Financing the trip
by Sil

Budgeting for the trip:
How to decide how much you need works differently for everyone.
It depends very much on how you want to experience your trip. Some people prefer to really rough it, whereas myself and Chris cannot say no to some luxury... Yes my friends, when we say some, we do indeed mean some! There will be no 5-star hotels (well not many anyway:-) and none of our famous shopping sprees.
We have looked at a lot of sites to try and determine how much we would need, then we looked at our bank account to see how much we could afford (big swallow here, no, only kidding!).
One large factor is looking at the countries you are going to visit (as daily spending can vary considerably between countries) and in this we have opted for the cheaper ones, thus Asia and South America where you can survive, comfortably on about USD 15/20 per person per day (although South America is quite a bit more expensive than Asia).
The average required amount seems to be about:
- USD 1,000 to USD 1,200 per person per month in Asia/India
- USD 1,200 to USD 1,600 per person per month in South America

We have budgetted this amount for accomodation, food and local transportation. Long distance travel (by plane), souvenirs, guides and entry fees are excluded from this.
As we want to go to some more expensive destinations such as the Galapagos and Easter Island, we needed to take this into account as well.( Galapagos could cost about USD 1,000 per week per person).
Also we had to budget for extra costs to get our advanced paddi in Asia and some other bits and bops.
There is no exact figure to give for the question of "exactly how much do you need for a year?", so just try and get as much info as you can on the countries you are visiting and make an estimate from there.
We have decided on a budget and should this (god forbid) be exhausted before the end of our trip we will see whether we want to spend more and thus exhaust our savings account or go home sooner (noooooooo!!!).
Since we are now both unemployed and have no idea where we want to go after this adventure, we have kept some money aside to see us through the months following our trip untill we have jobs again.

Ticket cost
One of the largest cost you will have besides your travelgear is the ticket. At first we thought about buying only one ticket taking us to Nepal (our supposed first port of call) and then taking it one ticket at the time from there. However after finding out the cost of a world ticket we soon changed our minds. We checked the prices for these tickets through vliegwinkel.nl (airtrade.com is a great site as well, though not so well geared for people leaving from Europe). Vliegwinkel however have been extremely helpful and therefore a small written thanks to them. Round the world tickets work as follows.: Every airline alliance have their own tickets and they are charged either according to the amount of miles you fly or by the amount of stops you make on each continent. Our biggest issue was Easter Island. We wanted to go there but soon found out that the cost of flying there from Chili was a bit above our budget (over USD800 per person from Santiago). We were informed however that Lan Chile landed on Easter Island on their flight from Australia to Santiago. Lan Chile is in alliance with British Airways and Quantas (OneWorld) which worked out perfectly for us as they could cover most of the routes we needed. The only unfortunate flight turned out to be the first flight as BA doesn't fly to Kathmandu. The nearest option was New Delhi so we decided to go for this and visit a friend of Chris who recently moved there (ah, it worked out perfectly after all).
Our flights, covered in the ticket, are as follows: Amsterdam - London - New Delhi - overland Asia to Jakarta - Jakarta - Perth - Sydney - Tahiti - Easter Island - Chili - overland to Sao Paolo - direct flight to Amsterdam (it sounds like nothing if you type it like this!). The cost of this flight including airport taxes and the visa for Australia came to EUR 2600 per person (incl taxes), which in our spoiled eyes is not bad at all.
The remaining flights, buses, trains, boats etc. will come on top of this, but hopefully we will be able to get some good deals while we are traveling. Keep those fingers crossed please......

Stuff purchased before
The second big cost is the gear you need to buy in order to survive the year.
As you see our packlist is quite extensive (although not nearly as bad as the poor souls who want to go camping, our thoughts are with you), and all this should weigh no more then about 15 kg p.p. and of course should all fit in one eeny teeny weeny little back pack (I miss my Samsonite already). We have done some research to see where we could buy all the stuff we needed and soon found out Dubai is NOT the place to be. People there generally go to a hotel, or at worst go camping for two nights, near the beach or preferably again a five star hotel, and then quickly back home for that lovely shower and extensively filled fridge (yup we are certainly those people as well!). Since we were living abroad we were able to reclaim the taxes we would pay on goods we bought abroad, and therefor we decided to buy everything in Holland. Of course should you be able to go to the States or Canada you will be able to get much better deals, as we found out recently. TIP: Birthdays are also a great way of getting some of your stuff together (thanks to all family and friends for their goodies).

We went to specialised stores such as Bever and Demmenie to get their advise on what to buy, as we were not sure ourselves on all things. The best advises we have been given were for the back pack and clothes. They advised us to get a back pack that looks and opens like a weekendbag, only with a back pack carryer system. With regards to the clothes the advise we got is to go for layers rather then exceptionally warm, thick clothes as we will be spending most of our time in warm regions. In the event we do require, gloves, ski jackets or snow boots, these can be rented in most places, according to the Lonely Planet and other traveler info (we decided one of them will at least be speaking the truth).

How to keep up to the budget
Since Chris is a fairly big spender at the best of times I have the honor of keeping track of our spendings. This will most likely mean walking around with my Visor PDA ready at any moment of the day to count down to zero... (sorry honey the truth is hard I know). We have decided to try and write down everything we spent, on a daily basis. I have never tried to do this before so it will take some getting used to, but I want to try and avoid the ATM machine telling me I'm out of money, being stuck in the middle of the Amazon, (if you catch my drift). We will keep all this info in the visor we are taking and will download it to the PC as often as possible. In case you are not taking any electrical equipment (wise choice may I add) an old-fashion writing pad will do l guess. There is then the added advantage of it not getting stolen, and you not remembering what you spent, thus being stuck in the jungle, ATM machine rejecting etc.

How much do you need when you come back home?
As I explained before we have, for now, no idea what we will be doing once we come back from our trip and even though we can hopefully bumb of our friends and family for a little while longer, we still need some cash. Ofcourse how much depends very much on which country you are living in, but since the EURO came to Holland I can tell you, you need a lot! Therefore please all put your hands in prayer and Numico please give me a job when I come back (or some sponsor money for the trip, whichever you prefer haha).