harryfat1

There’s no tour guide or anything resembling an organized climbing effort. It’s like letting loose 100 monkeys into a house and everyone is going every which way. Yeah, climb at your own risk...

One more picture of the Casibari rocks from the bus as we move onto the next stop – Bushiribana Old Mine Ruins This was an abandoned gold mine from many years ago and it’s somehow a big visiting site with tons of people climbing the ruins. I think this must be a big ATV roundup place as there are probably over 100 ATVs in the area along with all the bus tours

I briefly thought about a cruise out of NYC a while back but the itinerary didn’t appeal to me as it would take me south to FL and the Bahamas where my brain would melt in the August heat. Not to mention we already did 2 cruises in 2023 and one more upcoming this December, the family will bulk if I opt for more cruises. We like cruises in general but that’s not our only form of vacationing as we have road trips that span 2,000+ miles round trip in the west coast. Easier to just do a one-week land trip to NYC to see as much as we can. Then plan for a future December cruise where we will come back to see the Holiday lights of NYC and freeze our buns off as the West Coast stores don't sell clothes that are East Coast winter-ready. Nice view of the Statue at sunset

Thanks for the concern. Our area didn’t get hit too badly from this series of storms but from the news report, other areas did. https://www.yahoo.com/news/part-los-angeles-could-see-065102556.html I think Viator probably has a solid record on getting most of the tours out without glitches as they have 4.4 stars out of 5 out of 77K+ reviews on Google so they are decent. It’s just the odds of things going wrong increase every time you have a middle person passing on the traveler info and you are dependent on how organized the local tour operators are.. We have one more set of rocks to climb at the next stop on the tour and that one is even more challenging to go up

Good thing you didn’t stumble onto some hard labor bus where they take you to some field and make you do manual labor in the Caribbean heat. I guess the person whose spot you took was cursing out the tour operator as he/she was still at the cruise terminal waiting for their ride. That’s the drawback of online tours is that some are lazy about who they pick up. All you are is a headcount to them. They are employed to pick up X number that day and as long as the number is right, they don’t care if is that the correct group or not. At least with the ship-based tour, you meet at the theater somewhere and they issue you a group number sticker that you put on your shirt (i.e. group 7) to at least know you are with the right group. Like in the picture below - you just need to find the number and you are set.

Oh, yeah, you have to pay like $2 to use their restroom as my wife and my son were in line to pay. So have some small bills with you as you travel to pay for restroom use. From what they told me, there's no toilet paper inside the restroom so you have to bring some sort of paper Kleenex in your backpack to do your business...

We made it down early and here’s our bus as well as the little store down at the entrance area

Lots of people at the top After a while, it’s time to go back down as we need to go to the next place It’s a one direction up and another direction down. Going down is much easier with an open staircase. No worries about being the middle part of a “rock sandwich”… It's a steep downhill walk, Be sure to hold onto the metal railing.

You can see the Carnival and RCI ships out in the distance (red arrows) Zooming in

So this is what you see when you get to the top I wouldn't get too close to that railing as you don't know how sturdy that wood is being out in the sun and the rain year-round Another tour bus dropping off tourists to see the rocks

Does anyone really believe this little wooden bar has much impact on the movement of the rock? You would think they could at least use an aluminum pipe or something more sturdy looking than a little twig-sized wood to try and sturdy the rocks? Do they have earthquakes in Aruba? Watch out for your head

Lots of people at this stop as well with many buses in the parking area

We are here I like this disclaimer sign that says climb at your own risk – don’t sue us if a 10-ton rock crushes you…

After the Aloe Factory, the next stop on the tour is the Casibari Rock Formation. The place is a bunch of mixed rock formations in the middle of the island and people like to climb to the top to take a look at the island. Lots of cacti on the way there. Almost like we are visiting Arizona

Yeah, Viator is just a middleman in connecting travelers with local service providers. The quality of service you get will vary with each provider. Viator does provide a valuable service in that they display vendors of any city that you may not have found on your own but as we both know, there are shortcomings as well. Just the pure math of having a middle person in the booking process will increase the odds of something going wrong. At least your tour and our tour showed up, albeit late and not exactly as planned. When we were coming back, we heard some people behind us saying their tour guide never showed up. My wife thinks those could have been the other family behind us at the cruise terminal waiting for their tour operator who somehow never showed up. That's the worst fear as now you are stuck to find some local taxi guy at the cruise terminal and trying to replicate whatever tours you had originally planned. As everyone knows by now I'm not the spur-of-the-moment type so it would stress me out if I had to improvise on the fly at any port if I had to arrange everything on the spot at the cruise terminal in the chaos. Many people do that as you always see taxi/tour operators at each cruise terminal trying to sell their services so there must be a demand for on-the-spot tours. But I would think most anal people are not the spontaneous sort.

After the tour, they have a gift shop at the bottom floor for anyone who wants to buy some to take home – aka visiting the crazy aunt in the basement

Loads of people from multiple buses on the factor tour from the second floor

The Aloe worker shows that you have to soak it for a while and then peel it before it can be processed. After the demonstration, we all walked inside to do a guided tour of the Aloe factory from the second floor.

Aruba is known for its Aloe production and there’s an Aloe factory that almost all the tours stop by there for a free tour of the area. I think there were 3 different tour buses there at the same time we were so it was massively crowded as we all tried to squeeze in to learn how Aloe is made from the plant.

Alrighty, that was the excitement of the morning. We are on the bus now to our first stop – the Aruba Aloe factory.

The Carnival Hrzino was docked at the other pier (no cruise terminal building) as the driver took us past that terminal into some remote parking lot where our "real bus" was waiting for us. Inside the bus was ¾ full from the Carnival passengers. They were waiting for us to complete the roster. Nobody ever told me the whole story but I think between Viator and El Tours, they weren’t communicating in the background or El Tours is just disorganized. Maybe their paperwork assumed we were on the Carnival ship and not the Odyssey so they never arranged for someone to meet us there to link up cruisers from both ports. So this is the risk of booking independent tours in that you are relying on them being organized to be there. The tours from the cruise ships will be more expensive but you are pretty much guaranteed to have someone meet you at the pier when you get off the ship with whatever number tag they assigned you. The tour may be canceled due to bad weather or whatever but there won’t be any of the “your name is not on my list” kind of anxiety if you book a tour with the ship. Of course, there's the money-saving factor if you book an independent tour as they will be cheaper than the cruise ship ones. You have to be the judge of your comfort level