budget busters - what costs surprised you?

My bf and I are creating approximate daily budgets for each country we plan to visit on our RTW (based on info from fellow booties, Rough Guides, etc.) We did this for our travels in Europe and it was extremely helpful.

We plan to hit South America, India, and Asia. As I research, I've been finding that while everyday expenses (i.e. food, lodging, etc.) are fairly cheap in these areas, there have been some surprises...
For example, I just found out that Machu Picchu admission is around $45 which is much more than I expected. Our visa to Boliva costs $135 each. And though I know Japan is not a cheap place to visit, I was floored to find out a 7-day Japan Rail Pass costs over $400.

The extreme high/low of prices is making it difficult for me to gauge if my daily budgets are correct. Obviously, the longer we stay in a place, the further our dollar will go. But I'm curious...from those of you who have been to these places, if you could share what costs surprised you along the way?

Things that can cost more than you think are
Visas, innoculations,injections,malaria tablets(malarone is expensive)
The Japan rail travel you speak of was £350 in 2007 and I simpatize, we ended up not going to Japan because of the cost, so it's still on the list.
Some activities can be very expensive, we took a sailing boat to the Great Barrier Reef and this cost quite a bit but it was sooooooooooo worth it.
Tourist sites can be expensive and it's not always easy to know beforehand just how must things costs you just have to have a stab at it.
Safaris are expensive as I'm just finding out, we are off in October to Africa.
We found it could be more expensive staying in hostels because you pay per person compared to a budget hotel.
India, buy rail tickets from the station it's a lot less than going thru an agent. We got ripped off in Delhi for one of our tickets the guy charged us three times the cost. Only found out when we took the tickets back to the station in another city for a refund.
Always ask for discounts, the worst that can happen is they say no.
Don't use Internet cafes for banking, use the better hotels they usually have a business section and it's worth paying a little more for the security it gives. In some countries you can use the libraries for free.
Best of luck
Jean

For the most part the really budget busting items are touristy activities and famous sites. Just getting to the Galapagos is $550, and that's before you see anything or book a cruise. If you have specific activities or famous locations you're planning on visiting, do the advance research about how much they cost and create a budget separate from your daily spend for large items.

The costs that surprised me are mostly things that I wound up not doing because they were too expensive. Turkey was bad for this as hot air ballooning (around $500 per person), hanggliding and white water rafting (about $100 pp for either) were activities that sounded like a lot of fun, but I said no to over price.

Most expensive admission charges get rolled into the cost estimates that get bandied about the internet. When I say you can do fine in Egypt on $40/day, that includes the expensive site admissions. Countries with really outsized admission costs for a single site just get absorbed into other days when you do very little. $100 or so for a 3-day Petra pass got absorbed in the 4 days days when we lazed about and spent only $15 on full board accommodation.

Some "larger" items are avoidable...Syrian historical sites gouge foreigners for $7-$10 each - and you can visit several in a day - but with a student card come down to $0.25-$0.40.

Siem Reap, the Cambodian gate city for Anchor Wat has been nicknamed Siem Ripoff by backpackers. 3 day admission to the temples cost $75, and everything in the city has been designed for tourists, and it shows in the costs, as well as the amenities available there. Of course, it is still cheap compared to a first world city, and it is the main way that Cambodia brings in hard currency. And the Anchor Wat complex is AMAZING! And as 2wanderers mentioned, the expense of going to Anchor gets balanced out by the cheapness of the rest of Cambodia.

It's not on your list but make sure to stay away from Australia as it's even harder on the budget than Greenland!

busman7 wrote:It's not on your list but make sure to stay away from Australia as it's even harder on the budget than Greenland!

How bad is Australia? We were thinking of staying there for a few months.

Thanks everyone! It's incredibly helpful to hear the firsthand advice.

Jeanie99, based on your research do you think the Japan Rail Pass is even worth it? I've heard of taking buses, but when I started calculating our routes, the costs seemed to add up to around the same price as the Rail Pass. I really don't want to take Japan off of our list, but if transportation is so expensive, we might need to re-think...

2wanderers, thanks for the tip about creating a separate budget for specific activities/sights, I'll definitely do that. Did you find the 3-day Petra Pass useful? I had assumed Petra would be a day trip...

Flackattack, I had no idea Ankor Wat was so expensive (still getting through all our guide books) but as mentioned, hopefully those costly tourist attractions will get absorbed into other days.

Busman, we're actually hoping to get to Australia at the end of our trip if we have any money left over in hopes of possibly landing jobs there. We'll see... that leg of our journey is a long way away.

Thanks again everyone...

I found the Japan Rail pass really useful especially if you are going from Tokyo to Kyoto or further. There are lots of trains in Japan and we took them all over. So we never had to add extra transportation costs once we had the passes. However, there were times we when chose that rail company over others because of it and we could have done more convenient routes if we didn't use it. Still I don't regret it at all. (We were there in 07 when it was slightly cheaper as mentioned above.)

If you want to work in OZ that's a different story & your experience will be that much better.

Costs are in my blog but food & lodging averaged $100 AUD/day & that was staying about 1/2 the time in dorm rooms with 12 nights out of my 33 there on buses, trains & the Tasmanian ferry.

Splurged to the tune of $250 each on a trip to the rock & a balloon ride, the rest just normal expenses however I ate out the whole time, didn't cook in the hostels + on average 1 beer/ day is included so probably could have cut it by 25%, still expensive compared to SE Asia where I rented an apartment in Bangkok for 2 months that only cost $10/day utilities included.

Food out is more expensive but we don't have tipping. There are ways to get around the expensive food, just choose places carefully. Still, you can't really be expecting it to be like China or India.

I'd say that balloon rides would be expensive anywhere you go.

However! I'm researching stuff for our Queensland trip and things like the Australia Zoo are $40, the Currumbin animal sanctuary is about the same, etc, and that has surprised me greatly.

C-and-C wrote:2wanderers, thanks for the tip about creating a separate budget for specific activities/sights, I'll definitely do that. Did you find the 3-day Petra Pass useful? I had assumed Petra would be a day trip...

Oh, yes. Petra is in no way a day trip. It's a sizable city spread out over mountains and canyons and is absolutely fabulous. People who go with a day pass usually leave fully satisfied, having seen what they came to see, but they miss the stuff that doesn't make the postcards (and even some of the places that do). It's a great hiking location and there's so much to explore, you could fill far more than 3 days.

C-and-C wrote:do you think the Japan Rail Pass is even worth it? I've heard of taking buses, but when I started calculating our routes, the costs seemed to add up to around the same price as the Rail Pass.

It really depends on how long you are going to be there, where you're going, and where you are flying in and out of. If you can provide more details I can probably give you a decent answer. Certainly the Tokyo/Kyoto trip can be done cheaper with overnight buses which will also save on two nights accommodation.

C-and-C wrote:I really don't want to take Japan off of our list, but if transportation is so expensive, we might need to re-think...

It's not just transportation. If you want to do more than walk around, have early nights, and eat noodles from 7-11 than everything is a budget buster in Japan. Plus the accommodation options outside of hostels (ryokans, love hotels, capsule hotels, etc.) are unique in their own right and would be a shame to skimp out on.

C-and-C wrote:India

There aren't really any budget busters in India that I can recall. The Taj can be a few bucks ( around 20 dollars quite a few years back) and overnighting on the backwaters of Kerala can be a good chunk.

C-and-C wrote:Australia

Really no better or worse than traveling around Europe. The main differences are often large distance to travel between destinations and some isolated places you may want to see that will require getting on a tour. Those two things can really add up.

Regarding the Japanese rail pass, as a student my distant relatives I was staying with were amazed that I was going on the bullet train at all because it's so expensive and they all travel by bus when my age. But then I had free accommodation in Tokyo so I figured it worked out and Kyoto wasn't expensive either- plus this way I had the motivation to go on a daytrip to Hiroshima (completely doable from Kyoto) which I wouldn't have been able to do without the pass.

Another thing to keep in mind is honestly the trains in Japan are part of the experience- I'm a geek so I loved it, and it's the fastest you'll ever travel overland so certainly a novel experience.

As someone else mentioned I don't think Oz/NZ are that much more expensive than Europe, though the additional factor of distance really doesn't help. You don't notice as much in NZ partly because of the cost and partly because it's so much more compact compared to its neighbor, as the whole country is about the size of the UK.

Regarding my own issues of sticker shock, even though the pound was at a record low in the UK I had to leave after two weeks because I literally couldn't afford to stay longer! But not like you're never warned of that I suppose... traveling alone, costs always went way up when it came to going to more remote areas without public transport- I can't drive stick so car rental often wasn't an option, and even backpacker tours aren't that cheap. My biggest expense after flights was a backpacker tour from Cape Town- Vic Falls, which I absolutely loved, but I knew from the beginning I wanted to do it so I set that money aside. If you have even a remote idea of where you're going that's really the way to do it- make a note of your big ticket expenses and set them aside in a separate account even so they're not a part of your daily budget.

Snorkeling with whale sharks in OZ was $375 back in 2006. Definitely worth it, but heart attack inducing when we found out. Fuel was also very expensive, esp. in Western Oz and NT. Might have thought twice about renting a car had we known how high it would be out there. In general, driving from Perth to Darwin was awesome, but everything cost more than we thought, but we were at the point of no return so had to make the most of it.

Africa in general was more expensive than I expected, especially lodging and some transportation costs, like the bus from Windhoek to Joburg.