was pho and coffee eaten while seated on a dirty curb but STILL! If you wanna live like a king Vietnam is highly recommended.

Ok, enough. I could continue to entertain you with the minutia of cost of traveling in South East Asia but I suspect that there are no readers left down here at the bottom of the page. If you're planning a trip of your own or if you're one of those elusive Random Access Babble super fans I'll happily (if a little wearily) send you a copy of the grand spreadsheet, just drop me and email.

The Bug and Bathroom Experience

The Gibbon Experience was many things. Sweeping views of the rain forest that seemed never ending. Lightening storms that turned the whole world purple. Zip lines that stretched for miles 25 feet over the canopy. A hike that was by no means the easy hour that was promised. (Proving that, the world over, from Horst Klemm to the average Laotion villager, hikers are all evil lying scum). Winds so fierce that we twice had to evacuate -- zip lining blind out into the pitch black night and dodging falling tree limbs in a mad dash through the jungle. But as I sit down to recount our story of playing George of the Jungle for 2 days nothing comes alive on the paper save the stories of giant insects and questionable trips to the toilet. So here you will find no gibbons (we didn't find any in the jungle either, though we woke each morning to their ambulance-like singing) for which I am sorry but my muses lead me only towards potty humor (at least I'm not the only one -- see here for one of our treehouse-mates more poetic account of his own adventures in the jungle loo).

I have never been able to sleep through the night. No matter how tired I am, no matter how many drinks I refuse after 9pm, I will invariably wake up in the wee hours having to wee. When my bladder rudely interrupted the dream I was having about a ring that played music, the jungle world was pitch black and noisy. Insects buzzed around and threw themselves in fits against the protective sheet hung like armour around the mats and blankets that made up our bed. Something of considerable heft was wiggling around in the palm leaves of the treehouse roof. I did not want to get up and make the long climb down 2 staircases into the open air bathroom where hornets congregated like the toilet was their office water cooler. I squeezed my eyes back closed, I crossed my legs and thought sleepy thoughts. But my bladder would not quiet: "Time to pee, time to pee, TIME TO PEE!" Left with no choice other than getting up or wetting the sheets (which I would have more seriously considered if I didn't think the urine smell would attract even more beasties bed-side) I crawled out of our cocoon and into the night.

I had to turn on my headlamp lest the boogie man get me, or I kill myself on the stairs but each flash of the light was a beacon alerting every bug in the jungle to attack my head. So I'd turn it on, quickly scan the ground for slippery steps, egg-sized beetles and monster paws, then plunge myself back into complete darkness, shuffle forward a few steps and repeat. I eventually reached the bathroom only to live out childhood nightmare #437.

I scanned the room with my headlamp shining it from the curtain that we called a door to the railing that we pretended was a wall and off the edge into the abyss of the jungle beyond. I entered after the all clear (or the mostly clear -- there were moths and other unidentifiable swarming around my head almost immediately but none seemed bigger than a quarter so I hoped that I could take them.). Before hitting the off button on the light and squatting I quickly illuminated the toilet where some leaf or twig was floating around in the bowl. Two or three thin black strands seemed to be reaching up from the depths to curl over the porcelain lip -- certainly animated only by the lapping of the water. Or, perhaps, more certainly a living creature intent on biting my behind. As I stood there with my light aimed into the pot and an army of insect friends installing a velvet rope in front of the dance club that had just opened on my forehead, the leaves or twigs in the toilet quickly came to life. Flicking up out of the water and trying to cling to the rim were at least 3 antenna or legs belonging to either a mutant lobster lost miles and miles from the ocean or a spider the size of my fist.

A brief aside: For a few years when I was in elementary school my family took off the month of April to go camping on the beach in Baja, Mexico. One year when I was 7 or 8 we rolled home from vacation after dark and as we pulled into our driveway my mom joked that we'd been gone so long that the house would be full of cobwebs and that (most hilarious of all) there might even be cobwebs IN THE TOILET! What the fuck was wrong with this woman I'll never know, but I easily made the leap from cobwebs to spiders to my naked butt and have been a little pee-shy ever since. I always check the pot for 8 legged friends before sitting down. I can't quite tell you what awful thing a spider might do to my butt but I'm certain it won't be inviting me into its home for fly wings and lemonade. My white ass descending on the spider's web would certainly be seen as an invasion and the spider would, almost understandably, retaliate in whatever way a spider can.

Back to the treehouse. Thank god I had the paranoid good sense to check the toilet for arachnids but now that this nightmare had come true I certainly couldn't pee. And, according to my bladder, I certainly couldn't *not* pee. An impasse. But worry not! Your quick thinking intrepid heroine had a bucket and a plan. I stuck the flush bucket under the facet of the sink filling it to brimming while keeping my eye on Daddy Super Long Legs over there and then bravely leaned towards the pot and dumped all of the water, then filled the bucket a second time and doused again. The toilet had a hose that snaked its way 50 feet from the treehouse platform down into the jungle floor and I figured that if I could wash the spider at least to ground level and then pee as quickly as possible he couldn't climb back up the hose fast enough to launch a counter attack. The plan was executed perfectly and my still spider bite free toucas scurried back up the steps and practically dove into bed. Pulling the blankets tightly around my neck I lay my head back down and again listened to the chirp, rattle, peep of the forest -- this time with the assurance that I was safe in my own burrow until morning.

At dawn, after an unsuccessful Gibbon tracking hike through a jungle filled with mist and a breakfast experiment of tomato omelet and sticky rice (marginally successful), I sat perched on the edge of our treehouse with a mug of bitter over-steeped tea. My gazing out over the canopy was interrupted by a tickling on my right foot which I reached down to scratch as I slowly pulled my gaze from the distracting beauty of the forest -- so my eyes and my fingers met their nightmare together. Perched on the arch of my foot just right of center where my white flip flop tan line extends over the top of a juicy green vein a blob of gray snot the size of a lima bean was perched. Oh, but it was worse then it sounds because even more terrifying than the thought that someone had shot a huge booger onto my foot was the reality that a leech was clamped into my bloodline sucking away. My mug of tea crashed onto the floor and of course I screamed as I performed the most violent hokey pokey with my foot, managing to successfully dislodge Nature's Vampire. A river of bright red blood poured from my vein as Geoff and my treemates danced around me looking for the evil leech and eventually forcing his blood fattened body through a seam between two of the floorboards. For the duration of our trip I couldn't walk more than 25 feet without pausing for a thorough leach check.

Night two in the jungle and again I'm awakened by the call of nature (and also, again, surrounded by the many calls of actual nature). This is surprising as we spent day two hiking up hills that no human should ascend and zipping across the jungle at speeds previously known only to gibbons and NASCAR drivers. I admired brown and white butterflies too big for jam jars proving that not all gigantic insects are evil. I should be too tired to pee. As I lie in bed, willing my bladder to shut the fuck up I could only think that last night's midnight jaunt into hell's bathroom was horribly dangerous and ill advised. The number of ways I could have died (not to mention accidentally eaten a bug) were myriad. Never mind the aquatic spider attack -- I could have stepped on a poisonous snake, I could have been attacked by Rodents of Unusual Size, I could have startled by a moth, slipped on a damp board and fell over the side of the treehouse! I cursed my bladder over and over again but as usual mentally willing oneself to an empty bladder was wholly ineffective. I cannot blame PMS or mommy brain or any of the other easy excuses for the following embarrassing situation -- perhaps it was the bit of sleep still clinging to my mind but most likely I'm just a much much bigger baby then I'd like to admit. As I sat up in our bed mulling over my options (1. Use the cup we brought up to brush our teeth as a makeshift upstairs toilet, 2. Get up, make it half way down the stairs, be attacked by some unknown creature and die, 3. Will myself not to pee and eventually lose control and turn our boudoir into a makeshift diaper) I began... to cry. I KNOW. At this Geoff woke up and was thankfully too annoyed to actively mock me. I couldn't will myself to rise and face the haunted treehouse alone and so eventually Geoff was forced to slip onto his white horse and escort his princess to the loo. Oh romance, will you ever die?

So, again, I lived. Despite the obvious threat of death I cannot recommend The Gibbon Experience enough. I have never felt smaller, or more alone that I did huddled in the copula of the treehouse surrounded by creepy crawlies and trees the size of skyscrapers. I have never felt adrenaline pump through my veins or stared in awe as acutely as I did soaring between treehouses on a metal cable high above the jungle. I have never known love as big as a man willing to rise from bed, brave a world of dangerous beasties and escort me to the potty.

(more stunning pictures here)