October was the continuation of my Great South African Road Trip. While spending this much is difficult, I’ve gotten to do some really amazing things including a multi-day safari in Kruger National Park.

This summary covers nomad living expenses for 1-31 October 2018.

Location(s) Visited This Month

  • Nottingham Road
  • Clarens
  • Johannesburg
  • Pretoria
  • Graskop
  • Kruger National Park
  • Centurion

Transportation – $531.81

  • This covered planes, trains, buses, etc between and within all of the above locations. It also covers my rental car and gas while road tripping (gas in SA is ridiculously expensive!).

Lodging – $705.95

  • I did do some house sitting this month, but my visit to Kruger offset any money I saved with that. During in my road trip I’m staying in a mix of hotels, national park cabins, and fancy lodges.
  • Breakdown *
    • House Sitting – 13
    • Hotel – 18

Food & Entertainment – $588.95

  • Since I’m hopping around a lot, I’ve been eating out pretty much every meal. I need to be better about actually using the self catering facilities.

Miscellaneous & Tours/Activities – $352.42

  • This covers mostly expenses related to tours and that kind of thing. There is also some random cash for food and buses that I didn’t track under those categories because I’m lazy. The biggest expenses were related to my time in Kruger National Park. I bought a Wild Card park pass since the cost was almost the same and then I could use it on the rest of my trip.

Monthly Total:  $2179.31
Daily Average: $70.29

Average monthly spend: $1243.15 ($243.16)**
Average daily spend: $40.89

* When I published my summary in 2015 I had more than one person accuse me of always Couch Surfing or always staying in 30+ person dorms in order to keep my costs low. So this year I’m tracking my lodging type as an extra data point.

** My average monthly spending target is $1k/mo. This number is the average for the months I’ve been working remotely since January 2018.  The amount in parentheses is the amount I’m over or under my goal.

At reader request, I’m adding a link to a google doc with all of the monthly data at a glance: