Originally Posted by
shore9
Two of us will be spending the month of October in China. We plan to go all over the country, probably following the following itinerary:
Beijing - Shanghai (and surrounding areas) - Guilin - Kunming - Tibet - Xi'an - Beijing.
We would likely stay in cheap hotels / higher end hostels (double rooms). Given we'd likely eat out for most meals and probably take a few flights domestically, how much should we be budgeting for the month that we are there?
We were thinking of about $3,000 CDN, however after reading this, it sounds like China has shot up in price since I was last there.
I think $3000 is a reasonable budget for you to strive towards. Apart from BJ and SH, cheap hotels are still quite cheap (figure $25/night). As far as food, taxis, activities are concerned, I spend between y300 and y500 per day, but that's mostly in BJ and SH. It's not too hard to get by on half that when traveling out west, but since you are two people, maybe count on y300, or $45. So, that's 70*30, or $2100, leaving you $450 each for all of your internal flights/trains/buses. This is doable, but if you want to completely avoid hard seats and slow trains/buses, I'd advise you to earmark at least $600 for this purpose. Part of the problem is that Tibet is expensive to get to (btw, I am assuming there are easy/cheap ways to get Tibet permits now).