Costs

I have a few bike rides under my belt at this point so I have a bit of an idea as to how much certain things will cost. I've ridden my bike coast to coast across the USA, coast to coast across Australia and New Zealand, through South America and the Amazon jungle, and my most recent ride was from Mexico home to Canton, Ohio.

Each trip has varying costs for things like food, hotels, replacement parts, but for the most part the rider can decide how much they want to spend per day depending on how much they want to rough it. It would be possible to eat bread and tuna and free camp every single day if you wanted to. If you took an approach like that you could get by on around $10 per day. On the flipside, you could eat every single meal out at restaurants and stay in a hotel every night bringing the cost to upwards of $100 per day.

A collection of some foreign money I collected on my travels.

I rode for 60 days in Australia and spent just over $700 on those entire two months riding. On that tour I camped out almost every night, and cooked my own food most days. I was right around the $10 per day mark. On my ride in South American I stayed in hotels occasionally, I ate out at many local restaurants, and I did some exploring off my bike. In 5 months of riding I spent around $4000. That comes out to just over $25 per day. If I average out those two trips that would put the cost at about $17 per day.

Distance covered each day has a large impact on how much this round the world ride will cost. On both of my US rides and my Australian bike ride I averaged around 70 miles of riding each day. On my ride in South America I averaged almost exactly 35 miles per day. This was mainly because I took many more rest days and spent a lot more time exploring off the bike.

Okay now I'm gonna hit you with some more math. If I averaged 70 miles per day for the entire 26,000 mile ride it would take me 372 days to complete the ride. So just over a year. If I rode at the pace I did in South America it would take me 743 days or just over two years to complete it. More than likely the pace would be somewhere between those two speeds. If I average those out to 50 miles per day it would take 520 days or about a year and a half to complete the ride which sounds about right to me.

If I take that average day count of 520 and the average daily cost of $17 per day I am left with a trip cost of $8,840. That is much less money than I had expected. That number does not include the two flights I would need to take or take into account the cost of visas and entry fees I would need to pay for some countries. Also with a trip that long I would likely run into some bike problems which would require replacement parts and repair fees. The flights would be around $600 each and visa fees would be around $500 as well if I stick mostly to the route I have planned. The bike fees are hard to estimate for a trip of this size, but I think they would be less than $300 based on the costs of my previous bike tours.

That puts the total cost for the trip at just about $11,000. I will likely take significantly more money with me on the trip so that I have a safety net should I get sick somewhere, be forced to go around countries should I be denied entrance, or in case the ride ends up taking longer than expected.