Picking an excursion

Hi all,

We are going on a 7 day cruise in October and are looking at booking an excursion. The last cruise we went on we really loved our excursion, however there were many other things at the port of call that we didn't get to do due to the length of the excursion. When we got ronone of the other islands we only needed about 2 hours to do/see what we wanted at the port and it left us wishing we had done an excursion on that day instead.

We are trying to avoid that same experience. We would be stopping at Cozumel, Belize, mahogany bay, and Grand Cayman. We are set on wanting to do a tour of the ancient ruins so that would be Cozumel or Belize. Each excursion is about 6-7 hours.

Any opinions on which island to excursion on? Which island has more to see/do?

Welcome to Cruise Critic. You might visit the Ports of Call boards here for the Caribbean/Mexico and see what they recommend. You might also join the ROLL CALL for your cruise and see what your fellow CC members are planning and why. EM

We visited mahogany bay in August and booked a zip line and beach tour. It was so fun zipping across the tree tops. We had a busy morning with that and came back with about an hour to spare. Belize is a tender port, so you might want to do an all day excursion there and when we went, it was a short stay so if you did a tour, it would take up your whole day there, saving the days for a half day excursion plus touring time. Grand cayman is a tender too but it’s a small island so you can get around fairly quick. I like to use Cozumel as a beach day because we enjoy their beaches. I would choose Belize and mahogany bay as your tour days and the other ones free days.

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Out of these four ports, Belize is the one that you pretty much need to do an excursion. There really isn’t anything at the port, and you definitely wouldn’t want to venture outside of the port area. There are not many ports that I would say that about; just Belize and Jamaica.

And since you want to do a ruins tour, I HIGHLY recommend Lamanai. We did an excursion through Carnival to Lamanai via a river and it was fantastic. It’s deep in the jungle, so it has a whole Indiana Jones feel to it. And, you can still climb up one of the temples.

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We have done this itinerary and did independent excursions in all ports. In Cozumel we did a half day snorkel tour - nothing special, can do that anywhere. In Belize we did cave tubing, full day and recommend. In grand cayman we did stingray city and swimming with the dolphins, I ended up not enjoying swimming with the dolphins but stingray city is a must. And in roatan we took a private driving tour that I thought was boring.

If you choose to do the ruins on Cozumel day, just be aware that there are small ruins on the island; but for the bigger sites that were will be substantial travel time with a ferry ride to mainland and a long bus ride.

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Welcome to Cruise Critic.

In Grand Cayman we loved the "swimming with stingrays" excursion.