The highs, the lows and the budget.
Overall, the 17-day, 5-country South East Adventure was a success! I thought I'd write about our favorite spots but they were all so different and interesting in their own way that it's hard to choose. (And my daughter insists that her favorite moments involved bathrooms and potty talk which doesn't seem like a great headliner.) Instead, here are some superlatives we came up with.
Best Overall Food: Chiang Mai, Thailand
Best Dessert Food: Mango Sticky Rice, Thailand
Best Dinner Food: Kao Soi Curry, Chiang Mai Thailand
Best Coffee: All of it in Hanoi, Vietnam
Cheapest Beer: Siem Reap, Cambodia - 75 cents
Best Accomodations: Tam Coc Horizon Bungalows, Vietnam
Best Look Out Point: Hang Mua Pagoda
Best Bathrooms: The heated toilet in the airport lounge in Hanoi
Worst Bathroom: Any that involved a ladle and a bucket of water in Thailand
Best Passport Control: Singapore which was 100% digital
Best Animal Encounter: Chai Lai Orchid Elephant Sanctuary
Best Bike Ride: Siem Reap Angkor Temples - Grasshopper Tours
Biggest Surprise: Doha's Souq Waqif
Scariest Moment: Sleeping in a shack on stilts in the jungle on a steep hillside, with a raging river downhill which led to a waterfall, after learning there was a major earthquake in nearby Myanmar
the list could go on...
Most importantly though, all of the things that could have gone wrong, did NOT go wrong which is quite amazing. I anticipated that something would go totally sideways and we'd adjust accordingly but nothing really did.
The Logistics: Amazingly all of our flights were on time and we never had an issue getting a ride or a train from anywhere that we needed to go. All of our tour guides showed up when they were expected to. We didn't sense we were getting 'ripped off' at any point in time. Every day there was potential for some level of failure and getting stuck somewhere or not getting somewhere when we were supposed to be there, but it didn't happen. Especially in less developed countries, time is a bit more fluid. You realize that as long as it's within the hour, it's on-time. I had mentally prepared for this same mentality in SE Asia but we did not find this to be the case. If someone said they'd pick you up at 8, they were there at 8 or a few minutes before.
Our Health: I was definitely nervous about the potential for getting some sort of food poisoning on this trip. We all took probiotics for 2 weeks leading up to the trip. We also have our typhoid and hep A vaccines - in addition to anything else you can be vaccinated against. As much as we know the best practices for staying healthy, when you are eating food cooked by other people you just never know if it's really been prepared well. Especially questionable are the fresh fruits and vegetables which are also a highlight of any tropical destination. We ate everything that was put in front of us. Even cut fruit at roadside stands in Cambodia that was entirely questionable, we ate it. Mostly because we were hungry and this is the food that was available and it generally always looked A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. We each had a little bit of squirrely tummy ocassionally during the trip, but nothing that a quick trip to the bathroom and some Pepto didn't resolve pretty quickly. There was no vomiting and no downtime and for that I think we were prepared but mostly lucky.
Breaking down the Budget
This was our biggest, longest adventure and I know folks are curious as to the costs. As part of this blog and wanting to share how to plan affordable international vacations, I figure I need to share how the budget worked out for our trip. As I mention in another post, I'm convinced that families that have the budget for Disney vacations can travel internationally but most don't think it's within reach. I've researched online some typical costs to have some comparison points here.
Now I know that budgets range significantly and there are certainly ways to have week long vacations for $500 for a family of 4, so this is not to claim that a 17-day trip to Asia is by any means a 'cheap family vacation'. Typically our international vacations in the western hemisphere range from $3,000 to $7,000 for one week for our family of 4.
Most people in the US who would even look to go to Asia would probably look to a travel agent to book a tour. So let's look at what you can expect to pay for a tour. No tour has our exact itinerary for an exact apples to apples comparison but just to try to get the idea I looked for ones which were similar, but none of them included Singapore or Doha which were the most expensive countries.
One 17-day tour around Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam for a family of 4 for $14,500, not including all the food costs, additional activities or airfare to get to SE Asia. This was also a group travel, so you're with other people and likely on buses quite a bit. Adding these in would put the cost at probably close to $20,000, without Singapore or Doha.
I found a private 17 days south east asia tour for comparison. This one was "starting" at about $4,000 per person and didn't include international airfare. So this would definitely be well over $20,000 without Singapore or Doha.
By planning the trip ourselves, I aim to have an itinerary the fits our likes, not have a crowd of people that we are touring around with, avoid buses at all cost, and be about half of the cost of using a travel agent/booking a tour.
We tried our best to tally our costs from the trip and the total spent for our 17-day trip for our family of 4 across Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore and Qatar came in at $11,087. Here is how it broke down across budget categories.
Category | Actual Cost |
|---|---|
Transportation - Long Haul Flight (PHL - DOH - HAN and SIN - DOH - PHL) | $4,619 |
Transportation - Inner Asia Flights (3 flights) | $1,420 |
Transportation - Local (Metro, Grab, Uber, Trains) | $364 |
Transportation - Airport Parking @ PHL | $255 |
Hotels (17 nights*, mostly in 3-4 star accomodations) | $1,574 |
Activities (Tours, Amusement Park) | $1,597 |
Food (that we could identify on the credit card) | $353 |
Cash Unaccounted for (Where the rest of the food money came from, along with tips, souvenirs, and left over currency, etc) | $665 |
Immigration - Visa Charges | $220 |
Internet/Cell Phone eSIM | $50 |
Total | $11,087 |
*We used 70,000 Marriot Bonvoy points for 2 nights in the Westin Singapore
Clearly, the largest expense, as-is most travel, are the plane tickets. We decided that since we were paying the big cost of the long haul flight, we may as well stay as long as possible and visit as many places within SE asia as we could.
Superlatives on Costs:
Cheapest Good Hotel Prices: Vietnam
Cheapest Good Food Prices: Thailand
Cheapest Local Transportation: Cambodia
Most Expensive Everything: Singapore, for sure
I was really hoping our actual expenses would come in under the cost of a 1-week luxury trip to Disney World. That darn 3 hour trip to Universal Studios Singapore pushed us over!
Additional cost saving measures we could have taken include:
Fly more of a budget airline than Qatar Airways. We opted to pay a bit more for the top economy experience airline and least amount of total travel time.
Reduced hotel costs by choosing more budget accommodations. Although our hotels averaged about $100/night, there were certainly alternative options which could have brought the cost lower.
Passed on the Western food options. We had several pizza and burger meals to appease the kids which were always 3X the cost of local cuisine.
If I had to do it over again, what would I change?
Although I don't have 'regrets' necessarily about anything with the trip, I do like to at least note if there was something I would have done differently now that I have been there and I know what to expect. Not that I plan to go back - there is so much world out there to see! Looking at the main destinations, Hanoi and Chiang Mai were definitely winners. Siem Reap was a little tricky to get to but was still a good choice. The stopover in Doha was amazing. But I would probably swap Singapore for a different larger city. Maybe Ho Chi Minh City or Kuala Lumpur. Or just not have the additional destination. The kids did like the 3 hours of roller coasters and the Singapore Flyer and I loved all of the big light/water shows, but in general there was a lot of cost and the city has similar feel to a modern US city (although MUCH nicer in so many ways compared to any US city) so it was not as much a very 'international' experience.
If I wanted to reduce the overall cost of the trip but with a similar level of adventure, I'd probably consider a 2-week trip from North to South Vietnam by train, stopping at various towns along the way for a variety of experiences. I think we probably could have done this itinerary for $8k.
I hope this information is helpful!
Comments