As promised in one of the very first posts on this blog, here is our first monthly report from our trip. However, we started the trip mid month, so it is more like a fortnightly report this time!
Welcome to our Monthly Reports series. This series of posts, reviewing the past month, is to give you an idea of how our month looked, in terms of how much we spent and what we did.
First, some arbitrary numbers for our January:
- Flights taken: 3
- ATM withdrawals: 4
- Photos kept after editing: 355
- Liters of suncream used: uncountable
What did we spend? (All values are in GBP)
- Total spent for 2 people in January (15 days): £1125
- Average per person per day: £37.50
This number doesn't include flights or other large initial expenses (like travel insurance or some of the more expensive travel gear), just our day to day expense. Here's a pie chart breaking it down:
We are aware this might seem like quite a lot. Since it was the very beginning of our trip, we expected to be a bit more spendy than we would have liked, and that's OK. For February, we're going to be trying much harder to keep to a budget of about £25 per person per day, which is what we had been planning on.
As for our categories, you may notice that what could be lumped together as ‘food' has been split in to three separate categories: food shopping, eating out and cafés (Zab has something of a penchant for sitting in cafés). This was my doing, since I was interested to see how much we spent on buying things to eat and drink when we were out compared to what we bought to eat and drink that we cooked for ourselves. I'm expecting that in February, our eating out spending will be less, though our food shopping spending might be higher as we plan to couchsurf more and stay in places with kitchens where we can cook for ourselves.
What did we do?
Well, we spent our first 10 days in Buenos Aires, ate lots of gorgeous food and generally fell in love with the city. (We're planning to go back, probably in March.) We then flew south to El Calafate, saw the famous Perito Moreno glacier, then moved north to El Chaltén and walked around some stunning mountain scenery. Generally a success, I think!
