Argentine national parks are really expensive for foreigners. Admission tends to be something like $75, per person, per day — unlike in the US where national park admission is usually good for an entire vehicle for a week. (If you aren’t familiar with Argentine currency, here’s a crash course: the unit of currency is the peso, and there are currently about 4 Argentine pesos to the US dollar. The peso symbol is the $, so to avoid confusion, I’ll prefix the $ symbol with the country code, either AR$ for pesos or US$ for US dollars.)

Vanessa and I have visited 3 different national parks so far – Parque Nacional Iguazu, Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego and Parque Nacional de los Glaciares. We visited each park for 2 days, and since there are 2 of us, and all of the admission fees are per person per day, that means we had to buy 4 tickets — conveniently matching the 4-to-1 ratio between pesos and dollars. Thus, admission to Glaciares is AR$75 for a single ticket, but for the two of us to visit on two consecutive days it cost us US$75.

Iguazu was also AR$75 per person per day, or US$75 for our 2-day visit, and Tierra del Fuego was AR$65 per person per day, or US$65 for our 2-day visit.

Further: Argentine national parks have 3 different prices depending on where you’re from — residents of the same province as the park pay the least, other Argentinians pay slightly more, and foreigners pay a lot more. That seems somewhat fair since (a) foreigners don’t pay taxes and (b) they mostly come from more expensive or richer countries.

But, this still stings in comparison to the US: the less visited parks cost something like US$10, and the most popular and expensive (say Yellowstone) something like US$25. However, that gets your whole family in for a week. And there’s an all-access pass good for all national parks for a year (this used to be known as the Golden Eagle pass; now it’s called Access), which is US$80. That’s sounding like a better and better deal compared to Argentina, and as far as I know it’s available to foreigners as well.

(Maybe there’s some all-access pass for Argentine parks that I don’t know about? As it stands, we’ve racked up US$215 in park admission fees in just 2 weeks!)