Sailing 2/2/08 Help, Port excursions

[steelmanga]

Leaving San Juan, Looking for recommended excursions from past experiences. Open to everything. Late 40's and fit. Ports are St. Thomas, St. Maartin, Antigua, St. Lucia, Barbados

[EaglesFan13]

In Barbados, go take the natural cave tour. It's breathtaking !

[Miss Vickie]

We've done this itinerary numerous times, and are leaving on Serenade to do it again a week from tomorrow :D

 

There are lots of ideas and suggestions on the Ports of Call boards, but our favorite things to do on the islands are:

 

St. Thomas, grabbing a cab to Red Hook and then taking the ferry over to St. John for a day of snorkeling at Cinammon Bay. St. John is largely national park, and beautiful. You can hike, swim, or beach it. There's very good snorkeling at several beaches.

 

St. Maarten, we usually end up spending the day at Orient Beach, easy to get to on your own. We've also done the zip line adventure offered through Royal Caribbean and enjoyed it. On our first cruise we did the Americas Cup race - it was a blast. Renting a car and doing a self-tour is easy on this island, as well. Driving is on the right hand side of the road, and as there is a road that goes all around the island, it's easy to do without getting lost.

 

Antigua - www.adventureantigua.com. This is our favorite port - Eli's EcoTour is the very best excursion we've ever taken (and we've done it 4 times), closely followed by his Xtreme Circumnav tour. They are both full day trips aboard a power boat (and the Xtreme boat is awesome!) The activities are varied. The EcoTour includes snorkeling, climbing on Hells Gate, a short hike to the top of Bird Island, and a fantastic home made lunch. The crew is terrific, and fill the day with information about Antigua, it's ecology, the offshore islands, the mangrove area. And they take really good care of you. The Xtreme offers snorkeling, a stop to swim with the stingrays, a boat-based tour of English Harbor, the same great lunch at Green Island, and a stop at a beach for refreshments, as you circumnavigate the entire island. Again, great crew, great time.

 

St. Lucia - there are some very good island tours -we've used Frank, and Cosol gets lots of rave reviews, too. It's a gorgeous island - the prettiest we've been to, and it's well worth spending your first time there on an island tour. There's very good snorkeling at Anse Cochon, we use Island Divers when we spend our day doing that.

 

Barbados - I think the best thing we've done there is SilverMoon, a very good catamaran snorkeling excursion. We have also used Glory Tours for a very enjoyable day going to some places we hadn't been before (the Nature Reserve, Gun Hill Signal station, a couple of other places). We customized our day, along with some other folks from our roll call, so it wasn't one of their standard tours, and they were very gracious about doing that. One year we got off the ship, and got a cab driver to give us an island tour. We had done a lot of research before hand, and between the four of us and the cab driver's suggestions, we had a very enjoyable day.

 

The key is to do your research - on-line, both at island web sites and the ports of call boards, and maybe check out Fodors, Frommers, or some other ports of call books, and you'll find lots of interesting and fun stuff to do.