Letters to the Travel editor: Recycled soap and Brazilian visa blues

All that soap

Regarding Andrea Sachs’s story on hotel soap recycling in the Jan. 8 Travel section [“A green, clean recycling machine”], our synagogue (Congregation Har Shalom in Potomac) has been collecting hotel toiletries from congregants for years. It’s an easy way to donate something that probably would otherwise end up in the dumpster. The items are given to homeless shelters. Cruise lines frequently have even more substantial bottles of such products.

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Personal Post

David Epstein

Potomac

Visa blues

Thanks for the nice Jan. 15 Travel article about Rio de Janeiro [“Go on down to Rio”]. My wife and I have a trip there planned for late March. But there is an important thing you left out of the “Details” box on how to go, where to eat, etc. That’s the visa requirement.

Getting a tourist visa for our six days in Brazil is turning out to be very expensive and very annoying. I believe that you should tell your readers that it costs a minimum of $200 and involves annoying study, shipping and a little worry about sending your passport off to the Brazilian consulate. We are employing a firm to obtain our visa, which is charging us another $48 for their services, perhaps double if it is a “rush” job. So we are on the hook for more than $400 for the visa.

I am informed that on their end, Brazilians who wish to visit the United States are similarly jerked around in retaliation. How about an article questioning why the diplomats can’t come to some agreement to stop this nonsense?

Mitchell J. Bukzin

Woodbridge