One of the first questions people always have about traveling around the world is “How much does it cost?” Every month we have been posting our expenses. However, I thought it might be nice to give more explanation around our expenses, so that one can learn from our mistakes and also see how we are managing to come pretty close to our monthly goal of $100 per day for the entire family including transportation.
For the month of March we were in Morocco. The total amount we spent for the month was $3,089.76, or $99.67 per day. Not to shabby? Well to tell you the truth, I was actually disappointed by the amount we spent. I was hoping we would do much better than that to help offset some of the more expensive countries we have yet to see, such as Ireland and England.
Transportation
One of our biggest expenses in March was transportation coming in at a whopping $1278.82. The biggest portion of transportation cost was our flight from Morocco to Ireland at $950.91. There were significantly cheaper airline tickets, especially to Paris. Rail in Morocco is ridiculously cheap and is comfortable, clean and efficient and the ferries are also cheap. However given the Schengen restrictions, we were not allowed to enter back into mainland Europe for another 60 days. So, we had limited choices on where we could go.
Food
Our total expenses for food were $703.77, which as been our cheapest month for food cost so far, but this really surprised me. To be honest, Morocco has not been my favorite place for food and I did not really feel that we were splurging like we had been in France. We ate mostly local foods such as couscous and turkey and bought produce from the outdoor market. However, breaking down the numbers further we spent $239.61 on dining out alone, nearly 35% of our total cost for food. Yikes! I think we were lulled into how cheap the prices were in Morocco and couldn’t resist just popping into a café for coffee and snacks. We also spent several days in hotels without a kitchen. Our numbers really show how quickly dining out can eat up anyone’s budget.
Lodging
For lodging we spent $945.68, which is the cheapest month so far. Our apartment in Rabat cost $685, including all utilities. We spent 4 nights in hotels for the month of March, which added up to $185.94. Under miscellaneous lodging expenses, our hotel in Granada, Spain had fees for parking which came to $73.80. Overall I am pretty pleased with our lodging expenses. We could have lowered our expenses by not spending the night in Moulay Idriss, but I feel like we would have missed out on seeing rural Moroccan life and Moulay Idriss was actually our favorite place that we visited in Morocco.
Miscellaneous
Under the miscellaneous category our costs were $73.46. Unfortunately, $47.10 of that was for laundry alone. When we were looking for an apartment in Morocco, it was very difficult to find one that was self-catering. We had very few choices and I guess self-catering apartments are not very common in Morocco, yet. We did not have access to a laundry machine and there are absolutely no self-service laundries in Rabat. This left us no choice but to pay someone to do our laundry as we did not have a nice sink or bathtub like we did in Paris to hand wash our clothing. Sydney is just not a clean enough child to be able to go a month without washing her clothing. Other miscellaneous costs included school supplies, like pens, glue sticks, and other items like photocopies, hand sanitizer, ibuprofen and the most essential thing getting henna applied on our hands.
Entertainment and Entrance Fees
Overall our entertainment and entrance expenses were very cheap coming in at $50.71. Most museums in Morocco cost 10 Dirhams, which is about $1.17 per person, and Sydney was always free. Morocco offers many amazing sites that are worth stopping and seeing and the price cannot be beat.
Lessons learned in Morocco:
- Do more research into cost of airline tickets.
- If possible avoid flying into or out of Morocco.
- Avoid eating out even if it seems cheap. It quickly adds up.
- If you cannot find an apartment with a washing machine, plan to pay someone to do your laundry.
Many may ask if we would go back to see Morocco and I would say yes. But I also think I would try to spend more time in the tiny towns of Morocco outside the big cities.