South America Budget for a couple

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Couple RTW budget, round the world budget, South America Budget for a couple, Southeast Asia budget for a couple

By Rachel

I would definitely encourage everyone to travel for an extended period of time – it was a once in a lifetime experience, not only because we got to see some amazing places and met some amazing people, but also because we travelled in a completely different way then we normally would – on a pretty tight budget! And travelling as a couple was a great experience – we were both worried that it would be really difficult and may drive a wedge between us, especially since we were always long distance, but it definitely brought us together and it was amazing sharing all these new experiences with my best friend.

One of the main reasons people don’t do extended travel is because they think it would cost way too much – but if you watch your budget and go to some budget friendly areas, it is completely doable if you save!

When we were planning our trip, it was hard to find a lot of info on couples that travelled together – there were plenty of single backpacker budgets for the areas we were going to, but we knew that we wouldn’t be doing single dorm beds and because we were a few years older than the ‘typical’ backpacker, we knew we would want to do things just above what a backpacker would do. We would probably be considered ‘flashpackers’ a term that I think denotes people that have a slightly bigger budget (not much though) than a normal backpacker and probably a little older than the college backpacker crowd. It also meant that we went to places that weren’t on many of the typical backpacker trails because they were either a little more expensive or harder to get to (like Borneo, Indonesia or Uruguay).

We wrote a previous post on how we travelled in Thailand and what our spending preferences and styles were and for the most part, those habits and lessons remained true throughout our trip, so I won’t repeat it – the link to that post is here:

https://samirandrachel.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/travelling-on-a-budget/

All in all, here were our final numbers for two people travelling in India, Southeast Asia and South America for 206 days or about 7 months (not including our three weeks in the US). Important note – we used airline miles for travel from the United States to India and back as well as from the United States to South America and back – all other flights are included in this budget. Also, we used hotel points for about 17 nights, but even though we saved on lodging, we found that especially in Asia, it turned out to be a wash in terms of expenses because the hotels had more expensive food, sometimes charged for internet and cost a lot more to get to and away from!