Stung! By a stingray excursion in Grand Cayman
Over the new year my husband and I booked a nine night southern Caribbean cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Explorer of the Seas. The cruise visited George Town, Grand Cayman; Oranjestad, Aruba; and Willemstad, Curacao. We seldom find ourselves interested in excursions and instead prefer to enjoy the ship as most of the ports we have been to multiple times. This particular trip was different in that the ports were new and we had friends in both Aruba and Curacao who were to be our tour guides. This left us with no plans for Grand Cayman so we decided to book an excursion and see the area.
Now I have to be perfectly honest, I love to look at the ocean, not necessarily be in the ocean. I mean just look at this posts cover photo, see that lonely person up on top of the boat? Yeah that is me. With that said, my husband is more than willing to hop in and swim with the fishes. In my research I found an excursion for Stringray City with Tukka Restaurant Caribbean lunch. The excursion was listed as a 3hr tour which would leave us with ample time to explore the port area before we had to get on the ship. My husband could go swim with stingrays, I get a boat ride in beautiful water, and we get fed to boot. What could possibly go wrong with that I thought. So we agreed and I booked that excursion.
Fast forward to the day of in Grand Cayman we dutifully arrive at the ice rink at our assigned time and receive our number sticker and ushered to our seats to await departure. Sitting in our seats with our number 12 stuck to our shirts we realized this is a tender port. Not to say there is anything wrong with a tender port, it just takes a lot more time to go to and fro, the tenders also tend to be quite crowded. We are then led out of our seats through areas of the ship we wouldn’t normally be in and on to our tender to get us to port.
At the port we are grouped up with the unlucky number 13 and left to stand in a shaded area awaiting our bus. The 13’s and the combination should have been a clue that something was not quite right with our tour, we ignored it an after a longer wait that I would have liked we were led to our busses and whisked off to the marina and our ride for the next “3 hours.”
After a lengthy, but not too lengthy, boat ride we arrived at Stingray City where the captain anchored the boat with the stern facing the shallow waters where the sting rays swim. We were, at the time, one of about 4 boats at the location, a few personal boats and a couple of other tour boats. This, however, quickly turned into a mayhem of tour boats, so much so that the personal boats were literally pushed out of the area by the larger tour boats.
The water was absolutely stunning and amazingly clear allowing me to watch the stingrays easily from the safety of the boat, lol. My husband braved the water and swam with stingrays and seemed to have a good time. After a while stingrays get old and we were ready for our Tukka restaurant lunch, or so we thought. After getting back aboard the boat we were informed that our next stop was going to be snorkeling at a nearby reef for another hour.
So our three hour tour stretched on, we did not get to lunch until well after 2pm and everyone was hungry. The food was ok but buffet style and not worth the wait to eat it. We talked with some of the others on the excursion and discovered the 13’s were on the Snorkel, Stingray City, and Tukka lunch tour for 4.5 hours. Our group on the 3 hour tour were just lumped in with the longer tour including snorkeling even though we had paid less. In theory we should have been happy to get more for less money, the reality was though we were quite upset. The longer tour meant we did not have time to explore around the port when we got back as the we had to queue up for a tender to get back to the boat on time.
All in all we would not recommend the stingray city and tukka lunch tour if you really expect it to last 3 hours.