It’s All about the Benjamins, Baby: A Money-saving Odyssey in Three Parts

Alternately titled: Alanna Fancies Herself a Financial Expert

When it comes to frequently asked questions (besides that which has already been discussed), the thing that most people want to know about our trip is how can we afford it? Did a wealthy great aunt bequeath her estate to us? Did we set up a meth lab in our apartment? Did we invest our savings in Google and Whole Foods?

No, no, no, and it wasn’t gambling or a gift from God, either. The truth is much simpler: we got jobs and we saved. We decided to do something and we did it.

On paper, it doesn’t really add up. Our pay cheques are really quite paltry, the cost of living in this city is insane, and one of us just wrapped up four years of university that certainly wasn’t cheap. And yet, we’ve managed. We have more money in the bank than ever before, and we still treat ourselves to things like fancy cheeses and a bottle of (cheap, Chilean) wine more than we probably should.

The funny thing is, almost without exception, the people who ask us how we can afford it make far more money than we do, yet they are seemingly baffled by the perceived costs of a trip such as ours. This leads me to believe that there is a misconception about the costs of international travel. Sure, you could easily blow our six month budget on a six week (or even six day) African safari, spending your days tracking wildlife on private reserves and your nights in five star resorts and lodges, but you don’t have to. There are other options. Not all travel is prohibitively expensive.

A lot of travel blogs I’ve come across go into great detail about their budgets – what they estimate the costs of their trip will be, covering everything from airfares to camping equipment to immunizations. While this is absolutely fascinating for people who love crunching numbers and scrolling through Excel spreadsheets (i.e. accountants), it didn’t really do a whole lot for me. I haven’t spent a lot of time researching the cost of a bowl of mealie pap in Umtata or the cost of a dorm bed in Mwanza, nor do I think that that sort of precision is necessary, or particularly helpful to those in the process of drafting travel budgets.

I do, however, see the value in sharing some of my own money-saving tips and emphasizing how attainable long term travel really is. I honestly think that anyone (yes, anyone) can start at this point, with an empty wallet and bank account, and in less than a year be taking off for an extended period of vagabonding. If you have credit card debt, a hefty student loan, or a minimum wage job, you’re going to have to work a little harder, but I still think you can do it. Let the penny pinching begin!

Part One: In which the only math skills you need are addition and multiplication

Step one is an obvious one – decide where you want to go. Break out the old atlas (or use Google Maps, if that’s how you want to be) and have a good look at what’s out there. Since we’re talking about long term budget travel, there are a few places that you can pretty much forget about right away – mainly, Europe. Don’t let me crush your dreams of Paris and Berlin and Milan, but if you’re headed there thinking a few grand is going to cover several months of living and traveling expenses, think again. Your $35/night hostel bed in Amsterdam could buy you three or four days of beach bumming in Guatemala or Malawi. If you really want to stretch your travel dollar, you can cross off Western Europe, North America, Japan and even Australia, from the get-go, leaving yourself plenty of fascinating destinations to choose from. Travel Independent has a great section for wanderlusters trying to decide where to go and what to see.

Next, purchase a ticket. There’s a ton of information out there about this, and from what I’ve read, what it boils down to is this: air travel is expensive. There are certainly some deals to be had, and if you spend some time getting creative with your dates and pricing a variety of different airlines and ticketing agents, you just might get one of them. Most airlines will let you book fares up to eleven months in advance, and some of the best deals become available well in advance of departure. However, I would caution against becoming too caught up in getting the lowest fare. You might find that you end up having to pay several hundred dollars more because you were banking on fares dropping and they didn’t. Also, having a ticket purchased well in advance is one less thing you have to worry about as your departure approaches, and a great incentive to start saving for other parts of your trip.

Which brings us to all those other parts of your trip. Before you even get on that plane, you’re going to be doling out some cash – and no small sum either – on some rather pesky but totally necessary details like insurance and immunizations and equipment. If you don’t have a passport, you’ll need to get one. It will be the best $85 you’ve ever spent. Depending on the length and itinerary of your trip, you could be spending anything from a couple hundred to a couple thousand on travel insurance. We’re going with World Nomads, where a comprehensive six month international package costs $355. Another non-negotiable is immunizations and drugs. Unfortunately, few of these are covered by MSP or your employer’s insurance policy. It is possible to keep costs down to some extent by paring down the number of shots you get and by choosing cheaper or generic drugs (i.e. don’t get Malarone) but keep in mind that it’s your health in the balance, and $100 for a vaccine that could save your life? Sounds like a pretty good investment to me.

Another potentially major expense to consider is that of clothing and equipment. If you’ve done much traveling before, you can probably save most of your shopping dollars, but if you haven’t, you might surprise yourself with just how fast the money goes, even if you’re just picking up the essentials. Item number one on your list should be a backpack. You’re going to want something comfortable and small. Seriously – there’s nothing you’ll need for six months on the road that won’t fit in a forty litre pack. You might also want to buy some clothes to go in that pack. It’s probably not in your best interest to invest in a whole new khaki wardrobe, but a few high-quality outdoorsy items probably aren’t a bad idea. Besides that, you might want to think about purchasing things like a sleeping liner, a mosquito net, a head lamp, a travel alarm, and a caseload of DEET insect repellant (especially if you cut costs by opting out of anti-malarials).

Once you’ve added up your pre-trip expenses (which probably total somewhere in the $2500 – 3000 range) you can start estimating your on the road costs. This basically looks like this: accommodation + food + transportation + activities = don’t be totally distraught, you can do this! Honestly, staying in hostels, making most of your own meals, taking local transportation and steering clear of expensive tourist activities, you can travel in most countries (barring those listed above) for under $30 a day. You can plug your locations into this Travel Budget Calculator, and it will give you a rough estimate of how much you’ll need. Keep in mind that this doesn’t take into account costly one-off activities like shark diving and elephant riding, so any figure you come up with should be considered as a minimum. You’re going to want to add at least another thousand (or two, or three) to that number if you want to partake in such activities, or if you’re easily seduced by drink specials and full moon parties.

Altogether these things add up to a pretty sum, but think about what you’re getting – food, shelter, transport, fun – all in some of the most incredible places on the planet. In all likelihood, your on the road budget isn’t going to be much higher than your at home budget – the only significant difference being that you’re not going to have any income (unless you put a ‘donate’ icon on your blog, but you won’t see any of that here). No matter if your budget is $5000 or $20 000, it’s not as daunting as it seems. Stay tuned for part two, in which I reveal just how much the average office worker spends at Starbucks in a week, and show you how to turn your caffeine cash into a rewarding experience abroad!

Home and Away

Here’s the thing about me: I like to think about travel. A lot. I like to plan, I like to budget, I like to fantasize, and yeah, when it comes time for the actual travel part, I like that too. But I find that I get so excited by overseas travel that I rarely give much thought to doing the same here in Canada.

I spent most of my adolescence wishing I was anything but Canadian. Give me the cobblestone streets and sidewalk cafes of Europe, or the colourful lanterns and bustling markets of the Far East any day. Give me a foreign accent, a chic sense of style, the talent to play an obscure instrument, and life would be infinitely more interesting. In a city like Vancouver, where just about everyone seems to be from somewhere else, I’m left feeling seriously lacking culture wise.

But as devoid of culture as Canada may be (don’t take that too seriously) it sure is beautiful. Unfortunately, when you’re born into a place where mountains collide with sea, where you can escape into verdant rainforests on a whim, or plunge into a clear, cool lake in the summertime, you can’t help but take the natural beauty that surrounds you for granted. It’s home. It’s comfortable. And regardless of how stunning it may be to those who haven’t spent their lives here, it’s not nearly as exciting as, say, Africa.


That said, every now and then I’m shaken out of my complacency, my indifference for this place. Every so often I see what they see – the blues and the greens and the vastness of it all. My world gets blown wide open and I appreciate, seemingly for the first time, how utterly spectacular the landscapes I’ve become so accustomed to really are.

One of my favourite parts about travel is seeing how even the most mundane things are different in other countries – items in the grocery store, street signs, public transport – things that make walking down the street an eye-opening adventure. But as exciting as that experience can be, it doesn’t come close to truly opening your eyes to the things you see every day, and coming to realize that no matter where you go and what you see, this place you call home? Is the place you want to keep coming home to.


Photos taken on a recent trip to Sechelt, British Columbia. Thanks to Ron and Diane for hosting us and showing us the beauty of the Sunshine Coast.

Pourquoi Africa?

So the last time I tried to explain this, I opened my mouth (or should I say, web browser) and the entire history of Africa came spilling out (okay, maybe not the entire history, but all the important bits anyway). And while it’s all good and nice to put this trip into a historical context, I still feel as though I owe everyone a more personal explanation. This is a blahg, after all – you wouldn't be here if you weren't looking for a little voyeurism.

I find it a bit odd that I can’t remember the exact moment that we decided to do this. I’m constantly impressing Scott with my uncanny ability to recall exact details about obscure events, like what I wore on our third date or how much our electrical bill was back in March, yet as I wrack my brain to come up with the definitive tipping point of this trip, I draw a blank. Did we just wake up one morning, look at each other and say, “Let’s go!”? Did we carefully weigh the pros and cons of various destinations, deciding finally on this one? Did we scribble down where we most wanted to go, fold it up, and on the count of three, lo, we both wanted to go to Africa? I can’t remember.

There was always an assumption that once we finished school (or in my case, gave up) we’d get jobs, make some money, suit ourselves up like a North Face ad and set off for New Zealand or Western Europe or some such place. It’s what twenty-somethings with liberal arts educations, crappy customer service jobs, and a yearning for more do – they go abroad, meet like-minded fellow-travelers, get drunk on hostel-sponsored pub crawls, and supposedly find themselves. It sounds like a good time, but we eventually decided that it wasn’t for us. If we were going to spend our life’s savings (not much) on a trip across the world, then damned straight, we were going to do it right.

One of the major catalysts for me was a growing desire to escape. A year and a half in the so-called Real World had given me a rather disdainful attitude toward conventional adulthood in North America. I hated the 8 to 5, the 40 hour work week, the daily commute, consumerism, television, celebrity culture, Swedish furniture, apartment rent. And two weeks annual vacation? Puh-leeze! It’s a big world out there, and two weeks isn’t nearly enough time for me to see it, meet it, eat it, and get up close and personal with it. The economy is in the toilet, everyone’s on anti-depressants, and the view from my cubicle? Particle board. Asylum blue. A calendar marked up with things like Tax Seminar and Boss’s Day. There’s so much more to the world than what I can see from here.

So why Africa, then? Because we want to discover another planet located on Earth. The one we know is nice enough – mountains and ocean and skyscrapers and sushi spots – but we crave change. We want something that’s going to smack us in the face, offend us, challenge us, inspire us, ask tough questions, demand real answers, not give us an easy ride. A friend described Africa as “the Holy Grail of travel” and until recently I agreed with her that it was something you worked towards as a traveler, testing the waters first with jaunts to Germany and Costa Rica, gradually adding to your experience, heading for Indonesia or Ukraine, India or Peru. Then and only then, with a well-worn backpack and a sun-creased face, did you attempt Africa.

But we're throwing caution to the wind because 'gradual' isn't really our style . It’s not that we don’t want to see those other places – we do – it’s that we’d much rather do the ‘hard traveling’ now, and save the cushier destinations for our golden years. It seems that with age, you become accustomed to certain luxuries that you are less and less willing to give up. At 22 and 23, the luxuries we're giving up are few, and we’re happy to do so in the name of adventure and thriftiness. We figure Africa is a good destination for people with limited funds, open minds, and agile bodies. The French Riviera, on the other hand, is arguably better visited with a thicker wad of cash, a sophisticated mind, and what’s the difference if you’re agile or not when your main activity is sunning yourself on the balcony with a glass of Pinot Noir? It just makes sense: Africa is for now, beyond that comes later.

So your question then? Pourquoi Africa? The best answer I can give you is this: We want to see the world, and we've decided to make Africa our first stop.

That, and there's penguins at the beach.

(via)

War and Peace: the Africa edition

Preface: When I set out to write this, I wanted to give some sort of justification for choosing Africa (of all places!) as a travel destination. I also wanted to quell some of the concerns about the risks of traveling in Africa, as I have yet to tell someone about my plans and not have them respond by informing me of how dangerous it is. (It’s dangerous. I know.) In the end, this piece accomplishes neither of those things. It does, however, accomplish lengthiness, and if you happen to have a keen interest in colonial African history, you just might make it through to the end. If not, I’ve included a few pictures (and a video!) that do a pretty good job of summing it up the main points.

* * * * * * * *

Tell someone you’re going to Africa for an extended period of time and you’ll invariably be met with gasps of awe and concern. Awe because it sounds enviably romantic and adventuresome, and concern because it sounds troublingly risky and unusual. Why would you go to Africa when you could go to Europe and gape at ornate architecture and gorge on chocolate croissants? Why would you go to Africa when you could go to Koh Phangan and work on your tan and sip from coconuts? But mostly, when given the choice between a place characterized by relative security and one besieged by corruption, violence and political paralysis, why on earth would you choose the latter?

These are not easy questions to answer. Initially, I tried to assuage their fears (and my own) by seeking out success stories─ things that would shed some light on the Dark Continent, things that would make everyone sleep better. When people mentioned the genocide in Rwanda, I would tell them how resilient and progressive the country has proven to be: their roads and transportation network are lauded as some of the best in Africa, their parliament is the only one in the world where women hold the majority (56%), and their strict ban on plastic bags and mandatory monthly cleanup day qualify them as leaders in the fight against environmental destruction.

It has been my experience, however, that people aren’t interested in listening to success stories. Africa as a peaceful place is a pretty tough sell when you’re dealing with people whose ideas of the continent are informed solely by a very one-sided and negative media image. And I couldn’t really blame them, either. Try as I might to hone in on the positive, I found it hard to ignore the news stories highlighting the volatility of the continent that flashed in my periphery– warning signs that cautioned against taking an overly idealistic view. True, there are huge swaths of the continent that are peaceful, where farmers tend to their crops, children go to school, and life has achieved a level of normalcy we don’t readily associate with Africa. But it is also true that between 1990 and 2007, Africa accounted for 88% of the world’s conflict death tolls, 9 million refugees have been internally displaced and 12% of the continent’s children have been orphaned. Indeed, hell has seized parts of the continent, and there’s no sense in ignoring that millions of people have been, and continue to be, killed by bullets, machetes, hunger, bad water and disease.

So, rather than brushing off people’s insistence that Africa showcases humanity at its absolute worst and trying to convince them otherwise, I decided that a far more interesting and worthwhile effort would be to concede that they just might have a point. I can chalk it up to biased media coverage, dated stereotypes and the sheer physical distance that separates their landmass from ours, or I can admit to myself what I already know, and try to understand why it is that 5.4 million people were killed in the Congo, why 800,00 in the Rwandan genocide and why nearly 400,000 in the recent Darfur conflict. The question I wanted to answer was a simple, but difficult one: Why is Africa the way it is? What instigates these conflicts and enables them to continue? And why isn’t anyone paying any attention to them?

Over the past several months, my reading material has been almost entirely limited to books about Africa. Guidebooks, history books, memoirs– anything I could get my hands on that would give me some insight into this diverse and complicated continent that until fairly recently, I knew very little about. One of the main themes that surfaced in nearly all the works was that of war and conflict. Unlike the wars I learned about in school, where I knew the contributing causes, what was at stake, and which side came out on top, with Africa, the causes and outcomes of war were not always so clearly defined. Even after having read 500 plus pages on the Rwandan genocide, I still didn’t really understand what triggered the massacre.

It seems to me that when it comes to Africa, journalists have a tendency to dumb down complex realities for their western readers. I don’t know whether this is because it’s easier to get the story and get out, or if it’s because they’re actually worried about alienating readers by delving too deep into the issues. Regardless, news in the western world is about front pages and headlines, not lengthy explanations and background information. Rather than describing the historical and cultural complexities of a conflict, it is much easier to call it chaos and be done with it.

Not only are media reports of Africa incomplete, but they are also hard to come by. In 2000, Vigil Hawkins completed a study of some of the major western media outlets, surveying what percentage of their media focus fell where. The table above illustrates the proportions of coverage allotted by the BBC. Africa, he found, did not even figure in 10% of the coverage. According to Hawkins, “the death toll from the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is literally one thousand times greater than that in Israel-Palestine, yet it is the latter that is the object of far greater media coverage … [and where] the intricacies and nuances of the conflict, political situation and peace process are almost obsessively analyzed and presented … [African] conflicts are frequently brushed off and dismissed as being chaotic, or worthy of some vague pity or humanitarian concern, but rarely of any in-depth political analysis.” Too often, it seems that Africa just isn’t worth the trouble.

Oversimplified and distorted media coverage makes understanding African conflicts difficult, and the majority of westerners don’t have the time or motivation to question what they read and hear when it comes to something so seemingly removed from their day-to-day realities. This does not make the question “Why is Africa the way it is?” unanswerable, it just makes addressing it more difficult. Despite simplistic media messages, Africa’s problems do not stem exclusively from political corruption, human rights abuses and lawlessness– these are but symptoms of some of the underlying causes.

One of the most glaring factors influencing Africa today is the lasting impact of European colonialism. Often westerners take an attitude that suggests, “yes, we did some bad things, but it’s been a long time, and they’re worse off now than they were then.” While in some cases, this might ring true, it is hardly debatable that colonialism has had devastating consequences across Africa– consequences that are not overcome overnight.

The way that Africa was carved up, as colonial powers ruled and then abandoned Africa, had the effect of gathering many different of ethnicities and cultures under a nation that did not reflect, nor have the ability to accommodate, such diversity. A nation is a group of people you are born into or feel you belong to. The nations that were arbitrarily determined by the Europeans were neither of these things, and with the way colonialists exploited a largely self-manufactured difference, it’s hard to imagine that they thought they were actually helping Africans.

In many areas of the continent, colonial administrations did not have sufficient personnel or resources to adequately govern the territory, thus necessitating a reliance on locals to run them. Europeans selected who they wanted to have in power, dividing people into categories based on characteristics that had previously held little to no significance. One example of this can be seen in Rwanda, where prior to the arrival of the Belgian colonists, the country’s two main ethnic groups (the Hutus and the Tutsis) lived more or less in harmony. When the Belgians came, they gave the power to the Tutsi, believing that their lighter skin and more delicate features made them superior to their darker-skinned Hutu counterparts. This fuelled Tutsi resentment, contributing in part to the eventual genocide in 1994.

Not only did the Europeans exploit arbitrary differences, but they created them. One of the most profound and lasting impacts was the implementation of Tribalism. Based on very premature assumptions, colonialists supposed that just as they belonged to different nations, with distinct cultures and common languages, so too did Africans belong to different tribes. This, however, was not always the case. The notion of tribalism was largely a European construct designed to serve European interests. In fact, the Zulus of South Africa as a separate ethnic group only came into being in 1870; the Solis of Zambia only became Solis when they were told they were, in 1937.

Despite this, many people dismiss colonialism as a reason for Africa’s problems. “They’ve been handed independence and look what they’ve done with it,” they say. The fact is that colonialism grasped the continent for close to four centuries, and its effects cannot be overcome so quickly. In the words of Bob Geldof, “Consider the extent to which the Second World War of just six years has pervaded the consciousness of our developed world for two generations and imagine how four centuries of enslavement might have seized the entire social and cultural ethos of an undeveloped continent.” The damage caused by colonialism has become entrenched in African societies across the continent. The extent to which it permeates all facets of life makes it a difficult thing to forget or move forward from.

Here is a 10-minute film clip that shows how colonialism continues to affect current struggles, using Uganda as an example.

The film that this clip has been taken from (Uganda Rising) is excellent, heart-wrenching
and highly recommended. You can view it in its entirety on YouTube by clicking here.

It’s also worth noting that many African countries have only achieved independence from colonial powers in the past few decades. The newest independent nations include Eritrea (1993), Namibia (1990) and Zimbabwe (1980). Not to mention the most obvious colonial legacy of all, apartheid in South Africa ended just fifteen years ago. These nations are new, they have had little opportunity to establish themselves and develop a national identity. My own country, Canada, has been an independent nation for over 140 years, and we’re still grappling with how to accommodate our two linguistic groups– English and French– in a way that is accepted by all. Given the way that Africa was divided up, with little regard to existing ethnicities, languages and cultures (of which there are several thousand) it should be no surprise that developing stable nation-states is proving difficult.

Another legacy of colonialism has been that of the single party state. It was introduced by Europeans as the only method of effective method of governance and control in places that were characterized by a great diversity of interests. Dictatorships were implemented. Widespread poverty and oppression proliferated. And when the Europeans pulled out and granted their colonies independence, it’s true that things did get worse. Between 1960 and 2003, 107 African leaders were overthrown, two-thirds were murdered, jailed or forced into exile. Just three retired on their own accord, and not one was democratically voted out of office.

Colonialism also had a devastating impact on the Africa’s economy. For four centuries, Europeans siphoned Africa’s wealth of resources, from rubber to diamonds to oil to people. It has been argued that even independence served the interests of the former colonialists more than it served the interests of Africans. According to former Tanzanian president Julius Nyere, “It seems that independence of the former colonies has suited the interests of the industrial world for bigger profits at less cost. Independence made it cheaper for them to exploit us. We became neo-colonies.” In many ways, international trade agreements and economic policies have effectively picked up where colonial arrangements left off, whereby many nations have been forced to concentrate on export to stay afloat. Institutions like the World Bank and the IMF loan developing countries money, which encourages them to increase their export, often at the expense of service programs and education. This, combined with ongoing limited rights to land, has severely curtailed African development.

Colonialism is a big contributor to why Africa is the way it is. It planted the seeds for conflict, and manipulated industries in ways that have had long-lasting and detrimental effects on development. But there are other factors as well, such as the proliferation of weapons in Africa following the Cold War, when major powers like the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union saw a viable and profitable dumping ground for arms they no longer needed. The propagation of these small arms has no doubt fuelled many recent conflicts. The table below demonstrates the west’s complicity to conflicts in the developing world (shown in blue).

According to this table, 71 per cent of reported arms exports come from the USA, Russia, France, the UK and China. Incidentally, these five countries are also the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The hypocrisy is maddening. How can we simultaneously champion peace while profiting from an industry that kills people in such a direct and obvious way? We are inhibiting our own mandates for peace, acting in a way that renders success impossible.

The legacy of colonialism, the West’s continued support for exploitive regimes, the proliferation of arms, and policies that maintain dependency and poverty have had the cumulative effect of turning many African countries into what some have dubbed “failed states,” characterized by chaos and suffering. In 2001, Tony Blair called the state of Africa, “a scar on the conscience of the world.” As deeply offensive as this statement is to Africans, many of whom have worked very hard and made great progress to overcome incredible obstacles, I think it speaks to why Africa is the way it is, and why its problems are in many ways our problems.

In researching and writing this piece I have developed a better understanding of Africa and the ideas (both founded and unfounded) that people have about it. I have come to accept that Africa does have many problems, and that these problems re-enforce one another. Surprisingly, learning about war and conflict has not made me apprehensive about traveling to Africa. More so than the stories of hope and resiliency, it has eased my fears. There may be madness, but there is logic to it. Africans are not irrational beings, resorting to primeval violence at the slightest provocation; they resort to conflict because they feel as though they have no other choice. They have been exploited for centuries and they want things to change. And in many places, they have. Great strides towards peace and reconciliation have been made in the past few decades, and I think more than anything we will be struck by just how safe and welcomed we feel. Africa is an exceptionally diverse continent, with unparalleled natural beauty and fascinating people– to be turned off by its turbulent history and a handful of scare stories, would mean missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime.