Live and Learn

It is the end of week one here in tropical Bali! We have been tracking our expenses and looking at things we like and don't like about travelling. Before I get into the numbers though, I will give a little heads up about Visas in Bali: We felt dirty after seeing the Visa guy here in Bali. A 30 day tourist visa is free, but in order for us to get an extension, we had to buy the initial visas for 35USD each. Now, I thought this was for the visa itself, but that is not the case, it was for the priviledge of paying an additional 700kINR (or around 70CAD per person) and waiting 6 days and 3 trips into Depansar to get an extension on our visa. In my research and such, no where did I find any hint of this! So for Laura and I to stay in Indonesia for an additional week to move up the coast to Jakarta and take our time, it will cost us 140CAD, basically the cost of both of us flying to Singapore. We are now leaning toward leaving Indonesia early because of this. Ironically, if we did what most folks do, and that is a "Visa run", we would have saved the initial 70USD because airfares to Malaysia for a few days is roughly 70CAD per person, and accommodation would be just as inexpensive as it is here. Live and learn. Laura will be informing the general travel community via TripAdvisor forums so we save someone else a few bucks.

From a money perspective we are under budget by $14CAD off a weekly budget of $1,061CAD. From a world budget perspective, we are looking at being under budget by $490CAD off a weekly budget of $1,267CAD! Yay us!!

It does mean living a little more frugally than we anticipated though. Breakfasts are more expensive than we thought, so we are shifting our habit of getting up and walking to a breakfast destination, to cooking our own. Fresh eggs from the guy up the road are 0.20CAD each, fruits like star fruit and dragon fruit are literally falling off the trees (finders, keepers, then we eat'ers!). Laura can't have a daily massage (booo), nor can she take a yoga class everyday (drop-in classes cost basically the same as they do at home - 15 to 18 CAD depending on the studio). We have learned to make our own Balinese coffee (think microground coffee in a cup with boiling water - no filters or brewers here!) and thank God there is a Starbucks here (a pound of Starbucks Italian roast is 9.50CAD, a pound of Indonesian coffee is about 22CAD....go figure). Our cooking instructor introduced us to these cute little sandwiches from the convenience store, called roti (not the same roti as in the west indies). These babies are 0.40CAD and are seriously good! They are white bread sandwiches filled with either peanut butter, strawberry jam, or cheese and butter, with the crusts cut off. We have also discovered Indonesian style "crackers", or as Laura calls them "deep fried goodness" for 0.10CAD a bag. Our house cat also likes those...

Even though the tourist area amenities are plentiful, convenient and cheap, its still more expensive than truly living like a local. The challenge is not to slide into "tourist mode" if you want to stick to your budget (assuming your budget is like ours!) Here's hoping that our food costs and other expenses come down over the next week, so Laura can get her massages!