The Airport Fee
Argentina charges you at the airport if you fly in. It is not a visa fee. People call it one, but it isn’t. Fly into Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay or Brazil instead and cross into Argentina by land, and the charge does not apply to you. That is the whole trick. Have a good trip.
What Things Cost Now
A nice bife de chorizo, a sirloin steak, in a restaurant in Buenos Aires runs about $13. That is restaurant steak, not supermarket steak. A quesadilla at a street stand should not cost more than roughly $2. A pile of fresh produce from a vegetable stand, the kind of pile that looks excessive when you buy it and reasonable by the time you have eaten it, adds up to $12. Ice cream was $2.
Alcohol came to $76 for two people. The wine was bought from grocery stores, mostly red Malbec and white Torrontés, with a stock-up at a winery in Tupungato called Giaquinta. That number is for the whole alcohol spend, not one bottle.
Sleeping is cheap in Buenos Aires. A dormitory bed in a hostel costs $6 to $10. A budget double room starts at $25. Down in El Chalten, camping costs about $5 a day and a dormitory bed starts at $10.
The expensive part is getting around. Overnight buses in Argentina were the most expensive in South America. Each bus was at least $100. That is per bus, and the distances are enormous. Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, to Cusco in Peru, was done entirely by bus and jeep.
The Country Changed
Ten years ago the ranking was simple. Peru and Bolivia were the bargains. Chile was the most expensive. Argentina was also cheap, because it was recovering from a recession. That is not the ranking anymore. Argentina has been powering ahead, and prices have moved with it. The $2 ice cream is the clearest way to say it. People who remember the old Argentina keep waiting for the old prices to come back. They have not.
This is why some travellers who expected to stay a few weeks in Argentina end up staying two months, including one month in Patagonia. The budget does not survive contact with the place. A trip that was supposed to be cheap turns into a trip that is merely cheaper than home.
The Long Numbers
A five-month run from Argentina up to Colombia, working north, can be done on a $15,000 budget with $5,000 still in the account at the end. That is the shape of it. The overspend came from falling for Argentina and staying two months instead of passing through. Nine days of that was an apartment in Buenos Aires near the start of the trip. The cushion fund survived anyway.
Read those numbers together and the picture is clear. The steak is $13. The produce is $12. The hostel bed is $6 to $10. The bus is $100 and up. Argentina is not a country where you save money on transport. It is a country where you save money on everything else and then hand it back at the bus terminal, one long overnight at a time.
The airport charge is avoidable by arriving overland. The bus prices are not. Plan around the second one and the first one takes care of itself.
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