Welcome to ChrisGreenwood.co.uk this site serves as my own personal blog. If you haven’t yet guessed my name is Chris Greenwood. I’m currently on a 7 month sabbatical from work travelling around South America. Normally I work as an IT Architect for IBM. When I find some free time I love to travel, find interesting music and cook unusual veggie food. I live on the outskirts of London but am lucky enough to be sent across the UK and abroad for work.
While I mostly blog about subjects unrelated to my work. I do occaisionally mention technology however at all times all views expressed on this site are my own and can in no way be attributed to my employer.
Hi Chris,
My name is Rita. I found your page whilst researching routes for a trip around South America I’m planning for next year and I absolutely loved it! I’m sure some of your tips will come in very handy! I just wanted to ask you, as a student my budget is not huge so I wanted to know if it was possible to know an estimate of how much you spent in a general way in terms of flights, accommodation and meals. Hope you have some time to reply but I understand if not! Thank you in advance!
Rita
Hi Rita,
In my latest post about Colombia I tried to summarise a little about the costs. As we leave each country I’ll try to do the same however we are on a slightly bigger budget than you will be so to try and help I’ve put a bit more below. In Colombia if you are spending the bare minimum you can get a dorm room in a nice hostal for less than £10/$15 a night including breakfast. We generally tended to have something light or a snack for lunch for almost nothing. In Colombia we found bread shops everywhere where we could get a cheese filled pasty/bread and a sweet pastry for about £0.25/$0.35 which was really filling. For dinner you can eat a set dinner for just over £2/$3 per person and beers tended to be around £0.50/$0.75 each. If you want to splash out every now and then to get away from the Colombian food you can get a great meal for two (2 courses with drinks) for about £20/$30. Day trips cost us from about £7/$10 to £15/$22.5 though if you wanted to do any more extreme sports it would put the price up a bit more. Getting around the country is probably the biggest cost. We took internal flights with Viva Colombia whenever the journey was more than 3 hours by bus as the flights aren’t a lot more expensive in Colombia. Our flights ranged between £20/$30 and £80/$160 per person. The Viva Colombia website can the changed into English so you can some prices between destinations easily. We tried to be flexible with days to get the cheapest prices but we booked all of our flights less than a week in advance. We spoke to other travellers who took the bus everywhere and undoubtedly saved a little more. Colombia was very cheap and amazing as you can see from my latest post and I really recommend it. We’ve found Ecuador to be quite a bit more expensive than Colombia. We’ve been mostly l travelling here as part of our Spanish school so we haven’t got a proper feel of it yet but at the moment it feels like everything here is 20-50% more expensive. I’ll try to keep putting some prices in as I update the blog and when we leave Ecuador I’ll summarise what I think of the costs.
I’m glad you liked the blog. We’ll be travelling for another 4 and a half months so there’ll be a lot more coming. If you want to get updates when I publish a new entry there is a box on the right hand side of the page that you can use to subscribe to updates. It goes without saying that your e-mail address is only used to send you an automatic update when I publish a new post!
Hope the costs above were useful and good luck planning the trip!
Regards,
Chris