The ship....Princess Pacific--was great. It is very small and full of character. There were only 608 passangers on board. I flew on an American carrier non stop from Miami to Manaus. Fellow passanger that used the one ATM at the airport (arrival around midnight) was rigged to clone pin and ATM and they arrived home to find their accounts empty....so they reported on cruise critic. Fortunately I used a $20 bill to get by taxi to the hotel and was able to get to bed around 2am ....Up at 8 and on the way to the ship where the hotel van dropped us and our luggage at the ship (gangplank). The driver had no idea where he was going and the 15 of us had to get back in with our luggage and they finally dropped us at the proper location about 2 blocks away where we checked in, left our luggage, and got our cruise cards without incident or wait.

The Amazon is interesting but is just a very long, very wide river...we sailed down it for about 500 miles. Jungle on all sides and interesting to see once as were the ports. It is obvious they are not used to tourists and even the ship arranged tours were primitive as one would expect. After leaving the Amazon we stopped at the islands know as Devil's Island. The ship's tender takes us only to the Isle Royal since Devil's island is too dangerous to approach. The three French prision islands are unique and almost untouched by tourists ... they were abandoned about 1950 and were very interesting. Then on to a couple of Carib. islands which I had seen before. We had to skip Trinidad (which I had not been to) since there was no room for us....I suspect they wanted the bigger ships instead of us. Then back to Ft. Lauderdale.

The captain, Justin, was outstanding in every respect and was always mingling with the passangers - even at breakfast and lunch. A great guy! Read more