Brazil & Uruguay - $176.62
We had originally only planned to visit Uruguay for three days, alongside a 24 hour layover in Brazil, but ended up extending our time here to over a week. While Uruguay is more expensive than many other South American countries (more similarly priced to Spain or France), we were able to manage our money quite well here thanks to reasonable accommodation and activity prices. Our biggest category of spending was Food & Groceries, although our daily spending on Food was pretty reasonable, especially considering how much terrific food we had. We had three categories with no spending in Uruguay and Brazil; Flights, Visa, and Rental Vehicle & Gas.
Food & Groceries were our largest expense in Uruguay, but to be honest, we ate like royalty! Uruguayan cuisine is full of tasty dishes and big steaks, which I couldn’t help myself to enough of while we were here. We also found Montevideo to have a wealth of terrific cafes with tasty snacks and even better coffee. With several slow days to fill in Catalonia De Sacramento as well, we found ourselves indulging in little snacks throughout the day, usually accompanied by coffee, or Sarah’s new favorite drink: orange juice.
Our second largest expense category across Brazil and Uruguay was Lodging although, by our standards at least, only $44 per day is pretty cheap. We stayed in all kinds of accommodations – an apart-hotel in São Paulo, a hostel in Montevideo, and an Airbnb in Colonia De Sacramento. Even though all of them were rather basic, each of these places was perfectly fine for what we needed in each city. We likely could have saved even more on accommodation had we been booking ahead of time, but we kept this part of our trip extremely flexible, only booking things the night or two before we would be staying somewhere.
Our third largest category of expenses here was Other Transportation, coming in at about $21 per day. Most of this cost came from taking Ubers in São Paulo or Montevideo, as even though we didn’t take very many, each one was quite expensive by international standards. We also took one bus while in Uruguay from Montevideo to Colonia De Sacramento, which cost us $13 each, but took us to Colonia in pretty decent comfort.
Finally, we had some limited Activities expenses, mainly museum entrance fees, which we found to be quite reasonable, and some high Miscellaneous expenses. We averaged almost $20 of Miscellaneous spending here, but this was primarily down to our eSims, Google Fi phone plan for our US numbers, and a couple of small pharmacy visits for bits and bobs. We also used a small amount of cash in Uruguay but found it almost completely unnecessary as apart from one cab driver and one museum, everywhere we visited accepted credit cards.