Jamaica-Blue hole

[Coolmom50]

Hi, we are cruising on Oasis of the seas Western in June. We booked a tour to the Blue hole with Liberty tours highly rated.

I just read a post that said to skip Jamaica due to heavy crime etc...

Please tell me your experience in Jamaica and if anyone had gone on this tour.

 

Thank you!

[cb at sea]

You will be fine on a tour. It's just that Jamaica is extremely POOR....and visitors are often approached to "buy" this or that....and the locals can be a bit insistent. With a tour, that won't happen. No worries.

[BLAMBKY]

Went the last summer with Pete Taylor Tours, had such a fun time that we are going back next summer! I have a lot of the blue hole featured on our cruise video on YouTube.

[debshomespun]

We did the Blue Hole in Jamaica a couple years ago with others from our roll call. I don't remember who we went through, but was a non-ship excursion. We had a wonderful time. Definitely worth seeing. It is beautiful.

 

Here are a couple You tube videos: (not ours, I just googled them)

 

 

[Russ Lomas]

Hi, we are cruising on Oasis of the seas Western in June. We booked a tour to the Blue hole with Liberty tours highly rated.

I just read a post that said to skip Jamaica due to heavy crime etc...

Please tell me your experience in Jamaica and if anyone had gone on this tour.

 

Thank you!

We did the Blue Hole tour with Liberty Tours in March 2017. Here is my take on it. It is a beautiful location to visit. Liberty Tours is a well run company with great communication via email and telephone and we had a good driver. It is so much nicer than Dunn's River Falls in my opinion only if for the fact that you do not have to deal with all the aggressive harassment from the vendors (like at Dunn's Rivers) - a real turn off. It is a LONG bus ride close to 2 hours in length but you get to see some of the countryside and learn a bit of history. I was amazed at how good the condition of the highways are in.

 

The negatives...

1 - What a slow bumpy ride you have when you get off the highway. This does not bother me, but will bother some.

 

2 - You are on a single (and barely single) lane on the side of a mountain with a 50 foot embankment down one side with NO guardrail. There was so much traffic going up and down that road it was insane. At one point we met on that road with an on-coming vehicle that refused to wait or back up. It went on the hillside and scratched the hell out of one side of their vehicle and ripped off the mirror. We were in a more precarious state. We got pushed over the edge of the embankment slightly, so much that we were all told to go to one side of the bus so that it did not roll down the embankment. We could not reverse because it was bumper to bumper and the one behind us would not reverse. We really thought we were going down the embankment (I have read lots of other comments in CC saying things like this and brushed them off, but you could ask anyone on our bus and we thought we were dead). We tried to get off the bus, but could not because the door was blocked by the vehicle trying to pass us going down.

 

3 - The Blue Hole was really neat but it was not enjoyable (for our visit). It was FAR TOO BUSY. There had to be close to 75 vans and buses in the "parking lot" and they were triple and quadruple parked. It was insane. We had to wait 30 minutes to start since there was 100 people in line ahead of us. You have a guide (we had Daniel) and told you exactly what to do. We stopped for one quick photo and he yelled at us that we were holding up the group. The rest of the group was standing in line behind 30 other people waiting to jump 5 feet off a rock into a little pool. They were not going anywhere. We wanted to see the cave you could swim into and were told "NO" there is no time for that. The falls you walk down holding a rope and then jump into was neat but there were 50 people in line and you stood on the side of the slippery 45 degree rock holding a rope for 20 minutes almost falling off as the water rushed by. I had no trouble but children and older people were having difficulties.

 

My mistake - I thought that since there were 2 ships in Falmouth, getting far away from Falmouth would offer a quieter, less hectic excursion. I was dead wrong. I forgot the fact that Montego Bay and Ocho Rios are much closer to the Blue Hole and thousands of people go to the Blue Hole now from the ships daily. There were 7 ships in Jamaica that day in total (I thought there were only 2) - my mistake.

 

Is the Blue Hole gorgeous - yes. However, if there were more than 2 or 3 ships in Jamaica that day, I feel it ruins the experience totally. It was like being at Disney World during the Christmas break, not relaxing and peaceful as I had seen in all the videos and photos on line. Those days are long gone I fear. The secret is out. It would probably be incredible on a day with no ships in port still though.

[iambumbo]

We also did Peat Taylor's tour of Blue Hole last February and it was the highlight of our day. Our guide Samuel knew where to take the best pictures and even ran back and got a life vest for me because I can't swim. Best photos from our trip were from that afternoon. Absolutely recommend it.

[utopiahereicome]

We also did Blue Hole with Liberty tours back in May of 2015, and it was a wonderful day! Not crowded at all, the guides at Blue Hole were entertaining and so incredibly skilled at diving and doing crazy stunts into the water, our driver was terrific - my grandkids still talk about Blue Hole as the best excursion we have done.

[pso418]

I would confer that Blue Hole was awesome. Highlight of our time in Jamaica. When we were there it wasn't that bad crowd wise. So I think from reading the other post it depends how many ships are in port.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Forums

[Coolmom50]

Is there a way to find out a head of time how many ships are in port?

[Clarea]

Is there a way to find out a head of time how many ships are in port?

 

http://www.cruisetimetables.com/

 

http://www.cruisecal.com/

 

http://www.cruisett.com

[Coolmom50]

http://www.cruisetimetables.com/

 

http://www.cruisecal.com/

 

http://www.cruisett.com

Thank you! It indicates that only our ship will be in port that day. Do you think that sounds right?