Category: POC

How We Afford Full-time Travel

by BOLT, posted in African American, Black, Fun, Gay, Lesbian, Long distance, Long term travel, Old, POC, queer, retirement, Travel, WOC, Women

I know some of you, a lot of you were very interested in Marci’s post about how much we spend on a daily basis here in beautiful Southeast Asia. I thought this would be a great time to tell how we get the bills so low.

First let me say that there is a post somkwan-yin-love.jpg.jpegewhere that talks about how we got started. You know: saving, selling, dreaming, doing. But once here we still have daily expenses. No matter what we all eat everyday. Here in Southeast Asia we eat very well everyday. The food is not to be believed. So how do save on food? First we adopted a tentative monthly budget for everything. I said it would be $1000 a month for the two of us. Marci said I was nuts. She was right. We now have a pretty firm budget of $1200 a month. But I have to say when were in Chiang Mai we spent $800 a month. More on that in a later post.

So once you know your monthly budget y
ou just divide by 30 and you get a daily budget. For us that comes out to $40 a day. Not a lot of money but it is very inexpensive to live here. With that we must pay for a place to stay, food, transportation and entertainment. Here is the thing. The longer you stay in one place the fewer dollars, ringit, baht, rupiah, etc you will spend. So if one day we go over budget because we wanna see the Vietnamese Water Puppets, the next two days we go some place beautiful but free or inexpensive, like Hanoi’s Temple of Literature. This marvelous temple complex is $1 to enter. We walked and had lunch on the way. It is an average after all. But at the end of the month we want to have spent less than our budget.
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Saving money on food is as easy as eating what the locals eat. Western food here is very expensive and not very good. Street food here is incredibly delicious and almost free. Our daily budget is $10. (No alcohol. We don’t drink.)

Breakfast is sometimes included in the price of our accommodations. This is optimal to a point. Since we average about $3 a meal it does not make sense for us to spend more than about $5 over our daily budget of $20 a day for housing. But the extra $2 is worth it so we don’t have to leave too early in the morning.

Lunch is our biggest meal of the day. We always go out for it and we eat mostly street food. You can find delicious gourmet meals served at a sit down restaurant for much less during lunch when compared to dinner prices. Be mindful of the most touristy areas as they will have the worst food and the worst prices.

For most of you budgeting may be easier because your budget will be larger. But a larger budget is not the only thing that makes for an easy budget. Financial discipline is required. For some of you your budget will be smaller. You can do this too. If you have been following the BOLT FaceBook page, you know Marci and I are not living like paupers. The amount is up to you and your bank account. For the purposes of these posts we will stick with $1200 a month for two adults who like each other enough to share a room everyday.

Why we Travel

by BOLT, posted in Fun, Long distance, Long term travel, Old, POC, retirement, Travel, WOC, Women

Travel is scary. It can be expensive. Simply planning a trip can be daunting. It can be uncomfortable once you set out and find yourself in unfamiliar surroundings. But for Marci and I that is the point. We want to be in spaces that challenge and stretch us. Not because we are saints or masochists but because we have been fortunate enough to grow up and live in relative comfort most of our lives. When we travel we often comment on how uncomfortable we are. But the truth becomes obvious once you set out to places different from our home. Most of the world lives in situations that are uncomfortable for sixty year old women. They may carry their water from a well, for example. I hate doing that. They plant and harvest their own food. I hate that too. They may go to the bathroom outside of their homes. I really hate that.297

But for us it is not the hate we remember. Even now writing this I can’t remember all the things I hate about visiting villages and doing what the women there do. But the love is carried with us. We love visiting women in their homes. We love accompanying them to their work spaces. We love helping to prepare a meal. We are dismal at it all. And most of it is smelly and hard. But it is in these spaces where we find our truest love.

Our love of women of color. Women of means when it looks as if they have no means. Women of resource who look as if they are in poverty. These snaggle-toothed, smiling women who laugh at our feeble attempts to do one fifth of the work they accomplish daily are our truest and deepest loves. It is to them that we travel.DSC01484 For with them we too have an unseen value. A value that is not calculated in how well we cook or how many buckets of water we carry. Our value is multiplied by their patience with our well-intentioned ineptitude as verified by their simple words of “Welcome”. Whether it be in Tagalog – maligayang pagdating or Swahili -karibu or Wolof – dalal ak diam.  Or a myriad of other ways, we are better for the experience.

We make no allusions as to our benefit to them. We recognize that when we arrive (most of the time unannounced because of how difficult it can be to communicate with small villages in developing nations) we are an extra expense at best and a downright hardship most of the time. Yet they smile, nod and share their food and homes with us. So although we may hate sleeping on dusty mattresses, we recognize we have the best beds around because someone else is sleeping on the floor. When we complain about having to go to the bathroom outside, we recognize that before the toilet was dug these people went outside for real. It is there where we smile and realize in a very tangible way how blessed we are to have this life and to have the opportunity to travel.

Welcome to BOLT.  Our wish for you is that you will travel in spite of the difficulty. Maybe this site will inspire you. Thank you for reading.