Starting a fight with the NZHerald Travel Team
As we all filter back onto campus for the 2024 year, it provides a time of reflection. While some may lament a summer gone by, and others may question their choice to come to university at all, I chose to focus on the future. During my break, I read an article by the NZHerald about it being cheaper to live in an overseas resort than rent in New Zealand. It was flawed. It assumed you could earn the same amount overseas and that you had a strong preference for island living. I could do better than the professional travel advisory team.
So it occurred to me that there was a guaranteed source of earning available to students, whether we were here in a Hall of Residence or off in the Amazon: Student Loan. If you didn’t know, if you could get a student loan in Aotearoa, you can apply for it overseas as long as you’re still studying at a New Zealand university. You just have to be studying two courses. So that’s about three hundred dollars consistently while we take our impromptu exchange.
But we also want somewhere cheap to fly to, right? There is no point in booking a life in Astana only to realise you need to fork over three and a half grand to get there. So, we’ll be using course-related costs for this plane purchase. Spare one moment for that famed, one-thousand-dollar pot, which I’m sure no one has ever used for a non-course related purchase in the scheme’s history.
That narrows down our possible options to most of the Pacific, Australia, East Asia, and, for some reason, New Orleans and Moscow. For obvious reasons, Moscow has been struck off the list. In fact, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has helpfully issued a selection of travel advisories to cut down on the number of options we have. We’ll avoid Afghanistan (Terrorism and Kidnapping), Angola (Civil Unrest), Tunisia (Terrorism and Kidnapping), Georgia (Unexploded Ordinances), and Papua New Guinea (Terrorism and Kidnapping).
If you were interested, the cheapest international flight was one hundred and ninety dollars to Sydney, the same price as one to New Plymouth, and the most expensive economy flight trip was to Comodoro Rivadavia in Argentina for seventeen thousand NZD. Now, dear reader, you may ask what you can do in Comodoro Rivadavia that is worth nineteen nine-to-five work weeks, and I am pleased to tell you that the highest-rated attraction at four stars, is the National Petroleum Museum.
Also, the Herald article should have mentioned language. There is no point taking the three-stop, thirty-eight-hour flight to Ürümqi without Mandarin or Turkic. Many of you may be proficient in half the world’s languages, but I also know that our schooling system is not designed with international vacations in mind. I wouldn’t dream of starting a relaxing trip if I weren’t sure I could buy bottled water when I arrived. Oh, yes, many of these locations have different sanitary conditions to New Zealand, so short of moving from Wellington to one of these places, the water situation may require you to downgrade your standard of living for your sojourn.
Breaking down our weekly budget for a second, it comes out at thirteen hundred a month, or more importantly, forty-three dollars a night for accommodation. We’re not going to be getting five-star hotels, and you may need to have some savings in the bank for food and other essential living expenses, but that’s semantics. What matters is that there are options, so let us break them down.
I’ve found a few options for those who have stayed on: For just nine dollars a night, you can stay at the Flying Yak in Kathmandu, Nepal, a direct AirNZ flight away, and immerse yourself somewhere out there. You’ll have enough for food with the remaining thirty-four dollars a day. You can prepare to conquer your dreams of climbing Everest or just stare at it daily because it costs fifty thousand NZD for the cheapest expedition.
Or you may want to stay by the beach, sipping away, in which case, for a bit pricier, twenty-seven a night, you can kick back at the Pacific Paradise Motel in Port Vila, Vanuatu. You’ll get to know your island inside and out with the Island loop, which takes just one hundred and fifty minutes. Soaking up the sun, the French language, and a short flight from home if you need to return.
And because I’m a good traveller, after writing this article, I checked the following day, and now, for just twenty-two dollars a night, you can stay on the river in Budapest, whose flight path requires you to fly AirNZ, AirChina, and then the ever trustworthy, Whizz Air over the course of fifty-four hours for the low, low price of only nine hundred and fifty. It pays to wait and see with these things; new opportunities are always lying in wait.
Of course, if you’ve got language skills or are possibly hoping to train up, there’s the deep-sea fishing town of Wakkanai, Japan, for twenty-seven a night. Or consider The Nice Day Motel in Yangon, Myanmar, whose tourist information manages to complain about ‘deeply inadequate infrastructure’ instead of the ongoing Military Coup. Or worse, a waterfront backpacker in Cairns for thirty-two dollars if you can decipher the complexities of Australian.
Let’s not forget that you must be doing those two courses I mentioned. Auckland Online has a selection for all tastes, so long as your tastes include Medicines for Older Persons or Engineering Contracts for Project Managers. I’m sure you’ll find time. A few business courses do not seem to be about anything if you want an easy ride. Although that advice is true for Auckland Online, I do mean it generally.
So, New Zealand Herald with your budget that was twice mine and your salary that I do not want to guess at lest it makes me feel sad, one point to me. You can’t report on a housing crisis for a decade and then make your byline: Rental money goes a surprising way in the South Pacific islands. No kidding. You may have fancy bar graphs and scatter plots, but you don’t have that poor student ingenuity.
What are you waiting for? Forget about 360International; take the Craccum Experience. Wander the world on your next peregrination. Take advantage of what being a student offers you and scamper. Bolt for the foothills of the Himalayas. Dive for the coast of Japan. And, of course, in the end, always remember that a whole year in Vanuatu costs almost the same as half a year in Carlaw Park’s Stanley Residence.
