Travel

#Seven Best Budget Travel Destinations

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Traveling frugally doesn’t mean missing out, especially if you’re willing to think outside of the box when it comes to destinations. There are parts of the world where ten dollars can you buy you a meal, a beer and bed, not to mention excursions like cliff jumping or scuba diving.

Here’s a compendium of all the best budget travel destinations from some of my favorite travel bloggers on the web. Note that I did not include the cost of actually getting there or the cost of a visa to visit, so some of these destinations may be pricey to reach, depending on your nationality and where you are traveling from.

Lee Abbamonte is the youngest American to visit every country in the world, which makes him a great resource for budget destinations as he has literally been everywhere, at least once. An avid travel blogger behind his self-named hit site. he also writes great “30 Best” lists than run the gamut from “30 Best Airports in the World” to “30 Best Second Cities” and the controversial “30 Best Countries for Food”. For his list, he steered clear of Southeast Asia, as he guessed, correctly, that the other travel bloggers would focus on that area of the world.

Soar into your next adventure. Photo credit: Alexandra Talty.

1. “South Africa is a great destination for getting some serious bang for your buck. The Rand is weak so your dollars or euros go far in South Africa and you can afford that dream safari vacation, diving with the sharks or eating living it up in Cape Town or Johannesburg. The restaurants and bars are very cheap and you can eat all night for a fraction of what you’d pay in the west.”

2. “Bolivia is one of my favorite destinations because there is so much to see and do in that country. Even better is that you can do everything for dirt cheap prices. If you’ve dreamed of taking photos in the Salar de Uyuni. biking the world’s most dangerous road in La Paz or crossing into Peru via Lake Titicaca -you can do all of the super cheap in Bolivia. Just remember to take it easy with the altitude when you first arrive.”

Other sites in Bolivia include the Amazon jungle, accessible through Rurrenabaque; the lunar-scape of the Atacama desert and Potosi, to take a tour through the silver mines that funded the Spanish Empire Empire. They are some of the world’s largest mines still in use today.

Another one of Abbamonte’s recommendations for keeping transport costs in South America down is to try using an AirPass to travel in between countries, rather than booking individual flights which can get costly. He sees it as an efficient alternative to the dirt-cheap buses.

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