This is one of our Budget series of posts to give you an idea of how much we spent traveling around the world. Here we will look at Hong Kong and Macau. Check our posts to see what kind of activities we did and where we stayed!

In Hong Kong we used the Hong Kong Dollars. We converted to US dollars using the current conversion rates at the time of our visit. It was approximately 8 Hong Kong Dollars to $1.00.

Total Spent (6 days): $649.26

Accommodation: $258.43

This felt very expensive compared to the prior countries we had been visiting in southeast Asia. It was a tiny room for a lot of money!

Activities: $59.41

This included taking the peak tram, cable car to the Big Buddha, and a few museums.

Alcohol: $5.16

We only count alcohol costs when it is not purchased with other food. This was only 1 beer! Very different from Vietnam!

Food: $151.24

Again, we had a big of sticker shock comparing the food prices to those of our prior countries of Thailand and Vietnam. We ate out only once a day at the most. We bought snacks from the grocery store for breakfast and dinner. Dinner was a bit hard as we didn’t have a kitchen in our small hotel room. We only bought things we could heat in a microwave!

Miscellaneous: $21.89

This included some postcards, a few souvenirs and a load of laundry. We also had a little cost of currency exchange.

Transportation: $153.12

It was quite convenient to use the public transportation system in Hong Kong. We purchased an Octopus Card at the airport which covered all forms of transit! The only extra we paid was for our boat to and from Macau and the buses there.

This divides out to $108.21/day which is over our $100/day budget. Hong Kong was much  more expensive than the countries we had visited previously in SE Asia. We had a short time in Hong Kong so we tried to do a lot quickly. We also spent quite a bit so that we could do a day trip to Macau. We tried to keep our costs down by eating out rarely and doing a lot of self-guided walking tours. But, we did choose to pay a bit more to stay in a nicer place. We had heard reports of cheaper places but those all seemed quite sketchy. Overall, it was a bit challenging to stay to our budget, but we are still happy with our time in Hong Kong.