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Excursions a shore bet for thrills
By Matt Hannafin/ Cruise Notes
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Cruising is a balancing act. On the one hand, days spent aboard a ship practically force you to de-stress. On the other, too many days aboard, without setting foot on land, can drive you batty. That's when those of us who like to keep active yearn for something to get our blood pumping a little bit faster.
Knowing this, cruise lines have scoped out shore excursion options that go beyond the standard bus tour.
``In the last five years we've seen a huge growth in things like rock climbing, night scuba diving, ATVs and dune-buggy tours,'' said Glen Dean, manager of shore excursion presales for Carnival. ``People watch TV. They see these things on the Discovery Channel. And when they're on vacation they want to experience as much as possible.''
Like Carnival, every cruise line has a whole department whose job it is to find and test shore tours - of which there are at least 600 offered in the Caribbean alone. Aboard ship, the excursions staffs are well-versed in what each trip is all about. Tell them you want a really active, adventurous tour and they'll hook you up.
To get you started, though, I polled the experts at Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Princess and Norwegian, and asked for their picks. Here's a selection of the best in the Caribbean.
One of the most popular active excursions right now is a canopy tour, in which you swing on a system of harnesses and pulleys between platforms lodged high in the branches of jungle trees. In Ocho Rios, Jamaica, try the Original Canopy Tour in the Laughlands River Gorge ($89 per person). In all, participants cover nine traverses ranging from 105 feet to 660 feet apart. In Belize, Carnival and Princess recommend the Lost World Canopy Tour ($99), with five traverses ranging from 105 to 500 feet, crossing the fallen ceiling of the open-air Lost World Cave.
If you'd rather stay on solid ground, hiking can get you deep into the islands' interiors. In St. Kitts, take the five-hour Mount Liamuiga Volcano Hike ($109), climbing 3,800 feet to the summit of the extinct volcano. In the Southern Caribbean island of Dominica, a medium-difficulty hike ($59) takes you along the Sari-Sari River to its gorgeous waterfall. In Belize, the Cave Tubing and Rainforest Exploration ($93) combines a rain forest hike with a lazy tube-float down the Sibun River. You can take that concept to the next level in Barbados with the Tropical Rainforest Hike and Cave Exploration ($79), in which after your hike you descend by rope to explore a series of half-flooded caves. Several excursions offer water thrills. In St. Maarten, Royal Caribbean recommends the America's Cup Sailing Regatta, in which participants are split into groups, given a short sailing class, then sent off to race each other aboard actual America's Cup boats ($84). Prefer engines? In Costa Maya, on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the Xspeed Boat Xcursion ($96) lets you jet around Bacalar lagoon aboard two-passenger speedboats, buzzing between islands and exploring the mangroves.
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