Holy Wah! Reflecting on and analyzing this quarter is something else. There was quite a bit of forecasting and planning here. For one, we knew that we wanted to visit Japan during high season to see the Sakura blossoms in bloom! But we also know that is the most expensive time to go to Japan. So how did we spend only $78.50 per day (which is within our $100 budget) this quarter?

First, we flew from Singapore to Sri Lanka, which is known to be pretty inexpensive, and stayed there for 60 days! We did the math and the high cost of the tourist visa extensions for Sri Lanka were far less than the accommodation cost in the next countries we were going to… so we stayed an extra month. That sure brought the quarterly cost down… and was still full of adventure! We went hiking in the mountains through tea plantations, learned how to surf at one of the world’s best surfing spots for beginners, and even went on a safari to see the elephants! Flexibility sure has its perks.

From there, we considered how to get to Japan and scoured the internet for flight deals and points opportunities. We stumbled across seats.aero, which is now on the top of our list for finding flights. It compiles a list of all flights available in the world using points and lets you sort it! It even lets you set up notifications. Perfect for us. That said, we ended up booking a flight that had a “2-week” layover in Bali, Indonesia on our way to Japan. Mostly, because we wanted to see what the fuss was all about. We even witnessed the Day of Silence and the Indonesian New Year (out of pure luck)!

Next, to keep housing costs low, we considered housing costs in Japan using our favorite travel hack, housesitting. Unfortunately, There is a lot of competition for house sits in Japan and we were unable to land one. So we did the next best thing – private rooms in shared accommodation, just like in Paris!

That doesn’t mean we were in hostels every night. We actually splurged on 2 nights in a traditional Ryokan in Shibu Onsen (shared accommodation), where we dressed up in our provided Yukatas and went Onsen hopping to 9 different natural thermal mineral hot springs. From there, we made our home base in Osaka for 2 weeks and explored Kyoto 3 times for the tradition, Kobe for the beef and sake, and Nara to meet some very polite deer and see some shrines.

That was A LOT of transportation cost! But we never pay full price… we picked up the JR Arch Pass which is an unlimited pass for the region that we wanted to explore (up to Nagano and the Osaka/Kyoto Region). It does not cover the whole country as some of the other JR passes do and it is only valid for 7 days. However, we were able to save hundreds of dollars in transportation costs because of this pass. 

The key takeaway for this quarter is all about trade-offs. We only spent $1,000 in the month of February, but spent just over $4,000 in the month of March. Basically, we were able to have all of the best  experiences without blowing the budget just by relaxing by the beach for a while. Cool huh?

The best deal this quarter? The flights from Sri Lanka to Japan with a long layover in Bali. The cost of these 2 flights were the same as a direct flight from Sri Lanka to Japan! We saved several hundred dollars in Bali because of the reasonable lodging costs compared to if we were in Japan for those 2 weeks. Additionally, we were able to leverage our credit card lounge access more effectively because we took flights with 8h layovers each. Finally, those flights were overnight… which means no lodging costs for 2 days! Was it hard? Heck yeah… Was it worth it? I mean… we saved almost $1,000 by doing that so, YES.