Expedition Cruises through the Amazon Rainforest

Foreign.

Welcome to this week's edition of travel in 10.

And we're going somewhere a little bit more unique.

This week we're traveling to Brazil and going to place that I think is on a lot of people's bucket list.

Traveling to the heart of the Amazon.

Tim has had an opportunity to go on an incredible cruise ship there, an exploration ship, really, really getting into the heart of the Amazon and exploring it.

And we're going to get into a little bit of a discussion of that today.

So welcome.

Welcome, Tim.

Thanks so much, David.

Great to see you this week and can't wait to talk about this amazing, amazing journey.

So I had two, two full weeks.

I've been to the Amazon and a couple other countries.

This was completely in Brazil, but two weeks on the Amazon river on a purpose built expedition ship called Seabourn Venture.

And it was just an absolutely beautiful ship.

Do you want to paint the picture a little bit?

So when you, when you say an expedition ship, like, how many people are we talking about that would be on a ship like this?

What, what makes it different from a, from a typical cruise?

Yeah, good question.

So, so expedition ships tend to spend a lot of their time in, in the polar region, so Antarctica and the Arctic.

And if I understand correctly, I think I do, this ship was actually making a transit from the Arctic.

So it was going from Greenland all the way down the coast of North America, through the Caribbean, actually boarded in the Caribbean, and then two weeks in the Amazon and then continued south ultimately to Antarctica.

And so expedition ships in general tend to be small.

They tend to be between 2 and 300 people.

Because of regulations, when you're in Antarctica, you can only have 100 guests off the ship at a time.

So it doesn't make sense to, if you're doing landings in Antarctica, to have larger ships.

So this particular ship had just 264max capacity.

I think we had even less than that.

So it's a little.

Felt nice and roomy.

And this was, you know, one of the nicest, most luxurious expedition ships that I'd been on.

So it had all the things that made it an expedition ship, which is, it had zodiacs, it had, which are these sort of rubber boats, these small rubber boats that you get on.

They're very sturdy and they can take you almost anywhere.

So if you're in the polar regions, you get on a zodiac, you go see icebergs and, and you go see polar bears in the north or whales and seals and penguins in the south.

In the Amazon, we would get on these Zodiacs every day.

And we would cruise around and we would see little villages and we would see the wildlife there.

So it was equipped with all of those things that make it an expedition ship, but it was a luxury expedition ship.

So even the entry level cabin, I was in the entry level cabin, it's called a veranda suite, was 355 square feet.

So if you think, you know the size of a, you know, a hotel, a large hotel room or a decent sized hotel room, 75 square foot balcony, had its own big walk in closet.

And you know, as we've discussed on the podcast before, I'm a man who loves a bath and a bathtub.

The bathroom, the washroom actually had the separated shower and deep soaker bathtub and that was the entry level suite.

So it had, it had a lot of the luxuries that you might get on a traditional luxury small ship.

But it was purpose built to have all of these other amenities that, that make it an expedition ship.

And that small size means that you get to know a lot of people on board as well.

So really a beautiful ship, you know, and a great way to, to sail on the Amazon.

So that type of a ship you just talk a little bit about the like facilities.

Are, are you going to have things like, you know, are you going to have a pool?

Are you going to multiple restauran?

What sort of the facilities on board look like on a ship like that?

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

And that's a very good question.

So they do have a, they have a full service spa, they have a small swimming pool, but certainly plenty, plenty big enough, you know, to go for a dip.

And then they had two lovely, I think I had four actually Jacuzzis that were two for sure that were off the stern so you could sit in the Jacuzzi and just watch as the river rolled out behind the ship as you made your way down the river.

And you know, it's not going to be the kind of ship, you know, you think about one of these large ships that has 14 restaurants or 16 restaurants or whatever, that is not what this is.

But they had a beautiful, they basically in addition to room service, they had I believe two main dining venues.

So the, the main dining room, which I believe they call the restaurant, just simply the restaurant which is like a multi course formal dining room, although you didn't have to be formal because it was an expedition.

So I wore jeans every single night and that was not a problem.

And then they had a second venue called the Colonnade that was a Little bit more informal, buffet style breakfast and lunch and then you had a served dinner, but it wasn't quite as formal.

And then they did have one other cafe where you could go get.

You know, I'm not an early morning person.

Most mornings I didn't get up in time for breakfast so I would just go and get a couple little sandwiches and a coffee at this, this other small venue that they had.

So enough that you had variety and you could move around.

But.

But not, but not what you think in terms of, you know, 16, 17 restaurants, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

And what does, what does like programming and activities look like?

I'm, I'm assuming going into being on an expedition ship and going somewhere like the Amazon, you probably have some naturalists or other experts on board, but what does the programming look like?

That I think is the biggest thing that distinguishes an expedition ship from another type of cruise ship is the fact that they have a whole expedition team on board.

So you have an expedition leader who in this case was a very personable, very knowledgeable guy named Iggy Rojas.

He was, I believe Chilean by birth, had lived in Brazil for many, many years, of course, spoke Portuguese and every night he'd been a couple decades in, in the, living in the Amazon, I believe, doing scientific research and also doing tourism in the Amazon.

And every night we would gather, usually it was like 5:30 before dinner and they would do a briefing.

And so each of the guides there would be bird expert, there would be a marine expert, you know, and they would get up a geologist and they would give a little talk about what we had seen that day, what we, maybe what we were going to expect to see the next day.

And then of, and then sort of the grand finale of those briefings was Egy, the expedition leader getting up and laying out the plan for the next day.

You know, because so many, especially when you're in the polar regions, but even in the Amazon when you're on an expedition cruise, the weather dictates everything, the conditions dictate everything.

And so the plan, you know, they say you might have plan A, B, C, D and D.

And maybe it's not even any of those, you know, depending on the weather.

And so, so yes, so there was a really excellent expedition team on board this ship.

And every night we would gather and have, rather than, you know, having Broadway style shows and things like that, we would have these, these briefings telling us what exciting thing we were going to do the next day.

And we had lots of exciting things that we did.

I Would love that.

For me, that's like, totally sounds like my way more interesting than a typical cruise to be like much more educational and immersive and really getting into what you're going to see.

I'm curious, I mean, being 250 people, that's quite a few people to get out in doing wildlife viewing and stuff.

How did that part work?

And did you see a lot in terms of wildlife going down the Amazon?

Yeah, we did.

Absolutely.

And so in answer to your first question, which is a very good question, they will split you.

And this is typical also in Antarctica or the Arctic, when cruise there, they split you into basically teams.

In our case, I believe on board this ship we had four teams.

And sometimes they're designated by color, sometimes it's like an animal that you're, you know, so you might have, like, if you're in Antarctica, it might be penguins and seals and whales and whatever.

And, and so then they rotate you and so they'll say, okay, first we're going to have penguins, you know, go at 7:00.

And then we had quite early mornings because it was very, very hot when we were in the Amazon.

So, you know, 7:00 in the morning for penguins.

And it wasn't in the Amazon, wasn't penguins.

Let's substitute dolphins and, you know, sloths and monkeys, whatever.

And they would split us into groups and then we would go out according to our color group or animal group and they would keep a rotation going with, with the zodiacs.

And you know, I mean, you think about the Amazon, it is so much bigger.

I've been to the Amazon a few times.

It is so much bigger than you can ever imagine.

I mean, I wrote down a couple numbers.

6.7 million square kilometers.

They estimate about 400 billion trees in the Amazon rainforest.

It covers parts of eight countries.

The Amazon river is the world's largest river by volume.

And so, you know, and we saw a lot, we did, we saw, we saw pink dolphins, you know, which is the famous and strange and wonderful thing that you hope to see in the Amazon.

And we saw glimpses of them when we were in the zodiac.

So we were quite close to them, which was very, very cool.

Toucans and other, a lot of different waterfowl.

And then we also went fishing for piranhas, which is one of the famous fun things that you can do there.

So baited the hook with raw chuck, ground chuck, whatever, beef, and dipped it into the water.

And I personally didn't pull one up, but we did have some in the Boat and.

But you definitely, I mean, it's, it's almost like something from a horror movie because you drop that hook into the water and your line just shakes.

Because you can feel, you know, all of these little tiny, you know, these fish with these teeth just, you know, fighting for that little bit of, of meat.

So many, many times you'd pull your lineup and you would have.

It would be just clean as a whistle, right?

But you.

So you could feel the fact that there were all these piranhas down there.

So, so that was, that was very interesting.

But I think the, I think it was the human side of the Amazon that surprised me the most on this, on this journey.

In what way?

What, what was, what was unique about that?

So, you know, I mean, so the Amazon, you know, we think, I think when we picture the Amazon and certainly many parts of the Amazon are like this.

I think we picture this sort of vast, uninterrupted jungle, you know, that just goes on and on and on and on, and you can never get to the end of it.

And that's true.

I mean, I think that there are certainly places in the Amazon that we can't even wrap our minds around how huge they are and how unpopulated they are.

This particular part of the Amazon, we came down the Atlantic, we came out of the Caribbean, sailed down the Atlantic coast and that sailed in through the mouth of the Amazon.

That alone was interesting because we went from this, you know, kind of almost aquamarine ocean water, salt water, and then into the, the brown water.

I mean, it's a, it's a brown river, the Amazon river.

And you would almost have strips of water, so you'd have the aquamarine and the brown, the aquamarine and the brown, until you made that full transition.

And at that, at its widest, you know, at the end of the Amazon, there it is, a river that's so wide that it almost feels like.

Like you can almost not see from end to end when you're, you know, that's how wide it is, you know, the sides of the ship.

But once you get in.

And a lot of our trips, little, our expedition trips, yes, focused on wildlife, but a lot of them were focused on seeing life on the river, human life on the river.

And it was very, very interesting, you know, because the, the Amazon river is the superhighway of, of that rainforest.

You know, there are very few roads that connect the cities.

Manaus, I believe, is, is, which is the largest city in the Amazon, is basically unconnected.

So millions of people that are unconnected by road.

So people travel up and down that river as a, it's the super highway.

And so we would see these wooden two, three story boats that were traveling up and down and people in hammocks.

You know, these are multi day trips going from city to city.

And that was fascinating all the way down to going to little villages where people lived in these very lovely, well kept homes.

They live simple lives are Iggy and the other guys would say they live simple lives but most of them are very happy.

And they fish and they have gardens, you know, out back to grow root vegetables and other things like that.

And you know, a moment that I'll never forget was a couple.

One was we were in a little side river off the main river and a little cluster of houses and this boat came along, it was very vividly painted and, and there were a lot of sort of teenagers on the boat.

And I said what's this boat?

You know, what's going on here?

And they said, oh, that's the school bus, you know, so the, so the, you know, they had these wooden boats that would come around in the morning and pick up the kids and they would take them to school.

And this must maybe was a high school because the kids look like they were older, take them over to the high school and they have their, their classes all day and then they get back on the boat and the boat takes them back and you know, then there's never a, a car or a wheeled vehicle that's that's involved at all.

And then one of the other things, and we saw, you know, young women fishing for shrimp.

We saw a guy who was fishing, holding up his catch, very proud of it.

One cool moment was I think the Brazilian government has put money into getting a lot of these homes on the river connected to the Internet.

So even though you think you're in, in many ways in one of the most remote places in the world, I mean we're on the Amazon.

We're in the middle of the rainforest in the Amazon.

A lot of these places do have Internet, satellite Internet connections.

And a guy came around and I think he was selling acai, you know, this superfood that they have.

And he was selling, he was going to sell a bag of it to this family that we've been visiting with on the shore.

And I thought, you know, I think it's going to be this, clearly it's going to be a cash transaction.

But they both got their phones out and the one transferred money online to the guy in the wooden boat with the Acai, you know, selling it door to door.

And I just thought, you know, what an interesting clash of not just cultures, but eras.

You know, you have people living maybe as they've lived for centuries, fishing and farming on the river, but they're also buying things, you know, using satellite Internet in their phones.

So that was, that was, that was very cool.

And I just have one more experience to share that I think is really worth talking about.

So, I mean, there were a million I could talk for.

You know, we could spend an hour, we could spend two hours.

I mean even just life on the ship and, and things that we did on, on the Seabourn Venture.

But we went to a town called Parentines.

I'd never, I've been to Brazil before.

I'd never heard of this town.

Mid size, smallish kind of city.

I don't know how many people live in Parentines, but maybe, I don't know, it felt like maybe two or three hundred thousand, something like that.

Maybe less, maybe more.

But they had, they have a festival there that's called Boy Bomba.

And every year they do.

It's like a, like a theatrical retelling of a story of a resurrected ox.

I didn't quite understand the full story, but this, this is a huge event in the town.

They actually built a stadium that looks like a football stadium to, to, to house this festival.

And there's a red team and a blue team.

I'm not even going to try to pronounce the Portuguese names of these teams, but Red and blue and they have their training ground.

You're either red or blue.

You train through the year and then they have this festival that draws thousands and thousands of people singing and dancing and just beautiful, beautiful, colorful costumes.

And really, honestly, one of the highlights of the trip was they did like a, like a small version, like a one hour version for us and off the ship, just for us.

And you know, I mean, David, I mean you and I've done a lot of travel and we've been to a lot of these folklore shows, you know, that they do for tourists.

And that is honestly what I was expecting.

I didn't even sign up at first for the show and I would have missed the highlight.

It was absolutely spectacular.

I mean the, the, the, the costumes, I can't even describe it, but, but the dancing and the costumes and the singing, you had, you know, beautiful women on, riding these giant pink dolphins and hanging below monarch butterflies.

And you know, it was just a taste of it, but I know everybody came out of that.

I mean, people Were talking about that for days and for weeks afterwards.

I mean this was not your run of the mill, full core show and the passion of the people performing it like it didn't feel like okay, they're giving us this money and we're going to do it for the people on this cruise ship.

It was, they were so proud to show us, you know, give us just a little glimpse of what this festival is all about.

And so boy, Bombo was, was one of the, one of the big highlights and one of the big surprises to be honest.

So really.

Yeah.

Really special.

I mean sounds like an incredible, incredible trip.

Two last questions I would have is one, I mean I know this was part of a longer voyage on the expedition ship where you were on there for quite a while going everywhere from Antarctica to the Caribbean.

It was a long, long trip that you did.

But do you know, can people join for just the Amazon portion would be one question.

And also, I mean this is a pretty high end ship.

I know we were talking a fair bit while you were on.

Very much a luxury, luxury experience.

Any sense of like what, what the approximate cost for.

For a trip like this would be as well.

I'm going to demur on the cost because I know sometimes it can.

It.

It varies wildly based on your cabin type.

Sure.

You select.

I'm going to demur on that one.

But, but the, but yes, you can do the, the Amazon portion.

I don't know what exactly they have planned for next year because again it'll be about the same time of year next year and they'll do it again.

The, the voyage that I did began in the, in the Caribbean.

So I brought on the ship in Barbados.

We, we did a few stops in the Caribbean and then we did a week on the Amazon.

What happened after that was most people got off the ship except for 50.

So I mean probably a third, a quarter to a third that we actually had because it wasn't full capacity at the time.

Got off the ship.

We had new guests come on and then we went back into the Amazon and spent another week in the Amazon and then finished the trip in.

In down.

Went down the coast to Rio de Janeiro.

So you can do.

We had people on the ship a couple of.

There was a couple from Texas that I ended up hanging out with a lot.

They had gotten on the ship in Greenland and they had sailed all the way down to Newfoundland, all the way down the coast of North America all the way through the Caribbean and they got off in Rio.

So they've been on the ship for months, months and months.

But for sure, I think the minimum for the voyage that I was on was two weeks.

So you do either Caribbean and the Amazon or then Amazon and the coast of Brazil down to, to Rio de Janeiro, so.

But really spectacular.

Definitely recommend it.

Beautiful ship, beautiful.

Sounds incredible.

And I imagine that in addition to the, the human aspect of the people who you met onshore, must have been some incredible passengers and stuff too.

I mean, people who really into immersive travel and getting to some more exotic and more adventurous destinations like Antarctica and the Amazon.

So I can only imagine what the, what the experience was like, but hopefully we can talk Seabourn into letting us come do some live recording of future episodes on, on one of their ships or something.

It does sound like it would be an incredible trip.

Absolutely.

I'm always happy to sail Seabourn.

It's a beautiful cruise line and this was just an incredible, an incredible journey.

So.

Yeah, and you're absolutely right.

I feel like it's a, it's, it's a self selecting crowd when you go on a slightly unusual expedition style journey.

I mean, I think, honestly, I think interesting people choose interesting trips.

And so there were definitely lots of people that you would bump into and everybody had a story so about their past travels, about their lives and.

Yeah, so that was definitely part of the highlights.

Terrific.

Well, as always, we hope everyone will come back next week for our next adventure around the world.

And if you're enjoying some of the travel tips and travel information that we're sharing, hugely helpful to us.

If you can go onto the Apple Podcast Store, Spotify, wherever you're getting a podcast and drop us a rating or review and check out all of our podcasts from around the world with all of our podcasting partners@voyescape.com who are part of the Voyescape Podcast Network.

Always great to chat with you, David.

Thanks so much.

Thanks.