to whom it may concern:

Here is the letter I wrote about my time in the Amazon to SAS. I think it's pretty self-explanatory from there. ALSO! The first day we hung around Old Town and managed to not get mugged and drink sangria, then the other two days were spent drinking on a gorgeous beach (to forget the horrors of the Amazon trip).



"I have never written a letter like this before, so I am unsure how to start. I returned from my “Amazon Riverboat Adventure” trip today at 11 am, and to put it lightly, I was severely disappointed. I was placed in group D (SAL33), a group that did not exist when the original field program was completed; naturally I was ecstatic as I could only afford one big SAS-run trip. However, whenever I tried to find out when my trip was leaving from the field office, no one could ever tell me the time. They always said it would probably leave on the 22nd of April sometime in the morning. As you know, we ended up leaving at 2:30 pm, after every other group (including group E), and lost an entire day. The other groups saw the Victoria Regia water lilies, watched their guides catch alligators with their hands, and spent extra time hiking through the rainforest. My group did not get to do any of these things that were promised to us. This pretty much set the tone for the rest of my trip.

I only budgeted $25 for Brazil, as I thought I would be in the Amazon for three full days – all expenses paid. I did not realize that I would be spending an extra day and half in Salvador before leaving for my trip, as well as returning for another half day on the last day in port. Not only did I have to spend well past my budget while in port (only on food and cab rides, no souvenirs whatsoever), but I found it absolutely ridiculous that I paid approximately $1,300-some dollars on a trip where sodas and other beverages cost extra, where food was not given out during our nine hours of travel on the first day OR our twelve hours the last day, and where I was allotted only two very small bottles of water a day while on the boat. Given, one could refill the bottles, but not when the boat disappeared for five hours. Quite frankly, I could hardly afford the Amazon trip in the first place, and then to spend more money on little things in port…well, they add up.

I think it is also important to add that I got very, very sick the second night of the trip. Because we were only given two bottles of water, those are what we carried with us to visit Acajatuba and play a soccer game against locals. Although the soccer game was a fun activity, I had to buy an extra bottle of water in town because I had already drunk my two bottles. After waiting another hour or so for the canoes to take us back to our houseboats, we all piled in and sat for two slow hours as our guides tried to find the boats. We were not warned that the trip would be long, so many people had to go to the bathroom very badly, were hungry (as it was far past the designated dinner time), and were very thirsty. Over the course of these two hours, my head started throbbing worse than any headache I had ever had before. By the time we got back to the houseboat, I was throwing up violently. I tried to drink more water and eat some rice for dinner, but kept throwing everything up (five times total over the course of the evening). Luckily, our chaperone Maggie was an incredible help, called Dr Mort, and I turned out okay. However, because of this heat exhaustion coupled with total dehydration, I was not able to go piranha fishing or to another village the next morning. My “third” day consisted of sleeping in my hammock while waiting for everyone to return, reading in my hammock while making the approximately four hour trek to the meeting of the waters, and then playing cards while we went back to where the party would be held that evening.

The planning of the entire trip was unbelievably inefficient. We spent four hours driving to the meeting of the waters, only to put our feet into the actual Amazon River for just enough time to take a picture, then immediately drove back to the night’s party. I had expected an action-packed “adventure,” not naptime on a houseboat. Everyone on my trip was upset that we only had one hike in the Amazon rainforest – only three hours the very first day. All of us had signed up for an adventurous and exciting look at the rainforest, but instead we had to “avoid the bugs” and spent little to no time actually exploring. Also, while on this hike, it was impossible to hear either guide unless you were standing right next to them; all twenty people in the middle of the group couldn’t hear anything they were saying. Plus, we made absolutely terrible time on our hike – we stopped every two minutes for five to ten minutes at a time, sometimes without the guides giving us any information.

However, my biggest complaint I have with the entire trip was the fact that we spent an entire day of our supposed 3-days, 2-nights journey on a plane. Our original flight was cancelled, and we were quickly put on another one heading to Brasilia. This showed me how easy it would have been to book another flight that morning. My entire group was very upset by this and were surprised that SAS would not spring for a 5am flight instead of a 2:30pm one. All of us would much rather spend a half-day in the Amazon than sleeping on the ship. Additionally, even if we did have to go at the 2:30 pm time slot, we should have at least been able to stay a third night and part of the next day. There is absolutely no conceivable reason why all of the groups had to leave on midnight flights, experience two-hour layovers at 4am, and not even get back to the ship until 11am. We could have easily spent the night and gotten back to the ship at 6pm for on-ship time. I believe that this horrible travel plan is the reason why so many people were throwing up on the flights home – we simply did not get enough sleep.

To sum up, I am absolutely disgusted that I spent $1,300-some dollars on a trip to the Amazon when I feel like I didn’t have any time to actually see the Amazon. Considering my group lost an entire day, and we were supposed to have four days (including one for travel), I think it would be more than appropriate to return 25% of the trip’s cost to myself and my companions. I could have done the same exact trip more efficiently and at about half the cost. The worst part is that I lost three days in Brazil that I can never get back.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope to hear from you soon."