To help me answer this question I used The Economist's Worldwide Cost of Living Survey published in 2016. Many of the ports we visited are in the top 100 cities ranked by the cost of living there. Singapore is ranked #1 followed by Hong Kong tied for #2. Sydney came in at #20 with Amman tied at #29, Auckland tied at #38, Bangkok tied at #62 and Dubai tied at #68. The evidence supporting these rankings was obvious in many of these places.
We did not see very much of Bangkok because our ship excursion on day 1 in port took us out of the city proper and on our second day in port we left early in the morning to fly to Bhutan. We did not see very much of Singapore because of our overland trip to Bhutan but the drive to the ship from the airport presented us with views of a clean, well-ordered beautiful city. We were docked in Hong Kong for 3 days at Ocean Terminal very close to downtown. Ocean Terminal is part of the Harbour City Complex which is the largest shopping mall in Hong Kong. It has an area of over 2 million square feet including the flag-ship stores of the world’s super brands. Sydney is a beautiful city and it has high prices for accommodation and restaurant meals. Our seafood picnic lunch on Manly was pricey. Auckland is another beautiful clean city and our lunch at Harbourside there was also pricey. In terms of beautiful buildings however, Dubai was the most impressive. It is also home to the Dubai Mall with 1,200 shops ranking it the largest shopping mall in the world in terms of total area.
Here are a couple of pictures taken in Dubai.
The cheapest places were found in India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Egypt. Here we visited markets where vendors were offering very low prices and were keen to bargain. Our ship excursions from the ports in these countries took us past crowded, dirty and seemingly uninhabitable living accommodations although the cities themselves had some beautiful sites.
The places we visited on this grand adventure definitely showed life at the extremes. That was an education in and of itself!
The next post will contain more photos from segment 4 - Sydney to Hong Kong...
