As of October 31st, I've been on the road for exactly 20 days, and ridden approximately 800km, or 480 miles. Overall, the going has been a lot slower than I anticipated, for a number of reasons. First, the terrain in northeastern Thailand and in Laos is pretty intense. The mountains aren't tall, but the roads are not well graded and in many places I've had to get off and push the bike. Now that we're out of the mountains, it looks like most the route from Vietnam all the way to Singapore will be relatively flat, hopefully enabling us to speed things up a bit. I'm kind of sad to see the mountains go, though, because they were also the source of some awesome scenery and special places.
Traveling as a foursome is also a mixed blessing. We save a lot of money on accommodation, but probably spend more on beer. Gain a sense of comraderie, but lose some personal independence. We also have to wait for the slowpoke, the guy who can't get out of bed in the morning (that'd be me), and deal with the guy who always wants to go longer and further. I'd say that the benefits of remaining a group outweigh the disadvantages.
Above, you can see a graph of my daily mileage (and kilometerage) overlaid with my overall average KM/day. I'm not really happy with how this turned out, and for November, I'm going to try to find a better way to represent my physical progress, and maybe include a line for average speed and whatnot, too. If you have any ideas, let me know. Anyway, you can see that we've been doing 0 kilometers (resting) many days. Rain, sickness, serendipity; they all play a role in deciding when to take it easy. I'm hoping that in future months, we can churn out more distance in a shorter time each day, and take fewer rest days overall. We'll see if this happens.
Next is a breakdown of my expenditures for the month of October. Total expenditures were about $398, minus $118 in visa fees = $280. Since I was only on the road for 20 days in October, this means I would've spent $420 if the report had covered 30 days. This is a bit more than I'd expected, and initially I was hoping to keep expenditures below $400 each month, not including visa fees, which I can't really do anything about. I had to pay for the Vietnam visa ($85!) this month, as well as the Laos visa. Over the next few months, visa fees should go down quite a bit unless we end up going to Myanmar.
Where else can I cut expenses? Try to camp/couchsurf more. I don't really want to spend less money on food, because then I'd be sacrificing nutrition, not to mention the second most experientially pleasant thing in life, for budgetary concerns, which would be lame. I could cut out coffee (!), but I think I might die if I do that, and there is so much high-quality coffee in so many different forms in Southeast Asia, I feel like it'd be a shame to do that. Beer. I'll cut out beer. Except for every once and a while. How bout that?
Finally, a pie graph of how I've been spending my nights. You can see that the lion's share of my sleepy time has been spent in paid accommodation (hotels, hostels, etc.). These average $3-$4/night, but that adds up over time. I'd like to do more camping and temple-staying, but that might have to wait till we head back to Thailand, the land of plentiful temples and safe, beautiful places to pitch your tent. Finally, mooching, which includes couchsurfing/warmshowers type websites, as well as staying with friends and random strangers, has been a significant source of free accommodation. I really enjoy this type of thing, as it almost always leads to some interesting experiences, but at the same time, being quite the introvert, I get pretty exhausted if I have t o talk to new people all the time, which limits how much I want to give myself up to the hospitality of strangers.
That's it for the October report! Let me know if you want to see any other particular information graphically represented for future months, or if you have any other good ideas for how I can save money!
