Travelling on a Budget

April 02, 2019

Travelling on a Budget

I finally found my camera that I took with me travelling all those months ago. Looking through the photos it seems that I stopped taking photos on it some time in Japan, with a brief stint of using it again when we were in China. Good work Immy, nice one.

So, having worked and earned money for the entire year, my friend Roxy and I went travelling on the 1st of May 2018.

Our mums took us to the airport, we had a little cry and held hands on the escalator up into the terminal ready to embark on our biggest adventure yet.

So my first piece of advice is:

Travel with someone you really know and love

Rox and I have been friends since we were roughly 10. We know each other as well as we know our selves, and I can honestly say we didn't fall out the entire trip (except maybe one minor tiff on a bus 2 days before we came home which was entirely my fault!!)

Travelling with just one other person was ideal because there was no division like you can find in some big groups. We discussed what we wanted to do on different days and where we wanted to go.

Also we tried to make sure we didn't get sick of each other, in Thailand we went on a tour group which was a slightly odd but fun mix of people, and for our final 10 days of our trip Alice joined us.

I would say it is probably better to travel alone than to go with people you are going to fall out with, trust me I have heard some real horror stories.

Have a rough plan, but don't be afraid to deviate from it

Since all the photos from this post are form our time in Japan, I will use that as an example.

Roxy did most of the route planning for Japan and she did an amazing job. We had three weeks there, and I don't think we spent more than 3 nights anywhere.

We started and finished in Tokyo visiting Roxy's family friends, which I have to say was such a luxury. We travelled south, using the bullet trains to get around and it worked perfectly.

But don't get too hung up on plans. in the picture above, we were meant to be going on a walk in a beautiful mountain village and it was raining, I mean really tipping it down and we were freezing. so in the end we had a much more relaxed day and just saw what we wanted to see.

This also happened to us in China, where we went to a mouton village for 2 days specifically to see the sunrise over the monument at the top of a holy mountain and it was so foggy we couldn't even see each other, let alone the sun or the top of the monument!

Take in all the culture, but not too much culture!

You can't help but be overwhelmed by going to a place which is like no where else you're been before.

Japan was so beautiful and full of so many amazing tradition so different from our own. We also had the immense privilege of being shown around my the mother of Roxy's Japanese exchange from school when we were in Japan.

However, I think it was when we got to China that we really went into sensory overload. When we got to Shanghai our first stop was the world's biggest Starbucks, well worth a visit in my opinion. We let ourselves have an afternoon of sitting there reading our books, people watching and eating some of the foods that we'd missed in our month away from home. There is no right way to do travelling so sometimes you've got to give yourselves a break.

Pick a budget, but have some wiggle room

Ok so I'm not going to lie this was not something we were amazing at. We deliberately started off in Japan as the most expensive country we were visiting, then China, then Thailand.

We had both been working so did have money put aside but didn't want to burn through all our savings.

Budget is very personal, we tried to keep our accommodation costs fairly low so we could spend money on other things. Some days we ate all of our meals at a 7/11 and sometimes we had fancy sushi.

One thing I would absolutely say is make sure you have bought your ticket home before you leave. More than anything it is quite helpful to have an end date, and not to run out of money and be stuck somewhere, appealing to the bank of mum and dad to bail you out!