harryfat1

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

At 8:55 an El Tour bus finally shows up – 25 minutes after the fact. Better late than never, I supposed. But there’s nobody else on the small bus other than us. Huh? I thought these guys were a big company that had many other customers? Anyway, who cares, just get on the bus. As we were leaving the cruise terminal, the driver said he was only the driver to take us to the “real bus” as this was not our actual tour bus OK…

20231227_083805.mp4 Besides being anxious about not hooking up with the tour operator, the loud music and the chaos of the cruise terminal didn't make me feel the "Aruba - One Happy Island Vibe". You can check out the scene from this short clip. I will talk more later on about this other ship, Freewinds, docked beside us as it’s permanently docked here. Every Aruba YouTibe cruise terminal video shows the ship tied up here.

Then he asked what tour we were on and as it turns out, he is not the guide for our tour. He said our tour guide is coming. Huh? It’s 8:35 for an 8:30 tour and the guide is not there? That doesn’t sound good as they are typically there waiting for you, not the other way around. He told us to stick around and wait while he texts and calls. I'm not getting warm fuzzies about this whole operation as every minute is ticking away. Later on, another family showed up to talk to this El Tours guide and they were also not with his tour they were told to wait as they were with a different tour than ours but with the same company. By 8:45, the El Tour guide at the terminal left to take his group to their sightseeing. He told us to wait for someone at their office to pick us up. So in the meantime, there’s nothing to do other than take pictures of the cruise terminal area .

We signed up for an independent tour that I found on the Viator website and booked it through them. I know Viator is only the middle person, but I thought I could trust them more than some company I never heard of. Well, that didn’t turn out exactly as planned… I signed up & paid Viator for the tour one month before sailing. Their instruction was to meet the tour operator right after we got out of the cruise terminal. I put in the name of the ship in the signup description. Being 9.2 on the anal scale, I even emailed the tour operator after I got the Viator confirmation to make sure the tour operator has us on their list and they know we are coming on the Odyssey of the Seas. I received an email confirmation from them saying I am on the list and I’m good to go. Or maybe not… The name of the company is El Tours. They are supposed to be a big tour operator on the island with various types of tours and airport transfers so it’s not a one minibus-only tour operator as I wanted a bigger bus with a reliable AC system than a small taxi van. So I got out and I saw the dude with an El Tours blue cap (see me talking to him in the picture below), I was really happy that he was there to meet us – until I gave him our name and then he said we were not on his list. WTH?

The outside scene is best described as “Organized Chaos”. People are everywhere and you need to find whatever tour you signed up for and the very loud music in the background (do they really need that loud music to "welcome you" to Aruba?)

OK, so we just got off the ship in Aruba and weaved through the various shops inside the terminal to get out.

Oh, very nice. Much appreciated. People on YouTube often refer to certain districts and it's not always clear to me where's what. I know from the various research I have been doing on the basics of where Brooklyn and Queens are relative to Manhattan but within Manhattan, I only know the big-name areas like Wall Street and Central Park and Time Square. Still need to get familiar with the other small districts.

Yeah, we started getting rain on Saturday afternoon and it's been on and off since then. Hopefully, this series of rain storms isn't as bad as last time.

Back to the cabin to get ready to get off the ship for our island tour of Aruba. Unlike Curacao, Aruba has a cruise terminal that is there as soon as you walk off the gangway. The white building is the cruise terminal. Can’t miss it. Similar to the Cozumel cruise terminal, you have to weave through a whole bunch of shops before you can get out Aruba’s slogan is One Happy Island. Don't worry, be happy? As we will soon find out, it's time to be worried...

From the water turbulence, it looks like the captain has the side thrusters on and he is docking the ship at the Aruba pier at 8 AM.

To the rest of the world, it’s Wednesday but you don’t care. It’s Day 5 as far as you are concerned Windjammer wasn't too busy at 7:30. They have an omelet station and unlike the old days when you had to stand in a long wait to wait for your personalized omelet, you just place your order with the person at the omelet station and they issue you the pager and when your omelet is done, the pager will vibrate and lights will go off and you just go and pick up it. Much better system. In the past, I seldom got omelets for breakfast because I didn’t want to stand in line and wait but with the pager system, you can get other food/drinks and start eating your breakfast and then go back when the omelet is done.

Went back to the cabin after my coffee and woke up the rest of the family to go to Windjammer A pilot boat here already to guide us in Aruba straight ahead

Day 5 – Aruba Since we had a tour scheduled for Aruba this morning, I woke up earlier to go down to 270 to get my coffee. Wake view at 6:56 after going through the secret entrance. More overcast today than at Curaaco yesterday. A couple of dudes are already at the back of 270 early in the morning I got there at 6:58 and the café 270 wasn’t opened yet. Had to stand and wait a couple of minutes for them to open up at 7. They are nothing if not punctual. Don't expect them to open up early

At midnight, we are only sailing at 6 knots out of Curaaco on the way to Aruba as the 2 islands are only 70 miles apart so we don’t need to break any speed record to get there tomorrow morning. Anyway, since tonight was the 80’s night and that reminds me of the popular 80’s TV show – Miami Vice and the famous Phil Collins song to close out the night: This concludes day 4 of the trip report as we are now officially halfway done with this cruise. +++++++++++ As always, I appreciate everyone for following along. It’s been over a month since I started and we are more than 60% done as Curacao has the most number of pictures compared to other days. The next day, Aruba, has the second most.

My $20 cheapo pseudo smartwatch from Temu tells me we walked 14,000+ steps today in going back and forth to Curacao twice. This would be the most we walked on this sailing as we joined the tour at Aruba so we didn't walk as much. Labadee wasn’t that much walking either. We pedaled the bike pretty far back at Hollywood Beach but I don’t think my watch accounted for that.

After the show at 11, my older son and my wife wanted to check out the 80’s dance party at the Music Hall. The venue was WAY too small for the number of people that wanted to be there. My younger son and I left after a while but my wife and my older one stayed for most of the dance. These are some of their pictures. Since I didn’t stay, I can’t comment on the event other than it was way overcrowded. You can definitely feel the 125% of capacity in this event as it was wall-to-wall people.