If
you’re new here, I’m recapping (excruciatingly slowly) the trip that we
took to Granada, Nicaragua in late May/early June. Find pictures here, tales from our kayak trip here, info about relaxing here, ziplining, my thoughts on arrival and culture shock, and eating and drinking in Nicaragua. Now I want to talk about the
logistics of the trip, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
D and I make it a goal to take one big, fun, international trip a year. There’s so much of the world we want to see and we slowly save our pennies all year long so that we can make this a reality. We’ve also been to Paris and Puerto Rico together, and this year we thought we would cross off a country in Central or South America. I don’t have much vacation time, so we wanted to pair this with a long weekend so I only had to take 4 days off work for a 9 day trip. We also needed it to be after school was out for the summer so that D didn’t have to miss an entire week of classes. We settled on the week of Memorial Day, and with that requirement in place, I started looking for places to go.
I’m not kidding when I tell people that we knew we wanted to go “somewhere cool” and relatively cheap to fly to, and that’s how we picked Nicaragua. Around February, when it was depressingly dreary in Pittsburgh, I started getting really familiar with travel websites like Expedia and Travelocity. I’d pull up a map for reference and just start plugging our dates in these travel sites to see how much it would cost to fly to various major cities in Central and South America. I monitored these fares over the course of a few weeks, and priced out pretty much every city you’ve ever heard of, and probably some you haven’t. I now have a much better grasp of South American geography, that’s for sure. Nicaragua and Belize were the cheapest destinations (airfare to both were around $600 per person) so I narrowed in on those two places.
I then looked around online for quotes on hotels, hostels, and apartments for Granada, Nicaragua, and Belize City, Belize, to get a good idea of what the accommodations situation was. We knew we probably wanted to rent an apartment (like we did in Puerto Rico) but that’s more popular some places than others so I wanted to explore all our options. When I had a few quotes on how much it would be to stay in these two cities, I then turned to the cities themselves.
I requested books from the library on these two destinations and perused travel websites, which is where I came across an article that said Nicaragua was an undiscovered gem, soon to be the next big destination. It said it was still cheap and relatively untouched in terms of tourists, but there was plenty of cool stuff to see and do. Those were pretty much the keywords we were looking for. Then I read an article about how Belize is kind of dangerous, and I was completely sold on Nicaragua.
So Granada was it. I emailed a few people on vrbo.com about apartment rentals and got the nicest response from a couple who rented the apartment that was attached to their restaurant, The Garden Cafe. It was $45 a night for a total of $360 for eight nights. This was drastically cheaper than the hotels in Granada. It had a bedroom, sitting area, bathroom, and kitchenette and came with maid service, bikes to get around town, and a free breakfast at the cafe every morning. It was a steal.
We went on a few tours in Nicaragua (kayak tour, volcano tour, and ziplining), which came out to about $150 each after transportation and tips. We also bought the Lonely Planet for Nicaragua and did a few self-guided things out of the book, on foot and on the bikes. Food in Nicaragua is ridiculously cheap, and we paid in Cordobas instead of American Dollars, which reduced the prices even more (people tend to charge you a bit more if you’re paying in USD). The most expensive meal we had was our last night there, at a fancy steakhouse, when we were trying to spend all our remaining Cordobas so we didn’t have to change them back to dollars. We had drinks, I got the steak, and D had fish. It was $25, tip included. Food did not make up a very big portion of our spending in Nicaragua.
All told, the trip cost each of us about $1,100. This might seem insanely high (or insanely low) to you for a yearly international trip, but traveling is a HUGE priority for us. We are cheapskates to the extreme in other parts of our lives so that we can afford to travel once a year. We don’t have cable, share an ancient car that we drive once a week, use the library, live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, do free stuff, rarely eat out, don’t go shopping often, etc. $1,100 a year is less than $100 a month. It’s totally possible on a grad student salary. The memories of and planning for future trips like these gets me through those gross, dreary winter months. I live for this all year, and that’s worth way more than $100 a month to me.
D and I make it a goal to take one big, fun, international trip a year. There’s so much of the world we want to see and we slowly save our pennies all year long so that we can make this a reality. We’ve also been to Paris and Puerto Rico together, and this year we thought we would cross off a country in Central or South America. I don’t have much vacation time, so we wanted to pair this with a long weekend so I only had to take 4 days off work for a 9 day trip. We also needed it to be after school was out for the summer so that D didn’t have to miss an entire week of classes. We settled on the week of Memorial Day, and with that requirement in place, I started looking for places to go.
I’m not kidding when I tell people that we knew we wanted to go “somewhere cool” and relatively cheap to fly to, and that’s how we picked Nicaragua. Around February, when it was depressingly dreary in Pittsburgh, I started getting really familiar with travel websites like Expedia and Travelocity. I’d pull up a map for reference and just start plugging our dates in these travel sites to see how much it would cost to fly to various major cities in Central and South America. I monitored these fares over the course of a few weeks, and priced out pretty much every city you’ve ever heard of, and probably some you haven’t. I now have a much better grasp of South American geography, that’s for sure. Nicaragua and Belize were the cheapest destinations (airfare to both were around $600 per person) so I narrowed in on those two places.
I then looked around online for quotes on hotels, hostels, and apartments for Granada, Nicaragua, and Belize City, Belize, to get a good idea of what the accommodations situation was. We knew we probably wanted to rent an apartment (like we did in Puerto Rico) but that’s more popular some places than others so I wanted to explore all our options. When I had a few quotes on how much it would be to stay in these two cities, I then turned to the cities themselves.
I requested books from the library on these two destinations and perused travel websites, which is where I came across an article that said Nicaragua was an undiscovered gem, soon to be the next big destination. It said it was still cheap and relatively untouched in terms of tourists, but there was plenty of cool stuff to see and do. Those were pretty much the keywords we were looking for. Then I read an article about how Belize is kind of dangerous, and I was completely sold on Nicaragua.
So Granada was it. I emailed a few people on vrbo.com about apartment rentals and got the nicest response from a couple who rented the apartment that was attached to their restaurant, The Garden Cafe. It was $45 a night for a total of $360 for eight nights. This was drastically cheaper than the hotels in Granada. It had a bedroom, sitting area, bathroom, and kitchenette and came with maid service, bikes to get around town, and a free breakfast at the cafe every morning. It was a steal.
We went on a few tours in Nicaragua (kayak tour, volcano tour, and ziplining), which came out to about $150 each after transportation and tips. We also bought the Lonely Planet for Nicaragua and did a few self-guided things out of the book, on foot and on the bikes. Food in Nicaragua is ridiculously cheap, and we paid in Cordobas instead of American Dollars, which reduced the prices even more (people tend to charge you a bit more if you’re paying in USD). The most expensive meal we had was our last night there, at a fancy steakhouse, when we were trying to spend all our remaining Cordobas so we didn’t have to change them back to dollars. We had drinks, I got the steak, and D had fish. It was $25, tip included. Food did not make up a very big portion of our spending in Nicaragua.
All told, the trip cost each of us about $1,100. This might seem insanely high (or insanely low) to you for a yearly international trip, but traveling is a HUGE priority for us. We are cheapskates to the extreme in other parts of our lives so that we can afford to travel once a year. We don’t have cable, share an ancient car that we drive once a week, use the library, live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, do free stuff, rarely eat out, don’t go shopping often, etc. $1,100 a year is less than $100 a month. It’s totally possible on a grad student salary. The memories of and planning for future trips like these gets me through those gross, dreary winter months. I live for this all year, and that’s worth way more than $100 a month to me.
7 comments:
I think that is very reasonable and FAR cheaper than what my Paris vacation cost me. :) But so it goes when you go to a popular European city. I always find that my trips are more than worth the money I spend. And when you break it down to a cost/month like you did, it's even more reasonable!
You def got a steal on your accomodations! $45/night + breakfast? That is so awesome!!!!
Love reading about how you did this! It's great to have additional ideas as me and Knight are hoping to go on more trips together next year and beyond. (So far our only trip was to Door County, WI and that cost us close to $700 total including gas, food, lodging for a 4 night/4 day trip. I guess not too shabby?) Next up will be our honeymoon in October which I'm so excited about. And then after that we have a ton of ideas! So thanks for sharing these cost savings tips and ideas :)
You're so organized and resourceful (as if this were a surprise)...You guys will have so many awesome experiences and memories traveling every year!
Can you please re-plan our honeymoon to Japan? Because it is ridiculously expensive and planning from abroad is hard!
Also, I just saw your status about your next international trip...so jealous! Can I come??? ;) I want to know every detail about how you plan that trip on a reasonable budget, because we also want to go to Italy, but decided to save it for when we actually have money to spend because we didn't think we could do it cheaply. I want to take notes!
1,100 bucks is nothing! That's almost what I paid just to get to London a few a month ago. That's pretty durn amazing.
I think that was a VERY reasonable price to pay for a vacation out of the country! And for 8 days? Wow. I always wonder how people manage to afford long, international vacations but you've given me a pretty good idea.
My husband and I travel at least three times a year (mostly in the US) and are able to do so because we plan ahead quite a bit. We belong to several loyalty programs for hotel chains, rental cars and airlines. We buy Groupons and Restaurant.com gift cards for our destinations. We do a lot of price comparisons too. When my husband traveled a lot for his job, he was able to earn so many "points" on business that I actually got a free companion pass for 1.5 years from Southwest and we took about 8 free vacations! I miss those days of frequent travel, but not the out-of-town-five-nights-a-week relationship.
Another trick we've learned to lessen the financial strain of a vacation is to come up with a payment plan. Our cabin in Maine cost something like $600 to rent, so we each set aside $10 or so for a certain number of weeks. In the end, it was paid for!
Starting next month, we are going to try "tagging along" with one another to work conferences, which means only one of us is paying outright. We'll see how that goes.
My style is to book everything last minute, based upon its appearance in the Lonely Planet guide. If my top choice is fully booked, I go to TripAdvisor and find something else that works out for me.
I will eventually post our detail on Greece, and you will see just how little $1,100 is for a vacation. Well done :)
I think international travel is definitely worth the money if you spend your time wisely (which you definitely did in Nicaragua). I just hate to hear when people spend thousands of dollars on a trip, only to come back with drunken stories night after night. Thanks, but I can do that right here in Chicago. =)
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