I agree with Mark Manley. 15-20k is more likely. But it's all up to where you travel and your thresholds. I'm on something like 25$ per day here in east Africa. BUT adding visas, travel insurance, at home cost and bike parts/service it pops up to 35$ er day. If you eat local, use couchsurfing or hotshowers and kick the booze you could travel super cheap.


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You can make is a lot simpler on yourself but it is a little more work and requires a bit more thought.

It's a matter of breaking down the trip into fixed costs that you know you'll have upfront. There are only a handful. Transport (incl shipping), papars (visa's and carnet or TIP's), mileage (incl fuel, tires and maintenance), accommodation (hotels and camping) and food. You can continue onto incidentals but I prefer to have a contingency in my budget. It doesn't have to be much but that can include variability in assumed item costs. You also may end up spending less camping and more on hotels.

Work your plan starting with getting yourself and the bikes to where you want. Work out the route you want. How many k's that route is will tell you how many tires, oil and fuel you'll use. Is it land travel or are there flights or shipping costs? Then along that route you can workout if you'll camp and if so how many nights do you spend camping rough or on a camp site. If your route is all about cities it's probably more a hotel story. In any case those are approximate fixed costs. Your estimate will become more accurate the longer you go because the variability of each item will be spread more.

There is no golden rule IMHO. I've never focused on daily cost as a basis. That daily cost thing is a leftover from the Lonely Planet days which gave daily cost estimates for lack of a better method. I've always struggled with their estimates. People used to use that book as a bible so it became norm.

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Work it all out then double it.

I've always worked on the principle that you can pretty much go anywhere and do anything for £1000 a month if you can budget yourself pragmatically for the place you are. But then again, the pound is in the toilet so that's probably £1500 a month now.

Camp when you can, don't live in expensive bars, don't buy a BMW etc

Travelling in a group is cheaper. Lots of expenses shared.

Drinking and partying will burn through your budget like wildfire.

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Exactly this. Figure all costs as carefully as possible, without kidding yourself about the things which may not fit your desired self-image (Guided tours? Plush accommodations? Sit-down meals in the expensive restaurants where the ex-pats all go? Or maybe a/c cabins on the riverboats while all the "authentic" overlanders string hammocks on the decks....?). Then double that amount, and you'll arrive home with some minor funds to get resettled, which should be a part of your budgeting anyway.

With more specific experience overlanding on a bike, your advance calculations might become more realistic--maybe so realistic that you can get away with multiplying by a factor of 1.5 rather than 2. Me, I've never achieved this degree of realism on a long trip. Once you graduate beyond trips of a couple of weeks or venture deep into faraway continents, things tend to get more expensive, never less.

Then again, this is why the abbreviation "YMMV" was invented.

Mark

Hello

It may work for backpackers, but on a bike it doesn't.

As tmotten said, the route will define the cost.
The goal is to find the "hidden" costs.

What's left is to find out, how do you want to live or maybe "just exist" day by day.
But, only you know the answer to that, just a 3-4 week trip is enough to find that out.
Note every expense and figure out how much that will be in the place you will go to and do you need it.
The longer one travels, the more cost efficient one will become, it's almost an art.

sushi

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