Can you round up $68,500 in ready or borrowed cash? If so you can be the owner of a furnished beach house in Mexico and can cut your monthly living expenses in half. Or just have a cheap place to be a snowbird or go on vacation.

About a year and a half ago I announced on this blog that my Yucatan beach house in Mexico was for sale. Well, it still is.

We took it off the market a while during the rainy season and while it’s being rented a lot right now in high season, it’s still waiting for a buyer.

We own this place free and clear, so it’s not like there’s a mortgage gnawing at us, but we bought another house in Guanajuato, in the central highlands. We’re moving into that one come August for two years. We’d like to have the cash from house 1 to get debt free and flush so we’ve got plenty to put into beautifying house 2.

As you may have heard on the news, the housing market in the U.S. is in recovery mode now, to the point where there are bidding wars again in some cities because of a lack of inventory. While some savvy investors no doubt bought houses for $68,500 or even less the past few years because of bank foreclosures, they weren’t getting property one house back from a beach and those homes weren’t usually nice enough to be move-in ready. This one is both.

You can follow the link at the bottom for more details, but this is a well-maintained 2BR, 1 bath house with a nice covered outside terrace and plenty of room to build up or put in a pool. It’s a 30-second walk to the water and three blocks to the town square. There are already local caretakers in place we’ve worked with for years. It comes with beds that sleep four and all the other furniture there now, plus a fridge, dishes, and a bottle of 100% agave tequila we’ll supply upon closing.

This beach house is 40 minutes from the international airport in Merida, a city of a million, or less than four hours by rental car from Cancun.

If you’re wondering about home prices in Mexico in other non-tourist places, we paid a shade less than $90,000 for the Guanajuato house. It has four bedrooms, two baths, with a big sun room on the top floor that has terrific views. But right now it’s got a kitchen that we hate and no furniture…

So buy this bargain Yucatan beach house for $68,500 bringing just a toothbrush and a bathing suit. Then come stay with us later in the revamped city one. Full details here: cheap furnished Mexican beach house.

This time I stayed put and my blog went traveling.

After about a decade on the server (and domain) of my book publisher, I finally took the leap and moved this award-winning Cheapest Destinations Blog to its own host and a more logical domain: CheapestDestinationsBlog.com. Yeah, I know, not so creative. But I figure if you’re looking for the cheapest places to travel in the world or how to stretch your budget for a long-term international adventure, calling this thing something cutesy isn’t going to help you find it.

For now, nothing else is changing. Over time I might need or want to make some adjustments, but hopefully the old site will redirect like it’s supposed to and you should be able to see the RSS stream okay in your reader as is.

Now that I’ve got this on my own host, I should be able to make some tweaks that people have been requesting for a while, like getting buttons for Facebook and Pinterest on the posts. Meanwhile, if you’ve just landed here for the first time, a few popular and definitive posts you might want to check out:

The Cheapest Places to Live in the World

Out Now – the 4th Edition of The World’s Cheapest Destinations

The Best Backpacks for Long-term Travelers

Travel Prices in Vietnam

No More Excuses – Your Travel Resolution Starts Now

Bargains and Beauty in Bolivia

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering who the heck I am and why you should listen to my advice, see the About Me button at the top of this page. Or look me up on Wikipedia. Or go to the Tim Leffel portfolio site to see articles, awards, books I’ve published, and other websites I run.

You may have noticed the photo of my book, The World’s Cheapest Destinations, got switched out a while back in that picture to your right. It was a bit of a tease since the new version has been trickling out to different online retailers at different times, but now it’s out almost everywhere. This popular guide to the cheapest places to travel in the world is now in its 4th edition.

Prices fluctuate but don’t fundamentally change all that much in a span of three or four years unless there’s really high inflation (as in current Argentina), so if you have the 3rd edition it is still a good guide to how countries compare in terms of costs. If you have the 1st edition though, you might want to just put it in the recycling bin—I released that one a decade ago!

As I mentioned in this recent post on what has changed in the cheapest places to travel, I have made a few country changes. Turkey and Argentina are still great values for mid-range travelers, but are not the good deal they used to be for backpackers. To take their place, Cambodia’s infrastructure improvements enabled it to move from “honorable mention” to its own full-blown chapter and Slovakia replaces Turkey in Europe.

That means Asia gained a country and Latin America lost one, which wasn’t my intention, but unless people suddenly start finding a reason to visit Paraguay or Chavez gets replaced by a reform-minded president in Venezuela, I think the status is not going to change there. Apart from Chile and Brazil, the mainland Americas south of the U.S. are a great value, but Asia just has more bargain-basement destinations than anywhere else.

Get Your Copy!

So where can you get this book? It’s not yet online at Fishpond for Australia and New Zealand, but it should appear there in a week or two. Meanwhile, get it almost everywhere else online:

Direct from the publisher – paperback ($15,95 plus shipping) or PDF ($8.99, no shipping)

Kindle version from Amazon, Nook version from Barnes & Noble, Apple version from iBookstore  - all around $8.99.

Paperback from Barnes & Noble, paperback from Amazon.

Early Reviews

Want to know what a few other bloggers, editors, and book authors have to say? Here’s a random sampling of a few advance reviews.

“This is the book that anyone planning a vacation should read because it’s exactly what travelers who circle the globe all year long already know: it can be really cheap to travel, you just have to know where.”
- Christine Gilbert, editor of almostfearless.com

“As dollars get ever tighter, this book becomes all the more precious. But what’s most brilliant about it is that Leffel really doesn’t just think “cheap” – he thinks “smart.” As valuable a travel book as you’ll find today, in ways too numerous to even count, no matter what your budget.”
- Chris Epting, author of Led Zeppelin Crashed Here and Marilyn Monroe Dyed Here

“It’s no fluke that the world’s cheapest destinations are often also the most amazing to visit. This valuable guide inadvertently attests that money can’t buy happiness by recommending countries where the locals smile without it.”
– Bruce Northam, author of The Directions to Happiness: A 125-Country Quest for Life Lessons

“Warning: this book is hazardous to your ability to stay in one place. With your copy of The World’s Cheapest Destinations in hand, you can see the world while leaving your savings account untouched.”
- Chris Guillebeau, author of The $100 Startup

Buy this before you buy a plane ticket–it’s the best first investment for a budget traveler. Leffel provides real numbers and practical money-saving tips, and he wisely weighs the appeal of a country as well. As a result, The World’s Cheapest Destinations are places you really want to go.
- Zora O’Neill, author of The Rough Guide to Cancun & The Yucatan and Moon New Mexico

The World’s Cheapest Destinations is an entertaining read sharing the secrets that long-term travelers and backpackers have known for years. No room for excuses now, this book you’ll give the tools and information you need to travel the world in comfort on a budget. It’s an excellent resource for planning and researching your next vacation destination or around-the-world trip and is something that we’ll be using regularly for reference whenever we do our own travel planning.
- Deb and Dave, editors of ThePlanetD.com

“Tim Leffel has long been a guru of balancing the practicalities of cheap travel with a keen sense of judgement about the aesthetic value offered by varied countries around the world. In this newly researched and expanded edition, Tim’s easy conversational style turns the book into a page-turner, leaving you hungry to set off on the many paths he opens up to the traveler’s imagination.”
- Gregory Hubbs, editor-in-chief, TransitionsAbroad.com

“Tim is writing from the voice of a ‘Real Traveler,’ a person that has actually traveled the world for three years and lived in other countries for extended periods. This allows him to have the insight into what is the essential information needed.” – Andy Graham 15 years of Perpetual Travel and 90 countries – HoboTraveler.com

There was a time when people rode trains all over Ecuador, from the capital of Quito to Otovalo, Cuenca, and the coastal port of Guayaquil. More than 60 trains a day departed from the main station in southern Quito.

Then came the age of the automobile, which killed off the trains in a lot of places in the Americas, from much of the U.S. down to Patagonia. Compounding the problem for Ecuador though was the terrain: this is a land of steep, high mountains. Building the railways in the first place was daunting enough. Constantly clearing the rockslides and broken tracks after natural disasters required more resources than the government was willing to spend. So over time the journeys got chopped up into smaller pieces. That’s about to change—and more on that at the end—but here’s one of those pieces: the Devil’s Nose train ride down a very steep mountain to the bottom.

This famous train journey is unique because of the engineering challenges the builders faced (ones that took the lives of some 2,500 workers) and one novel solution to them. At one point the train goes around a bend and then comes to a stop at tracks that end. At that point the tracks are switched and the train proceeds down the mountain facing the opposite direction: the previous back of the train is now the front. This enables it to tackle a much steeper grade than it could have otherwise. (You can see that transition in the video above.)

Soon it arrives at a renovated station in the narrow canyon, which is a place you can actually spend the night now if you want. There’s a package including the train down and back, lodging, and two meals for a quite reasonable $50 per person. Regular day visitors get a bite at a panorama snack bar up some steep stairs, where there’s also a museum. Local community people perform traditional dances on the train platform. And there’s a woman with a llama for photo ops. Sure, it’s kinda cheesy, but fun.

The exciting news is, short trips like this are not going to be all there is anymore. Workers are busy restoring the line from Guayaquil to Quito and it should open by July of 2014. A lot of it is new tracks, with materials meant to hold up to tremors. At first all the effort is going into offering a luxury 4-day grand train trip to get some real funds flowing in, but it should become a true passenger line that all travelers can use eventually. It will be one of the world’s great journeys when that happens, through the “Route of the Volcanoes,” from sea level to 3,000 meters.

I first took a train ride from Quito to Cotopaxi and saw new government initiatives in action. There was a spruced-up station with an attractive new cafe serving good coffee, a room explaining the history of railroads in Ecuador, and an introductory film about the train system here in two languages. The people working at the station and on the trains were bilingual and sporting nice Tren Ecuador uniforms with a cool logo.

We clattered out of the city, past factories and homes, and climbed up the hills to a point where we could look across park lands and a valley to mountains dusted with snow on the other side. When we got to Machachi station, a brass band was playing to welcome everyone. No, this wasn’t a special occasion—they do that for every arrival.

The revitalized train system is just one more reason to visit Ecuador, which is one of the best values in the world for travelers, with a lot to offer for a reasonable price. International Living just tagged Ecuador  as their leading retirement destination in the world for the sixth year in a row. Even if you’re not trying to live to 100 in Vilcabamba, this is one of the cheapest places to live in the world–with a good quality of life. It’s also one of The World’s Cheapest Destinations for travelers at any budget level, so put it on your list if you’re heading to the Southern Hemisphere.

To check the latest options on train trips in Ecuador, see the Tren Ecuador site or book an excursion with Metropolitan Touring—-my host when I was researching Ecuador articles for another publication.

With close to 1,200 posts on this cheap travel blog, you’ve probably missed a few things you’d be interested in.

I’m currently biking and hiking around the Atacama Desert of Chile and will have all kinds of info and photography to share from there later. This is not a cheap place to travel by any means though (I’m here doing writing work for other pubs), so here’s a quick rundown on what visitors to this blog have been reading the most.

1) The cheapest places to live in the world – 2012 edition

2) Quit your job, see the world

3)  6 places to live for super cheap

4) Updates on the cheapest places to travel

5) I want to move abroad. Where do I start?

6) Travel prices in Cambodia

7) Gadgets and gear I always pack

8) How to get around Spirit Air’s baggage extortion