Dear Luciana,
I enjoyed both tours and considered them to be well-run and a reasonable value for tourists. I would like to especially give my compliments regarding the tour guide Paul Carter, who was my guide for the Presidente Figueiredo tour. He was pleasant, intelligent, gracious, and interesting, one of the best tour guides I have had anywhere.
I forget the name of the driver on the P.F. tour, but I felt that he took too many dangerous chances on the drive returning to Manaus while we were out in the countryside. I realize that drivers in Brazil are more aggressive and that the traffic necessarily seems to tourists to be more dangerous than in the US. However, several times the driver passed around a vehicle in front of us when there was simply not enough room to see if another vehicle was about to come over the top of hill toward us and make a head-on collision. On a hilly 2-lane road in the countryside, this is a simple safety matter regardless of where in the world it occurs. Each time it was a gamble like rolling dice. Also the driver sometimes passed while we were going uphill, when the car was having trouble accelerating, rather than passing downhill when gravity would help us go faster. That unnecessarily added to the danger. That particular car plainly did not have a powerful enough engine to give fast acceleration when it was full of passengers, so that it was a slow process to pass around another vehicle and our car had to spend a long time in the “danger zone” every time we passed. There was no need to take so many chances in order to save only a few minutes getting back to town.
best wishes,
Bruce McCollum