January has been quite a different month altogether. I separated from the shakies just after we entered Cambodia on January 3rd, and so I've spent the entire month on my own, which meant that every time I had to pay for accommodation, I had to pay for the entire room, instead of 1/3 of it! I also spent quite a bit of time hanging out with non-shaky Mike at the beach in Sihanoukville, where prices were quite high, resulting in my spending almost three times as much as usual on accommodation.
Food in Cambodia also tends to be more expensive than elsewhere. Although it was certainly possible to get a good meal for $1.25 in out of the way places, anywhere with any pretense at all of catering to tourists had their prices jacked way up. And as I wrote about in a previous post, since locals live off of an average of $150/mo, that means pretty much any town with a restaurant is catering to foreigners.
Finally, I actually spent money on motorized transportation this month. It was kind of a fiasco to be honest, and I should've planned better. I applied for my Thai visa in Phnom Penh, and then biked on to Om Permaculture Food Forest, thinking I would volunteer there for a day or two and then come back by bus to pick up the visa (it's only 140km from A to B; about 85 miles, or an hour and a half in the car right?). It ended up taking two full days to get back to Phnom Penh, pick up the visa, and then go back to Om, wasting lots of time and money. I should've just stayed in Phnom Penh a few more days with my awesome host, who was letting me camp on her roof for free, and arrived at Om a few days late. Oh well; in the future, I'll just try harder to take it slow and not be too urgent with all the things I want to do. Live and learn.
But even though I'm trying to conserve money as much as I can, I don't want budgetary issues to get in the way of doing the things I want to do. I wouldn't have given up spending a week chilling with a good friend on the beach or piloting a sailing catamaran on the open ocean to save what is in the long run, an inconsequential sum of money. On the other hand, I should really try to make up for some of this overexpenditure in coming months, in the form of increased camping and volunteering! Yay!
You can see from the chart above that January was filled with days off the bike, punctuated by extra-long days in the saddle. Cambodia is pretty much totally flat, save for a couple hundred kilometers of road through the Cardamom Mountains (really just small hills) in the southwest, and some bigger mountains in the east (where I didn't go). So pretty much every riding day I did 100km (60 miles) or more, and then spent a day or two off the bike. I was sick with some kind of stomach bug for a couple of days in Kratie (Jan 7-8), hung out with Mingyu in Kampon Cham (Jan 10-11), stayed at Om Foodforest (16-18th), and hung out on the each with non-shaky Mike (20-27), so quite a few days off the bike, which also contributed to the extra expenditures. It pretty much costs money to get off the bike, since you stop concentrating on the bare essentials like food and...well really just food, and start worrying about entertaining yourself, whether it be through fun activities (usually cost money), beer (money), or hot showers (more money).
That's it for the first month of 2014! I'm not even going to publish a chart for my accommodation statistics this month; I stayed in paid accommodation 25 nights, camped 2, and mooched off of people for 4. Wouldn't be a very illustrative graph. Happy New Year!
Food in Cambodia also tends to be more expensive than elsewhere. Although it was certainly possible to get a good meal for $1.25 in out of the way places, anywhere with any pretense at all of catering to tourists had their prices jacked way up. And as I wrote about in a previous post, since locals live off of an average of $150/mo, that means pretty much any town with a restaurant is catering to foreigners.
Finally, I actually spent money on motorized transportation this month. It was kind of a fiasco to be honest, and I should've planned better. I applied for my Thai visa in Phnom Penh, and then biked on to Om Permaculture Food Forest, thinking I would volunteer there for a day or two and then come back by bus to pick up the visa (it's only 140km from A to B; about 85 miles, or an hour and a half in the car right?). It ended up taking two full days to get back to Phnom Penh, pick up the visa, and then go back to Om, wasting lots of time and money. I should've just stayed in Phnom Penh a few more days with my awesome host, who was letting me camp on her roof for free, and arrived at Om a few days late. Oh well; in the future, I'll just try harder to take it slow and not be too urgent with all the things I want to do. Live and learn.
But even though I'm trying to conserve money as much as I can, I don't want budgetary issues to get in the way of doing the things I want to do. I wouldn't have given up spending a week chilling with a good friend on the beach or piloting a sailing catamaran on the open ocean to save what is in the long run, an inconsequential sum of money. On the other hand, I should really try to make up for some of this overexpenditure in coming months, in the form of increased camping and volunteering! Yay!
You can see from the chart above that January was filled with days off the bike, punctuated by extra-long days in the saddle. Cambodia is pretty much totally flat, save for a couple hundred kilometers of road through the Cardamom Mountains (really just small hills) in the southwest, and some bigger mountains in the east (where I didn't go). So pretty much every riding day I did 100km (60 miles) or more, and then spent a day or two off the bike. I was sick with some kind of stomach bug for a couple of days in Kratie (Jan 7-8), hung out with Mingyu in Kampon Cham (Jan 10-11), stayed at Om Foodforest (16-18th), and hung out on the each with non-shaky Mike (20-27), so quite a few days off the bike, which also contributed to the extra expenditures. It pretty much costs money to get off the bike, since you stop concentrating on the bare essentials like food and...well really just food, and start worrying about entertaining yourself, whether it be through fun activities (usually cost money), beer (money), or hot showers (more money).
That's it for the first month of 2014! I'm not even going to publish a chart for my accommodation statistics this month; I stayed in paid accommodation 25 nights, camped 2, and mooched off of people for 4. Wouldn't be a very illustrative graph. Happy New Year!
