What Families Spend on Food Around The World

As we continue to validate what it will cost us to sail around the world, I found a very interesting series of photos and articles on how much families spend on food per week in different places around the world. The information is pulled from a book titled Hungry Planet: What The World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio.

The weekly food spend runs quite a gamut: $1.23 USD to $500.07 USD. From bags of lentils and rice for a week, to big steak packages and bottles of beer for a week.

The photos in the book are outstanding. You see families with their entire weekly food outlay right in front of them, in their homes, in their place of eating. Some have live chickens, some have defiant teenagers, some have TVs in their dining rooms, some have 3 generations living off the weekly food, and more. None of which we have, yet.

Flipping through the pictures, it is neat to see so many cans and bottles of Coca-Cola in the photos .... a product from right here in Atlanta, Ga.

The amount of fresh vegetables, from family to family, was also neat. It is encouraging to see how many had good, raw foods.

As you might guess, the more first world the nation of the family, the more that packaged food showed up in the photos.

The family food favorites is fun to peruse too. You find Polar Bear, Pig's Knuckles, Mutton Dumplings, Marge Brown's Quandong, Sheep Soup, and other neat stuff.

Here is a summary of the spend data for 1 week of food per family (family size varies starting at 4 people and going up) in USD:

$1.23 Chad, Breidjing Camp $5.03 Bhutan, Shingkhey Village $26.39 Mali, Kouakourou $31.55 Ecuador, Tingo $39.27 India, Ujjain $40.02 Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar $68.53 Egypt, Cairo $75.70 Guatemala, Todos Santos $145.88 Turkey, Istanbul $151.27 Poland, Konstancin-Jeziorna $155.06 China, Beijing $189.09 Mexico, Cuernavaca $221.45 Kuwait, Kuwait City $253.15 Great Britain, Cllingbourne Ducis $260.11 Italy, Sicily $277.12 Greenland, Cap Hope $317.25 Japan, Kondaira City $341.98 USA, North Carolina $345.00 Canada, Iqaluit-Nunavut Territory $376.45 Australia, River View $419.95 France, Montreuil $465.84 Luxembourge, Erpeldange $500.07 Germany, Bargteheide

Boating Europe's Canals and Rivers

One of the reasons we bought Ariel, our Gemini 3200, is her size. We talked long and hard about the right size boat for us. We wanted her big enough for us to be comfortable for years at a time, but small enough to allow us to navigate tight waterways, such as those that comprise Europe.

Our plan is to sail from East to West, leaving from the East Coast of the USA. This places Europe in the final leg of our round the world odyssey. At a high-level, our plan is to spend at least 2 years wandering the canals of Europe once we finally arrive.

Europe has a fantastic network of waterways. The canals, originally built for goods transport, are now a highway of opportunity for tourists. They make the innards of Europe easily accessible, if one has the right sized boat.

Ariel's draft is a mere 18 inches, and her beam 14 feet. This beam figure is about a foot or 2 short of the maximum you would want for traversing the canals. Our mast will have to be stepped of course, so down it will go. We will most likely carry the mast with us, versus shipping it to a known end destination.

Many of the canals have captain operated manual locks ... that is, we will have to get off the boat, and work the locks ourselves. That is an exciting proposition!

The pace on the canals is around 4 knots .... a nice leisurely pace, one to take in Europe's offerings. Germany, Holland, France, Sweden, Spain, and more are all at our boats disposal.

Complete Raymarine Super System Pack Plus for $2,065

With our recent win of a Radome, we've managed to create a fantastic boat electron super system for only $2,065. This is what we have:

1. C70 Multi-Function Display (MSRP $1455)
2. DSM30 Digital Sounder Module (MSRP $550)
3. Raystar 125 GPS Sensor (MSRP $365)
4. RD218 Radome (MSRP $1415)
5. SeaTalk Cables (MSRP $35)
6. P66 High Speed Transom Mount Transducer (MSRP $152)
7. Navionics Gold East Coast and Bahamas electronic maps (MSRP $169.99)

All for about $2K!

Pulling this stuff together only took patience. We lurked on craigslist, ebay, and marina bulletin boards and executed when the prices were right.

Our original budget for the Radar system was $2,500. This was to buy only a multi-function display and a radar. We spend $2,065 and got much more.

How Much Money Do You Have, Foreigner?

As we work through all the places we want to see, a common visa acquisition requirement we've come across relates to our net worth.

A number of countries want you to have a certain amount of self financial capability before they will grant you the privilege of entering their country. This makes sense, these countries don't want people coming in and tapping their national resources. In New Zealand, for example, if you want a 6 month visa, you must be able to show you have $700 USD per month you want to stay. This can be demonstrated via bank statement.

We suspect that the formality around demonstrating the net worth part of the immigration policy is often left to the discretion of the local immigration official. That is, if we come in looking like we are financially sound (e.g. not coming in wearing tattered rags and appearing emaciated), we will be fine in most places. In policy driven environments, however, some form of proof must be on hand. This means that we will have to carry on our boat some proof of our financial soundness.

The trick will be to carry enough proof of financial self sufficiency to get in, but not so much as to then be susceptible to being taken advantage of (mysterious new fees). While we are modest in our means, everything is relative so modest in the US is wealthy in most parts of the world.

Our approach will be to have different bank statements. Since we have multiple accounts across multiple banks, we will simply keep the levels of money in each one different enough that we can produce the bank statement that sufficiently gets us into a place and no more.

Will this be a major issue? Probably not. However, we are thinking ahead and it is an issue one may face when taking a trip like this.

We Are But A Speck!

A colorful world map adorns our living room. You may have seen it in the background of some of the pictures on past blogs. Our family spends a lot of time looking at this map, dreaming of places to visit.

While staring at it, I imagined our boat making its way down the coast of the USA on our journey to see the world. Mentally tracing our progress, I began to wonder just how big we would be on this map.

Our boat is 32 feet long. The Earth's equator is 131,480,184 feet all the way around. Our boat, therefore, is 0.000024 % of the Earth's equator!

Another way to appreciate the magnitude would be to consider this: we would have to place 4 million, 108 thousand, 756 Gemini 3200 catamarans end to end to equal the distance around the Earth. That's a lot of boats!

Back to the original question, how big would we be on the map?

The map is 3 feet across, and factoring in a bit of the overlap that occurs on the map (e.g. a flat map depicting a near spherical shape with each side having some duplication of landmasses like Alaska), we are looking at about 30 inches of an equator on our map.

That means our boat, on the map, will be 0.000024% of 30 inches. Or, 0.0000072 inches!!! That is smaller than the diameter of a human hair!

Quite a small boat .... we are but a speck!