Kayiwa · · 9 min read
Every few weeks someone asks what a month in South-East Asia costs, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on how you sleep and how you move. Food is almost irrelevant to the total, which surprises people. Here is the actual arithmetic from my last thirty days across Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.
The number, first
One thousand one hundred and forty US dollars for thirty days, excluding the flight in. That is a mid-range figure — not a hostel-dorm-and-instant-noodles budget, and not a comfortable one either. It buys a private room, three cooked meals a day, and movement every four or five days.
- Beds — $480, or 42% of the total
- Food and drink — $270, or 24%
- Transport between cities — $185, or 16%
- Local transport — $95, or 8%
- Entry tickets and activities — $70, or 6%
- SIM, laundry, everything else — $40, or 4%
The thing worth noticing is that the two categories people obsess over — food and attractions — together make up less than a third. The bed is the budget.
Beds
Sixteen dollars a night on average, which in most of the region buys a private room with air conditioning and a working shower in a guesthouse a ten-minute walk from wherever you actually want to be. In Bangkok that number goes to twenty-two. In small-town Vietnam it drops to nine.
Two things move this line more than anything else. The first is booking two or three nights at a time rather than a week, because the good places reveal themselves once you are there and you want to be able to move. The second is walking ten minutes further from the transport hub, which reliably takes a third off the price for the same room.
Food
Nine dollars a day for everything, and I ate well. Breakfast at a street stall runs a dollar to two. Lunch where the drivers eat — which means where the vans and taxis are parked, every time — is another two. Dinner is three or four, occasionally eight if it is a proper sit-down meal.
Coffee is the line that gets away from people. A specialty flat white in Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur costs the same as it does in London, and three of those a day is more than my food budget. Local iced coffee from a cart is fifty cents and better in the heat.
Eating where the vans are parked is the single most reliable food advice I have. Drivers eat three meals a day out and they do not overpay.
Transport
Six inter-city journeys over the month. Night buses and trains do double duty as accommodation, which quietly removes a night from the beds line each time — that is the real saving, not the ticket price.
- Night train, Bangkok to Chiang Mai — $32 in a second-class sleeper, and a bed for the night
- Bus, Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai — $8
- Budget flight, Bangkok to Penang — $54 booked eleven days out
- Train, Penang to Kuala Lumpur — $19
- Overnight bus, Hanoi to Hue — $17
- Local flights, ferries and the rest — $55
Booking flights ten to fourteen days ahead is the sweet spot in this region. Earlier does not get cheaper, and later gets expensive fast.
Where budgets leak
Not on the big items. Budgets leak in four small, boring places, and every one of them is avoidable.
- ATM fees — five to seven dollars per withdrawal in Thailand. Taking out the maximum each time instead of small amounts saved me about thirty dollars over the month.
- Airport transport — the taxi is four to six times the train. This is the most reliable overspend in travel.
- Convenience-store water — a refillable bottle and the refill stations that exist in most guesthouses cost nothing.
- Laundry by the piece — always ask for the per-kilo price, which is a fraction of it.
None of these are dramatic. Together they came to roughly eighty dollars, which is five nights of accommodation, which is another city.
The broader point: nobody ruins a month in South-East Asia by eating too well. They ruin it by staying in the wrong part of town and taking taxis from airports.
