4 ms·

My friend recently went to Chiang Mai. His decent hotel room cost something like $3 per night and his meals were about $1. I went to Thailand in 2002 and stay

• gexla 15y ago
  You can get a room here for about $4 - $5 per day. This doesn't include utilities but if you only run a fan and go without cable and internet then utilities won't be much. You can also get meals here for $1 / day. There are other costs that you can't forget. Transportation can easily cost you another $1 / day unless you walk everywhere. There are places where you can get free wifi but if you can't do that then an internet cafe will charge 40 cents per hour. The killer is the visa, which runs approx $60 / month. I didn't say you couldn't do it. I said you would be barely squeaking by. For some that is okay (easy even) but for me it's difficult. I have tried to live on that budget and it's not fun. We might call it backpacking, others call it poverty. ;) Maybe at first you can take this as a personal challenge to live cheap. In my experience that eventually wears thin and you sort of bounce back to wanting a decent life again. I suppose that's the point where it became not fun for me. Fortunately, I didn't have to keep living like that, I simply quit taking it easy and did more work. However, point taken. You can live very cheap if you choose to, and that gives people an idea of where the bottom would be for a foreign visitor (many Filipino's live on far less.)