My name is Martina, 29 years old girl from Czech Republic. 👋🏼 I started to travel in 2016 when I quit UNI and also my job where I was working for 4 years at that time. It was a big decision but I don’t regret it. 😉 I choose to work and travel at the same time. The best option for doing this is one year working holiday visa. 🏝 And when you start live this lifestyle is very difficult to stop.
Canada 🇨🇦
My first destination was Vancouver, Canada. Moving to a foreign country is always hard. You don’t have a place where to live, no job and no friends. I was lucky enough to get all these in a few days. 🤩 Vancouver is a big city with lots of job opportunities. I was working for landscaping company for one month, then I quit and started to work as a cook in catering kitchen where I stayed for rest of my visa. Even though I had a job I still wanted to know how expensive Vancouver is compared to my home country. 🤷🏼♀️ So I used excel to write everything what I bought and it was quite interesting. I found that prices for groceries are almost the same as in Czech Republic. Rent and eating in restaurants were much more expensive, of course. 🍝
New Zealand 🇳🇿
After Canada I moved to New Zealand. Again for one year working holiday visa. This experience was totally different then in Canada. No big cities, less people and also less work. When I decided that I want to extend my visa I had to find a job in agriculture. 🌾 If you ever worked in agriculture you know that’s not just a hard work but also unstable work because of weather conditions, especially in winter. In the area where I was at that moment I couldn’t find any work for a few weeks and had to live off my savings which made me nervous. That time I was monitoring my finance on Spendee app (finally I discovered this app) more than ever before and it was way more clearer than excel. 💸 Luckily, for visa extension is necessary just three months in agriculture and after that I could work again in hospitality. I had seven jobs in total during my 15 months in New Zealand.
Asia
When my New Zealand’s visa expired I spent some time travelling in Asia. Even though I didn’t work all 15 months of my working visa I saved enough money to easily travel in Asia without any income. Everybody knows that South East Asia is cheap but I would like to say that it can be also very expensive. It depends on everybody how they travel. I chose to eat with locals, sleep in hostels and I rather walked than took tuk-tuk or other kind of taxi and sometimes do volunteering — working for food and accommodation. This way of traveling is not just cheap but also more interesting because you get closer to locals and meet much more people.
Some of my friends told me that Bali is not what it use to be. It’s very touristic and that’s the reason why the prices are high and staying in Bali is not cheap anymore. I won’t lie, I wasn’t really excited to go there. But the flight ticket was super cheap so I risked it. I tried to avoid all these tourist places, I didn’t eat in “insta” restaurants and went for a walks to areas where locals weren’t used to see tourists very often. After one month I checked Spendee and was surprised. I spend just around 9 thousand CZK which I think is not that much for “touristic Bali”. And yes, although I’m switching currency in app according to where I am, I’m still converting my money to Czech crowns afterwards :D
India was even cheaper than Bali, of course. But I can imagine that it could be more expensive than my budget 6 thousands CZK for a month. I was two months in India and it was the most craziest two months in my life. India is full of contrasts and so much to see. I usually travel solo but on this trip my friend joined me for three weeks. We decided to use money just one of us and at the end of the trip I counted how much should the other pay. This wasn’t very difficult to do it thanks to Spendee. My next stop was Hindu Rishikesh — the World Capital of Yoga and Jaipur where I stayed some time with Muslim family. It was beautiful but exhausting experience.
Australia 🇦🇺
Third and probably my last working holiday. It’s been nine months since my last work in New Zealand, so I really needed to find a job as soon as possible. Thanks to my experience from previous working holiday I found a job quite soon. 👩🏼💻 Salaries in Australia are higher than any other country I’ve worked before, numbers in Spendee were mostly green and I was happy. ✅ Everything was perfect until May. All World get crazy because of Coronavirus and Australia was no exception. All business went down and we lost our jobs for next couple of months. And here we go again. Time for my savings and hoping this all situation will be soon over. To be honest, to have free time for myself is not really bad.
Even if you don’t need to pay an attention to how much money you spend, it’s always interesting to see the difference between the countries. And thanks to Spendee you will have exact answer on your friends question “How much did this trip cost?” 😋
We are glad that Spendee is loved by so many great adventurous travellers! ✈️ Thank you Martina for taking us on your world trip 🌎 Don't forget to follow her on her Instagram to see more from her journeys!
