September Travel Expenses

At the beginning of September, we broke away from Granada and hit the road again. We spent 11 days of September in Morocco and the remaining 19 days in Spain on the Camino de Santiago. We were constantly on the move, never in the same city for more than 3 nights (one night in most cases), and traveled a total of 2,661 miles, many of which were by land. This put a healthy dent in the Transportation category of our budget which included first class bus tickets from Granada to Malaga, a one way flight from Malaga to Tangier, train tickets to Fes, a private transfer for four days from Fes to Merzouga (Desert town on the Algerian border) to Marrakech, train tickets to Casablanca, taxes on one way flights from Casablanca to Pamplona booked with British Airways Avios (Miles), and bus tickets from Pamplona to St. Jean Pied de Port so that we could start walking the Camino de Santiago (but at least walking is free!).


In addition to Transportation, also hit hard was our Lodging due to the fact that we no longer had our €490/month apartment. Dining out increased because we rarely had a kitchen we could cook in and the only time we did was while we were in Casablanca where we found it incredibly difficult to find good groceries, even from reputable grocery stores. Entertainment costs came down because we spent almost half of the month in a relatively dry country (so no beer and free tapas). Health & Medical costs almost doubled because we now have traditional health insurance! (a high deductible health plan). Attractions came down a bit because Morocco unfortunately doesn’t offer them to the extent that Spain does, but items here included two admission fees to Mosques which we are technically not allowed to enter since we are not Muslim...Money seems to always have a way of changing tradition and values. Miscellaneous costs mostly included a few last minute Camino supplies such as sleeping bags. Last but not least I had to add a new cost category called Communication because we got local sim cards. In Morocco, a more generous plan than our previous US plans was obtained in under 5 minutes from Maroc Telecom for around $5. In Spain, we bought a plan (also more generous than our US plans) from Vodafone which we can roam all over Europe with  for around $17/month. After walking out of the store, I noticed one last interesting piece of marketing on this purchase informing us that we can also roam to the USA free of charge meaning roaming to the US with our Europe sim is cheaper than using our US sim...in the US. Oh how I love competition.

Because I thought it would be interesting to track costs by country going forward, I went ahead and broke out our Morocco cost categories vs Spain. Looking at the numbers in more detail, I'm surprised Morocco wasn't cheaper. To be fair, we were tourists doing touristy things, but since I had to constantly negotiate and sometimes re-negotiate already agreed upon prices, I don't think we always got the best price we could have. Some friends we met in Fes found that they were able to negotiate prices on a restaurant menu (something I never would have thought to try) which suggests that most prices in Morocco aren't truly what we would traditionally call fair or consistent. In fact, looking at the numbers, I suspect that the only “local” price we paid the entire time we were there was for our Maroc Telecom sim card...oh well.