DRAWING THE BALANCE - SOUTH AMERICA
After travelling nearly 35,000km in 10 weeks, our trip in South America has come to an end, and we are (nearly) back where we started, on a stopover in Milan. Other than stocking up on supplies (mainly cosmetics such as our favourite L'Occitane sun screen) and getting our new guide book (perhaps unsurprisingly, it is quite difficult to find a book about Japan or China in Colombia which is in English) we decided to do a quick reckoning about our trip, hand out a few OZ-car awards to our readers and share a couple statistics that might be useful if you are planning your holiday in South America.
To start with here is our completed itinerary in South America across 4 countries:
Lost (but not found)
We quickly found that when living out of a backpack and changing locations every couple of days, our ownership of personal items is sometimes more transitory than they would otherwise be at home. We try to pay extra attention to the major valuables, but small things sometimes slip through the cracks. Luckily we didn’t lose anything critical (although we would have lost our passports at the border crossing between Peru and Bolivia if the person walking behind us wouldn’t have noticed that we dropped it!). So for the sake of posterity and a few laughs, here is the list of all our personal items which decided they liked South America so much, they wanted to stay (if you see a pattern, with a certain name appearing more often than others, I think it just goes to see who carries more responsibility on their shoulder and has more things to pay attention to):
Deodorant stick (Sz) – left at home in Hungary
Shampoo (Sz) – left in shower
Soap box – left in shower
Straw hats (R+Sz) – left on bus (in separate occasions!)
1 underwear + 1 t-shirt (R) – lost in laundry
Diving mask (Sz) – donated to the sea lions in the Galapagos
1 binocular (Sz) – left in canoe before having used it once, after less than 24 hours ownership...
Camera lense cap (R) - dropped on the street
Bank card (Sz) – left in ATM by accident (ATMs in South America give cash first, then return your card - unless you’re gone by then…)
OZ-car awards
A huge thank you goes out to our family, all of our friends and readers for keeping us motivated to write this travel journal! We greatly appreciate your patience with our delayed blog posts (although now we have caught up to the present), we know it can get a bit annoying when articles arrive in a flood after a week or two of internet drought. Also, being far away from home, we needed some support from these people along the way that was greatly appreciated and invaluable for us. To show our appreciation, we would like to recognise a few contributions and hand out well-deserved OZ-car awards (cue drumroll!):
Best logistics provider: Our parents and my brother (for visiting us in Istanbul and resupplying us with all the things we had lost / depleted but are hard to obtain on the road)
Best mail clerk: Nora Nemes and Istvan Mag (for taking care of the important but unavoidable mail we continue to receive in London, including tax declarations, pay slips and my replacement bank card after the aforementioned incident with a Colombian ATM)
Most thorough reader: Lilla Ivady (for being our most enthusiastic reader and asking us at least 10 follow-up questions about each post, thereby single-handedly propelling the town of Erd to generate the 2nd most page visits on our blog according to Google Analytics!)
Best pre-travel gear advice: Carolin Wolf and Henry Zimmermann (for sharing their gear knowledge and thereby helping to ensure that we would want for nothing despite having to fit into a smallish single backpack each)
Best travel advice – South America: Peter Ignits, Liz Hollis and Georgie Williams (for sharing their extensive travel experiences from South America)
Best travel advice – Asia: Astrid Neve and Razvan Pravat (for sharing their Japanese travel itinerary and warning us on time that Japan isn’t a place where you can just show up at a hostel without a booking…)
The awards for the Asian portion of our trip are still up for grabs (including the possibility of new award categories), so feel free to be active!
Cost breakdown
A final piece of information which we thought might be useful for future travelers is a country-by-country breakdown of our costs.
Naturally, costs vary depending on the standard of living you want for yourself. For accommodation you can spend the night in dorm room for as little as $5, or you can stay at a luxury hotel where the sky is the limit; likewise for food (street vendors vs. restaurants) and transportation (buses vs. flights). To help gauge where our costs fit in this scale, here is an idea of what we generally aimed for (although we adjusted our standards down in more expensive places, but went for a bit more luxury in cheaper locations):
Accommodation: Private room with own bathroom at a clean hostel, usually found via our guidebook (Rough Guide) or booking.com (although we had quite a few days with shared bathrooms where the price difference wasn’t worth it, or there was no private bathroom available)
Food: At least one cooked meal in a restaurant a day (with the occasional treat at a nice / fancy restaurant), but sometimes prepared our own breakfast. We had at least one coffee / fresh fruit juice per day, but no alcohol (which is probably not very common but when fruit juices are so nice who would want a bitter beer??).
Transportation: As mentioned previously, inter-country flights are quite expensive, so we either flew on a domestic low-cost airline or took a long-distance bus. Additionally, we managed to use our airline miles for a few flights saving quite a bit of time and money. Within cities, we took shared buses with the occasional taxi to/from our hostel when we had a lot of luggage or when public transport was too complicated. The figures below exclude the cost of the return flight from Europe.
Activities: While we didn’t skip any activities (that is why we are travelling after all), we did try to see how they could be done more cheaply, either by shopping around with different agencies, negotiating, doing less pricy/comfortable alternatives (Machu Picchu by bus + walking instead of by train) or doing it ourselves (e.g. for day hikes that are well signposted). At the same time, if we saw something that was worth it (e.g. the pricey but special eco-lodge in the Bolivian Amazon), we decided to go for it.
Taking all this into account, our costs per country were:
We hope you had a good time reading our updates and you found them entertaining or potentially useful for planning a visit to South America. We`re looking forward to sharing further stories with you from Asia! Our first stop will be Istanbul followed by Tokyo! It is hard to believe we will actually start getting closer to Sydney!