Spendings - The Dirt

Yeah, you want to know the dirt on our trip, don't you? You don't care about the Sydney Opera House or Kakadu National Park. You think our pics are mediocre and just browse through them as you peruse your usual internet sites. You scoff when I mis-spell things or trip over a punctuation mark. You are overwhelmed when you log on after two weeks and I have 17 new posts that you will never catch up on and, frankly, don't much care to read. I mean, they're boring. Documentation of the day to day activities of traveling - come on! Write something interesting! Make something up if you have to, right?

Well, this entry is for the prying minds, the curious cats, the chatty Kathys. This one will tell you all about the bottom line, the real deal. So, the question remains: how much money did we spend on this trip around Australia? You already looked down, didn't you. The pie chart is just too tantalizing to resist - I know better than most*. Well, you may as well look now if you haven't already:
Let's analyze, shall we? We left June 8 and got back July 4. That means the trip was 26 days** long, which translates to $317 per day for both of us, or $158/day each. It sounds expensive, doesn't it? It was, damn it, that wasn't a trick question. Regardless, if you are acquainted with Kane and me, you are aware that we are relatively frugal. Not so frugal that I would resort to, say, camping or eating at McDonald's, but we're certainly budget conscious. As evidenced by the very existence (and accuracy) of the pie chart.

I don't have a lot of excuses; this country is expensive. I was impressed to see that almost a quarter of our expenses were for activities - I had not realized we had paid so much money for tours, cruises, etc. The bulk of our activity money was spent on: Fraser Island Tour; two Whitsunday Island boat/snorkeling tours; Reggie Watts tickets; the Australia Zoo; Great Barrier Reef Cruise and Snorkeling tour at Port Douglas; and two river cruises in Kakadu. To be fair, the Fraser Island trip was a two day deal that included one night accommodation and food and accounts for about a quarter of the activities costs. I just need to take deep breaths and keep saying the "once in a lifetime" mantra to keep calm with these ridiculous prices.

Transportation and accommodation were the next two big hitters - we rented a car for the entire trip which was just plain expensive and also very nice. It cost an average of $64/day for the car, but a lot of that was because they charge you a whole lot extra for pickup one place and drop off another - not really sure why. Accommodation averaged out to about $62/night which is about as good as you'll get here. We stayed in hostels most nights; got nice hotels in two places for 6 nights total. Totally worth it. Plus, you have to account for the fact that we weren't paying rent during this, and our rent here was $2173 a month. So, really, we were saving money on accommodation as compared to the past year and a half. Like how I worked the numbers there?

Food is probably where we could have saved the most money - we ate out almost every lunch and dinner. We tried not to go to super expensive places, but a standard meal for dinner here is typically between $20-$30 per plate which just racks up a huge bill really quickly. We did almost every breakfast in our hostel/hotel with cereal and powdered milk which probably saved us a few hundred bucks. Flights were the next offender, exacerbated by the trip to Darwin. Could have saved a few hundred bucks each if we had just come back to Melbourne from Cairns.

The stragglers are gas, stuff, and other. I was impressed that gas was such a small chunk of our spendings; we spent $513 driving 5719km (=3800 miles) for an average of about 33 miles to the gallon per Kane's calculations. Note also that gas here is between $4.60 and $5.60 per gallon (though it's sold in liters so the price doesn't sound so heinous). "Stuff" just means random crap we bought which mostly consisted of a bag I acquired and towels we purchased to replace the ones we left at a hostel, in addition to books, magnets, drug store supplies, internet, laundry, post cards, etc. "Other" was a category that I see was not used correctly as it also includes laundry and internet. If I cared more, I might fix that. I think we'll live.

So there you have it. You now know how much poorer we are from this trip around Australia. It was good times; can't really put a price tag on experiences and all that, right? I'll just keep telling myself that as I mourn my bank account. And that wasn't even the start of our troubles...Europe will surely trick us out of the rest of the money we have so dedicatedly saved up over the last year. Sigh. Save, save, save...spennnnndddd!!!

*I freaking love pie charts. In case it wasn't clear in the body of the post.

**I'm not counting July 4 as a day on the actual trip since we arrived back in Melbourne at 7am.