Traveling is Cheap

So here’s the total amount of money I spent traveling around Mongolia for one month* This includes everything: transportation from “home” (Irkutsk) to Mongolia and back to “home”**, all transportation within Mongolia (going from northern Mongolia to Ulaanbaatar, Lake Khuvsgul, Gorkhi Terelj National Park, to the Gobi Desert, many places in between and back to Ulaanbaatar and the north); all food, all accommodation, horse riding, motorcycle and quad riding, seeing beautiful mountains, hills, boulders and lakes, a trip to the Khongor Sand Dunes, the Yolin Am Canyon, Mukhart Shivert and White Stupa. Plus much more :)
Grand total= $323

Here’s the breakdown:
Transportation:
$38

• We mostly hitchhiked, which is free, but we also paid for a bus, train, taxi, or a dead sheep van here or there. Clearly, public transportation is cheap in Mongolia. Read my blogs and do the math yourself if you don’t believe me! :P

Food/drinks/groceries:
$84

• What’s in the magical bag of groceries that cost less than $10 almost every time and lasted for so many days? If you want to make your money last long, you can’t be too picky with what you eat. Don’t buy pesto if you’re not in Italy, don’t buy fresh tuna fish if you’re not by the ocean. Figure out what the locals eat and go with that. We bought things like noodles, rice, bread, onions, cabbage, garlic, and other random grains and vegetables that I don’t know the name of 😊. Some Russian products, like buckwheat, are also cheap in Mongolia. Less than $1 for a kilo, which makes 5 hearty and healthy meals for 2 people (100grams of any grain per person per meal is plenty). We also bought things like oats, dried fruit and nuts for breakfast and hiking. You can go with cheap nuts like pumpkin or sunflower seeds instead of your expensive almonds and hazelnuts. When we bought food to cook in a hostel, we often went for beetroot, since it’s super healthy and super cheap, but is heavy and takes a while to cook (meaning a waste of your camping gas).

• Basically, we looked for cheap and healthy (plus long-lasting and light when hitching/hiking). I often buy stuff that I’m completely unfamiliar with just because it seems to fit the category. For example, we randomly found a big bag of dehydrated soy meat for about 50 cents. It was perfect- very light, full of protein, quick to cook, could be added to almost any meal and it didn’t need to be refrigerated. We even soaked it in water one day, put it on a stick and BBQed it on a fire like chicken. Delicious 😉

• We could have gone even cheaper if we wanted to, completely getting rid of anything unnecessary. Our bag of groceries sometimes included cookies or sweets, jams, juice, alcohol or spices. -None of that stuff was necessary and most of it is unhealthy but, what can I say, we had a lot of fun 😉 It’s up to you to figure out the right balance between funds, fun and necessities.

Accommodation:
$79

• We paid for accommodation for 13 out of 30 nights. Accommodation ranged from 0 to 8 USD and included anything from camping to couchsurfing, to sleeping in family homes and yurts, in a train, Airbnb, hostels, motel-like yurts and cheap hotel rooms. You can see detailed examples in my previous blogs.

4WD Tour to the Gobi Desert:
$100

• So we caved in and spent a third of our entire budget on a three day 4wd ride to the Khongor Sand Dunes in the Gobi Desert. It was worth it, but now that I know the situation better, I would prefer to try to hitch a lift to the dunes instead. I mentioned in this blog that we met a guy who managed to do that even in November. We also eventually found out that there are some buses that go further into the Gobi Desert, to villages like Gurvantes, Servei, Noyon and Bulgan; so that could be another option for those who want to save some money and travel off the beaten path. I don’t have much information about those buses (besides the map below), but if you make it to the local Dalanzadgad bus station, I think you could figure it out 😉.

Miscellaneous (shower, gas, souvenirs, speaker):
$22

• There will always be some kind of extra stuff to buy. Here, again, it’s important to find that balance between funds, fun and necessities.

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Total:
$323

• If we hadn’t paid for that Khongor Sand Dune tour, the total would have been around $230.

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*I think I missed a couple of days somehow while writing these blogs because it was 30 days all together (the full length of my visa: October 15-November 15), but the money is correct because I wrote it all down as we traveled (if I missed anything it wouldn’t have been more than a couple of bucks).

** I would not have gone to Mongolia in the first place if I was not currently living near Mongolia. I went to Mongolia because it was cheap and easy for me to get there. This is how I manage to travel cheaply all over the world and see so many places- I live in one place for a little while, while I’m there I see a lot of the general area, then I live in a different place and see a lot of that area. Before living in Siberia, I lived on Oahu, Hawaii. I travelled around all of the accessible Hawaiian Islands (for about the same amount of money that I traveled around Mongolia). I would never have taken a “vacation” from Hawaii to Mongolia or vice versa because the flight itself would cost about 6 times my monthly budget. This is one difference between travel and vacation; read more on that topic at the bottom of this blog

Here are some of my favorite photos from the trip:

That was a big effort to write out all of these blogs by the way. I think I spent as much time writing and sorting photos as I did actually being in Mongolia 😊 So I hope some of you can find this information useful or at least entertaining. I don’t think that I will go into that much detail in my future blogs, but I wanted to do it this time to provide an example that demonstrates that it doesn’t actually take a lot of money to travel. Again, I completely understand that not everybody wants to travel like me, but if it’s something you’re interested in, don’t let money be the excuse that’s stopping you.

And don’t take life too seriously. It’s really all just a game after all 😉

Now I’m off to a small village on Lake Baikal. I found a room for less than $5/night in a place called Sakhyurta. I haven’t seen the room yet but I think it will be suitable because only about 10 people live in this village during winter :) I’m hoping to hide out and concentrate on my book until March. I found the room by going to this village and knocking on people’s doors :D

In March, I’m planning on doing some fun stuff on the frozen lake with my buddy Alfie. We’ll be ice diving, ice swimming, icicle hunting and anything else you can think of related to ice :D. All of those fun ice activities will either be free or cheap, mostly because I have lots of fun friends 😊. After March, I’m planning on packing up all my stuff and taking the train across Russia (about $100), leaving my winter clothing with my family in Moscow, then making my way to Spain the cheapest way possible (probably a bus to Poland and then hitchhiking across Europe). I will be in Spain by May 1st to meet with the guys from the TROM project. Very excited for that.

And then… I will probably run out of money again and will have to figure out what to do about that. If you’ve enjoyed my blog and would like to help me out so that I don’t have to go back to the job game so soon, you are welcome to donate here. I would be very grateful. I’ve never asked for donations in the past and I haven’t gotten any donations yet, nor am I expecting much, but since I really want to keep on writing and not have to waste time working in some bar/restaurant/wherever, donations could help a lot. I will continue writing and doing what I’m doing regardless of whether I get anything, and everything I write will be available trade free :).
You can also help just by sharing my blog, if you would like to :)

I don't know if I will have internet or phone service in this small village so I'm not sure if I'll be able to post here for a little while. But I will try :)

Over and out for a little while.

Thanks for reading! :)

-Sasha