What a Round-the-World Trip Actually Costs

Visas vary by country and by nationality and by how organised you are. China required an application before departure, processed through the Chinese consulate in London, which cost around sixty pounds including the administrative fee. On the road, visas are typically obtained at borders or at embassies in the nearest capital city. Cambodia charges twenty-five US dollars at the border for a tourist visa, which you pay in cash and receive within about twenty minutes, which is either impressively efficient or encouragingly unpretentious depending on your reference point for border bureaucracy.

The flights are the largest single cost and the one most susceptible to strategy. I bought individual one-way tickets rather than a single round-the-world ticket, because the one-way approach allowed me to adjust the itinerary as I went without paying change fees on a pre-committed route. The total for the main flight segments, UK to Japan, Japan to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Manila, Manila to Beijing, Beijing to Kathmandu, Nepal to Thailand, Thailand to Vietnam, Bali to Australia, Australia to New Zealand, came to just under four thousand pounds. This sounds like a lot and it is a lot, but divided across a two-year trip it represents a lower cost per day than a reasonable hotel room in London. The framing matters.

On the ground, daily spending across Southeast Asia has been running at roughly thirty pounds per day, which covers accommodation, food, local transport, and a reasonable amount of going out. This is not the absolute minimum. Accommodation in Vietnam can be had for eight pounds a night in a clean and perfectly adequate guesthouse. A bowl of pho on a street in Hanoi costs the equivalent of eighty pence and is one of the better meals available in the country at any price. A beer in Boracay in the Philippines is forty-five pence. The thirty-pound daily figure reflects the reality of actually living in these places rather than surviving in them, which involves eating in restaurants sometimes, taking the right bus rather than the cheap one when you are sick, buying the Columbia trousers in Makati because they will last two years and the budget alternative will not.

Japan costs more. Japan was running closer to sixty pounds a day, which is the difference between a country that has successfully exported its economic model to the rest of the world and a country that is still building the infrastructure the economic model eventually produces. A pod hotel in Nagasaki costs forty pounds a night. A hostel dorm in Hanoi costs eight. The gap reflects not just economic development but the relationship between cost of living and what travellers are willing to pay, which in Japan is calibrated to locals who earn considerably more than locals in most of Southeast Asia.

Separately from daily spending, I paid for two organised trips through GAP Adventures. The Beijing to Kathmandu group tour, which included the Tibet crossing, the Everest base camp visit, and everything in between, cost fifteen hundred pounds and was worth every pound of it for the access it provided to places that would have been difficult and in some cases impossible to visit independently, Tibet in particular requiring a specific permit and a licensed guide that GAP absorbed into the price. The Bangkok to Bali leg, booked for August, will cost a similar amount.

The total for the original itinerary plus the additions that accumulated as I adjusted the route came to approximately seven thousand five hundred pounds before departure. On the ground, at thirty to sixty pounds a day depending on location, the daily running costs add up to somewhere between eleven thousand and twenty thousand pounds across two years, which is the range between survival mode and living reasonably well. Most people end up somewhere in the middle.

The question underneath all this, which nobody asks directly but which is implicit in every conversation about the money, is whether it is worth it. It costs roughly the same as a small car, or a year of rent in a medium-sized British city, or a kitchen renovation that will produce modest satisfaction and then be taken for granted within about three months. It produces something that is more difficult to account for on a spreadsheet. I find myself unable to argue against the exchange.