Two Ways to Do a Safari
A group camping trip to the Maasai Mara runs $150 to $250 per person, all in. That is the number that matters most, because the same trip booked through a lodge circuit can run $500 a day. The gap is not small. It is the difference between a two-week trip and a four-day one.
Camping is the mechanism. Tents, shared vehicles, fixed departure dates. You give up the plunge pool and the turndown service. You keep the animals, which are the actual reason anyone flies to Kenya in the first place.
Diani Beach sits on the Indian Ocean and prices like a backpacker town rather than a resort strip. Sand, warm water, cheap beds. It pairs well with the camping math above, because you can spend a week on the coast for less than a single night at a high-end Mara lodge.
What a Bed Costs
In Arusha, $20 per person per night buys a small private bathroom with a shower. Power comes from solar panels, so it is limited. Internet works in the communal areas and not reliably in the rooms. That is the honest trade at that price. Elsewhere in Tanzania the same $20 buys less, because Arusha has more supply than most towns on the circuit.
Move to Southeast Asia and the floor drops out. Backpacker dorms go for as little as $2. Hotels start around $20. In Vietnam, $1,000 covered two weeks at roughly $70 a night — okay hotels, flights between cities, the works. Thailand ran about the same, though the tracking was looser.
The western edge of Europe is not the bargain people assume. Portugal, done simply, lands around $55 per person per day. That figure assumes a two- or three-star hotel, meals in inexpensive local restaurants, a small rental car, and free activities. Add tours and wine tastings and it climbs fast.
The Long Trek
A seven-day trek done solo runs about $30 per day, so $210 for the week. Hire a guide and add $30 per day for guide fees, split across the group. Two people halve that. Four people quarter it. The guide cost is the single line item most worth thinking about before you commit, because it scales with the group and not with the itinerary.
The Pre-Trip Bill
Plane tickets and travel insurance, booked before anything else, totaled $1,700 for one traveller. That number sits outside every daily budget above. It is the entry fee. A month across Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia is the common shape of a first long trip, and the daily costs inside it are the ones you can actually control.
The Philippines tells a different story. Twenty-six days came to $3,525, or $136 a day. That is not a typo and it is not a luxury trip. Island ferries, internal flights, and the geography of 7,000 islands all push the number up.
The Luxury Line
One sit-down meal per day is worth budgeting for. Not every meal. One. It is the version of a trip where you sit down, order from a menu, and do not check the price of the second drink. Everything else can stay cheap. The dorm, the bus, the street food, the free walking route.
The numbers above are 2025 and 2026 prices, not historical ones. A dorm bed in a hostel runs about $11 at current exchange rates. A full lunch — soup, main, water — runs $4 to $5. A bus across a country costs $11 to $13. Entry to a UNESCO World Heritage site is $5 to $8. None of those figures have moved much, which is the useful part. The cheap tier of travel has stayed cheap while the expensive tier has not.
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