With the opening of Asia from Covid lock-down in the last half of 2022 we knew 2023 would be our opportunity to spend quality time exploring the region. We spent Christmas 2022 and January in the Palm Spring, California area with Whitney’s parents, and a quick search in Google Flights showed LAX to Tokyo was by far the cheapest destination in Asia, so that’s where we headed!
The plan was to spend 7 or 8 months in Asia and visit a number of the places we had heard were great locations for expats to settle so we could get our own feel for the areas. We also hoped that once we left East Asia (Japan & Korea) we’d be able to save some money in lower cost SE Asia.
We managed to visit 9 countries in Asia, and really did get a pretty good feel for the countries and their differences. In SE Asia we also realized that the heat and humidity, that’s so different from our dry cool climate in Calgary, Canada, really took a toll on us, and we decided to end our time in the region after 6 months.
There was a silver lining to our decision to leave SE Asia a bit early because we again used Google Flights to find the cost of flights to Europe, and it turned out that Bangkok, Thailand to Stockholm, Sweden was far cheaper than any other route out of SE Asia, with the bonus that it was a direct flight! We used this serendipitous travel planning to explore some of the Scandinavian countries and the three Baltic states before ending with a month in Spain then boarding a ship in Barcelona for a repositioning cruise to Tampa to get back to North America. We spent a total of 281 days in Asia and Europe from arriving in Tokyo to departing Barcelona on a ship bound for Tampa, FL.
Our Route:
Trip Stats:
The two main bummers this year were Whitney breaking a bone in her hand in Lithuania, and losing her phone in Barcelona when a backpack zipper came undone and it dropped out. Luckily the hand wasn’t too painful and only required a cast for three weeks. Nor was treating it painful to our pocketbook – $75 for the doctor visit, x-ray and cast! She was WAY more upset about the lost phone which wasn’t replaced until we arrived back in Canada seven weeks later.
The lost credit cards were also a bummer. When we left Canada we had 6 cards, which we thought was plenty, but after 16 months on the road we returned to Calgary with only 1 remaining. One of our cards was cancelled by the provider when they went out of business. The other 4 were lost – 1 in an ATM in Bali, 1 in a card swipe machine in a grocery store in Stockholm, and 2 in Whitney’s cell phone wallet when it fell out of her backpack in Barcelona. Luckily only the card lost in Stockholm ended up with strange charges on it (we didn’t notice the card was missing for a full day) which were four Uber Eats deliveries, but they were fully refunded to us.
Costs by Location (281 days in Asia and Europe):
- Location Avg/day is our costs to live in that city, including accommodation, groceries and restaurants, local transportation, entrance fees for sights we visited.
- Nomadic amounts are our FULL costs for living this lifestyle including the location amounts mentioned above plus the cost of travelling between locations (flights, buses, trains, ferries), medical insurance, data plans, subscriptions (streaming services, blog hosting, financial services, etc), and any other miscellaneous things we spend money on.
As seen in this chart our full nomadic costs were $41,690 for the 281 days, which extrapolates out to $54,153 Canadian$ for a full year ($39,655 US$, €36,979). Our max budget is $60k CDN$/year, so we’re pretty happy about being under that mark even though we travelled pretty quickly to see as much as possible, spending a lot on travel costs, and often not being able to take advantage of weekly or monthly rental discounts. More details of our costs can be found on the Spending page.
What Did We Spend It On:
How Can We Afford To Do This???
I’ve been tracking our spending for years, so I compared our 2023 nomadic travelling to a year in our old life in Calgary with a house and two cars (all paid for and no mortgage). Now that we have no property taxes, utilities, home and car insurance, maintenance, and the elevated cost of living in North America, we spent about $5,000 LESS doing this travelling than we would have spent living in our home in Calgary.
People sometimes think we must be rich to live this lifestyle, but for us it’s actually saving us money living like this. It’s a decision we’ve made to eliminate everything else in our lives that would be a drain on our finances, and spend this phase of our lives fully embracing the travel we’ve always enjoyed to get to know as much of the world as we can. We know this mindset doesn’t work for everyone, and personal situations will differ, but we’re lucky to have hit a point in our lives where our sons are self-sufficient, our health is good, and we were able to retire, so this is what we’ll do until we decide we want to enter a different phase of life.
Where We Stayed:
Our general rule of thumb is that if we’re only staying for one or two nights we book through Booking.com, check the listings on Google Maps, or search through some other booking sites where we can find a good deal on a hotel. Most of our stays are closer to a week or more, which we normally book through AirBnB to find more “homey” accommodations and take advantage of weekly or monthly discounts, although occasionally VRBO, Booking.com, or a few other sites have good long-term deals as well.
When staying more than one or two nights we’re normally looking for a highly rated and well reviewed place with the following amenities:
- A decently outfitted kitchen. We cook most of our own meals, but we’re not that fancy, so as long as there are some pots and pans, glasses, dishes and utensils we’re normally fine.
- A defined bedroom (not a studio, although we have done them for shorter stays if choice is limited).
- A comfortable seating area with a couch and TV. We’re not on vacation, this is our life, so relaxing watching Netflix is a normal evening activity. We also check the pictures of the TV on the listing to make sure it’s relatively new so we can attach our Firestick to use our own streaming accounts, along with news and other apps. Quite often the only stations you can get on the TV are in the local language, so it’s nice to have a consistent source of news and entertainment we can understand.
- A work area where we can set up our laptops with accessible plug-ins. Usually this is the kitchen table.
Having said the above, every once in a while we come across a listing where the view is so incredible that it’s the deciding factor for where we stay. If it also meets the list above we’re as happy as clams. Here’s the view from the pool deck of our AirBnB in Kuching, Malaysia, and you can see some of our other great views in our 2023 Around The World Top 5 Lists.
Random Tips from our 2023 travels:
When in SE Asia download the Grab app to get around. It’s almost exactly like Uber, including the ability to order food from pretty much any local restaurant (you’ll see tons of Grab delivery drivers riding around with the distinctive green food bags on their backs). We were usually only paying a few dollars to be driven to most places within a city, and you can even pay less if you’re willing to ride on the back of a motorcycle. Just make sure to be ready to depart when you go into the app, because the car often showed up at our place within 30 seconds of confirming the order! When in Europe use the Bolt app, which is the same thing for that region just more expensive given the difference in cost of living.
Metro and mapping apps:
- Japan (and most countries): you can ignore the many different subway and metro apps, and just use Google Maps to show how to take the trains and subways. I tried a number of them, but never found one that was any better than GM (and some that were worse), so just go with Google Maps since you probably already have it on your devices.
- South Korea: you can ignore the point above because it’s the one country where Google Maps will completely let you down since the country won’t share their mapping information with them. Use the Naver app that is a good replacement, but unfortunately not as good as Google Maps is in other locations. Available in the Android and Apple app stores.
- Stockholm, Sweden: use the local metro app SL, as Google Maps did not inform us of some extra costs we would have had to pay for certain areas, while the local app had more details and excellent pricing and schedule information.
If you’re planning to travel between Thailand and Laos do yourself a favour and take the two day slow-boat on the Mekong river. We were traveling from Luang Prabang, Laos to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and travelled upstream from LP to the Thai border, overnighting in Chiang Kong, then taking a bus to Chiang Mai. Our guide on the slow-boat said the upstream route is better because the boat is rarely full whereas the downstream trip from Thailand to Laos is almost always packed. This was proven true for us because there was only one other couple on a boat that normally seats 30 people, so we had a very relaxing trip. Even at the reduced off-season rate ($300 USD/$403 CAD for the two of us, which included an overnight stay in a hotel on the banks of the Mekong) it’s a bit of a splurge but worth it for a memorable experience. Details and contacts for this trip can be found in our Laos – Luang Prabang, Waterfalls, & the Mekong post.
Our Full Nomadic Dashboard At End Of 2023:
This is the dashboard of all our statistics for nomadic life to the end of this year.
What’s Up For 2024? We’re currently staying with family in the Palm Springs area of California where we had Christmas with our sons flying down from Calgary to join us for a few days. From here we travel to Cambodia in early February for a month, Vietnam and Thailand for a month each, then a cruise for almost a month from Singapore to Greece through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Make sure to subscribe here or follow us on Facebook or Instagram to come along!
Favourite Photos From 2023: You can view all my favourite photos from the year on my Howard’s Favourite Photos From 2023 blog post, but here’s a handful of them:
Another great blog. Happy New Year!
Will your cruise leave time for diving in the Red Sea ?
Did you dive in SE Asia?
We’re looking at getting certified – need to know the best secret spots!
Unfortunately that trip has has been cancelled because cruise ships aren’t going around Yemen these days. We’ve booked another cruise around the same time to Iceland, so should have a good on that one. We were planning on diving the Red Sea while there, and have done it in the past a few years ago and consider it in the top 3 list for dive sites we’ve been (along with USAT Liberty Shipwreck in Bali and The Cathedrals off Lanai, Hawaii). We have dived SE Asia. Near Phuket, Thailand was pretty good, but not so much Vietnam. Thanks for the question.