The Basket: all the essentials needed for life on the road
Every year the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the UK
collects the prices of 650 goods to calculate the official retail price index and Consumer Price Index (CPI), which give it an indication of inflation levels and household spending.
Known as ‘The Basket’, the list of items that are compared are chosen to reflect the appetites of the nation. The very first basket, back in 1947, according to The Times, included lard, unskinned wild rabbits, back-laced women’s corsets and a gallon of lamp oil. 2009′s basket includes smoothies, USB pen drives and a rotisserie chicken.
Backpackers, and even a slightly more indulgent ‘flashpackers’, don’t exactly buy smoothies or rotisserie chicken on a regular basis. Instead there is such a thing as a Traveller Price Index (TPI), that the average traveller evaluates the expense of travel in a country by.
In the essential Basket used to calculate a country’s TPI I
would include: a night’s budget accomodation in the backpacker district, a bowl of noodle soup, packet of washing powder, packet of cigarettes, t-shirt, sunglasses, an iced coffee, 1.5l water bottle, bus ticket for a 12-hour journey, roll of toilet paper, DVD, book, and – most importantly – a pint of beer.
In this way we’ve been able to compare countries and find that Malaysia is the most expensive country we’ve visited, with a TPI of £41.80 and Laos the cheapest with a TPI of about £22.90.
More than this though, the huge variety of price differences in each of these items brings up some strange anomolies. In some very Muslim parts of Sumatra, for instance, a pint of beer costs £2.50, while a hotel room can be rented for about £1.50.
In Vietnam a roll of toilet paper costs more than a packet of cigarettes, while in Laos a bottle of water and a bottle of
beer both cost the same amount (about 60p).
It may seem a sad little exercise, and you may wonder if I don’t have anything better to do with my time, but comparing prices can be fun. In Vietnam, for instance, where a pint of bia hoi (fresh beer) can be had for 25p and the cheapest room is £8, a beer is only 3% of a night’s rent, rather than 120% in Sumatra so there’s obviously far less guilt involved in having a few beers in an evening. Or that’s what we tell ourselves anyway.
