Uzbekistan Costs: Summer 2016 Summary

I announced a few weeks ago that I’m changing the way I talk about trip expenses. Just a few things are changing. In short:

• I will only be publishing the costs of being in a country, not the costs of getting to or from that country. Why? Because the cost of traveling to and from somewhere is to variable. I’ll still talk about good deals and some miles redemptions, but in separate posts.
• I’ll only be writing full posts about countries that I am in for at least a week. Why? I go to countries for just one or two days sometimes. When that happens, my costs are usually insanely low, or insanely high.
• I’ve started a database to document the cost of traveling to various countries. I’ve gone back and added past trips to the best of my ability, but will be adding everything going forward, including those one and two day trips. I may occasionally take data from other people who travel in a similar style as I do to get this table filled out a little faster.

This is the first post documenting the cost of traveling around a country. Let me know what additions you would like to see over time!

Lodging was a little more expensive that I was expecting it to be. I generally aim to be closer to $10 per day when I am outside of Europe. It was possible to spend less on lodging than I did, but with how hot Uzbekistan was in June I quickly realized that sacrificing air conditioning to save a couple dollars per day was not worth it.

My entertainment charges were higher than they generally are, because I tend to choose only a handful of things to do that cost money. In this case, one of the things I really wanted to do was take a trip to the disappearing Aral Sea. I even made a video about the awesome 2-day, 1-night tour I went on. The tour itself wasn’t too terribly priced considering it included transport, food, and lodging for one night. I am glad that I went.

Food was incredibly reasonable to pay for, but variety was somewhat lacking and almost everything was heavy and fatty. It was a little tough to convince myself to eat during the heat of the day, which arguably saved me a few dollars in the food category. Transport was very cheap with taxis around town usually costing less than a dollar and transport between towns costing anywhere between $10 and $25.

I was in Uzbekistan for 20 days all together. Uzbekistan does require a visa for U.S. citizens. Usually visas are granted with only a single entry, so if you are planning to take a short trip that $160 visa will really add to your daily average. My stated visa fee is higher because I included the cost to mail my passport to get the visa. Since I was there for 20 days, that charge was spread pretty nicely over the cost of my visit.

Overall, my trip to Uzbekistan was a little bit more expensive per day than I aim for (<$50), but considering the experiences I had while I was there and the visa requirement that added to my cost, I’m pleased with how I managed to keep my budget in check for the 20 days that I was in Uzbekistan.