11 Jul Bolivia Travel Costs For One Month

Getting lost in the Amazon Rainforest, driving across the world’s largest salt flats, boating on Earth’s highest navigable lake, we did all these bucket-list activities in Bolivia, but were they expensive? What about Bolivian food and accommodation? And how much does it cost to get around Bolivia? Read on to find out all about our Bolivia travel costs.

Want to compare our Bolivia travel costs with our detailed cost breakdowns for other countries around the world? Check out our travel cost page or some of these popular posts:

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Bolivia accommodation costs

We stayed in Bolivia for 29 nights in total, although our accommodation for four nights was included in our Amazon Jungle trip and Bolivian Salt Flats tour. Our average Bolivia accommodation costs were £19.69 per night. There are plenty of cheap hotels in Bolivia, but we primarily used Airbnb apartments while staying in La Paz and Sucre since we needed space to work and were there for more than just a few days. We booked hotels in Rurrenabaque for either side of our Amazon Tour and Uyuni for our Salt Flats Tour.

Our cheapest accommodation was in La Paz, costing just £16.30 for the night (although it didn’t come without its problems) and our most expensive was in La Cupula in Copacabana, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, at £30.60 per night, which we loved. We did find that pretty much everywhere we stayed in Bolivia is at a fairly high altitude and therefore could get quite cold, it’s a good idea to look for somewhere with heating if possible.

Bolivian food costs

In all our travels, only the Philippines, Burma, Indonesia and Malaysia were cheaper for food. Having said that, there wasn’t a great deal of choice for us while trying to eat a vegan diet. Since we were staying in apartments most of the time we were able to cook at home though. Choice of food in the supermarkets varied, we easily found soy milk and had cereal and fruit for breakfast, found plenty of cheap avocados for lunch and we usually ate pasta or sometimes found some decent vegan sides for dinner.

Our Amazon and Salt Flats tours included about five or six days of food, so are in the activities section below. But we did buy plenty of snacks to take with us. We rarely ate out in Bolivia but when we did the cost of food was manageable, for example we ate at a pizza place in Uyuni for £12.40 (one pizza, soup, two portions of garlic bread and their homemade lemonade). Trying to travel as a vegan in South America can be hard, especially in Bolivia!

Transport costs in Bolivia

We’d heard that long-distance bus journeys in Bolivia were hellish, so we decided to avoid overnight/long rides by choosing to fly instead. This has most definitely bumped up our transport costs. For example, we could have chosen a 20-hour bus ride along windy dirt roads for less than £10 to get from La Paz to Rurrenabaque, but instead we opted for the £125 return flight each which took about 45 minutes. What would you choose?

We did use Tickets Bolivia to book buses from Sucre to Uyuni via Potosi, which were fairly short (three or four hours) and inexpensive journeys. We also took the Bolivia Hop – also known as the Peru Hop – to get from La Paz to Copacabana and onwards to Cusco in Peru. We’ve included the total price for the Bolivia Hop even though it was just three hours. Taxis were generally cheap and easily available, we mostly used them to get to and from the airports, otherwise we walked around. Bus stations and some airports also had departure/terminal fees, usually no more than £0.50 per person.

Cost of activities in Bolivia

If you don’t visit the Bolivian Salt Flats or explore the Amazon Rainforest in Bolivia then your activity costs would probably be a lot lower than ours. But why wouldn’t you visit those places? They really were among the highlights of our time in South America. We also headed out on a tour to Tiwanaku, a few miles north of La Paz and took a boat trip out on Lake Titicaca. Our guides on both the Amazon tour and Salt Flats tour were great, so were the other people in our groups. As for our Salt Flats tour, we originally paid more but found out that everyone else on the tour paid less, when we finished the tour we spoke to the owner and got a refund.

Miscellaneous Bolivia travel costs

Since we naively didn’t expect it to be so cold in Bolivia, we didn’t pack enough warm clothing, so we did buy some more clothing. For example a fleece cost about £7.50 and trousers cost £15. We also had typical laundry costs and had to pay for toilets while out on trips. Of course we had to buy a toy dinosaur for some perspective shots on the Salt Flats too.

Total Bolivia travel costs

So, with daily activity costs second only to New Zealand’s (£48) and transport costs higher than in the USA, we left Bolivia with significantly less money than when we arrived. We haven’t figured out our Peru travel costs yet (we have to factor-in Machu Picchu) but we suspect Bolivia will come out as our most expensive South American country.

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Have you been to Bolivia? How did your costs compare with ours? Do you think you could do it much cheaper than us?