What works best in one place may not work best in another.  Our actual spending per country is listed below and will be updated each time we leave a country for a new one.  These dollar values all represent how much we spend together on an average day for each category.  The final column represents how much the “average” day costs us in each country.

Check out our spending summaries for Central America and South America!

Food:  This is what we eat; sometimes at a restaurant, sometimes snacks from the grocery store.

Lodging:  Most directly this is what we pay to sleep.  If we purchase a host gift, we include it in this column.  Overnight transportation is not included here.

Activity:  This is what we do for fun and can include a lot of different things.  Kayak rentals, park entrance fees, tour costs, movies to fill time and the occasional night out.   When we need to pay for transportation exclusively for an activity we usually count it here.

Transportation:  Trains, planes and automobiles….and of course buses.  This gets most complicated with big airfare; when we fly from Central America to South America we apply half that  cost to CA and the other half to SA…it gets applied to the total and not to any particular country regardless of where we take off and land.

Misc:  Everything else: visas, guidebooks, medicine, bathrooms, internet access, souvenirs, phone calls, hygiene, gifts, postage…you get the picture.

The Confusing Part:  The header row (gray rows) for each region includes costs (such as transportation between countries) that are not applied to any specific country.  For example, our flight to Africa is include in African Transportation but is not applied to any specific countries.  Also, nothing we purchase in the USA is included.