comparing cave tubing companies

[imacruzinma]

We used X-treme (BelizeCruiseExcursions . com). Our guide was JP and he was fabulous. He loves his country and his natural resources and was able to share loads of information. He was also very kind and funny with the kids ages 11, 13, 14, and 16). We were a group of 7 in our family and added to a group of 4 for a total of 11 people with one guide.

 

JP met us at the port, brought us to the booth and we settled the bill and picked up our t-shirts. For $110/pp we got a full day - Ziplining in the morning, and cave tubing in the afternoon. At the Zipline, we were handed to two guides for the course while JP waited for us. We did 8 stations of various lengths. We had a quick snack of fruit and water before walking to the river/caves. (You might want to bring some other snacks to leave in the van).

 

I have to tell you I am very happy that we did the combo tour. We all loved ziplining - even my dh who is sometimes not so good with heights was giddy as he was zooming along in the rainforest. The natural beauty of the caves was an experience that we will all treasure. One of the greatest things about our day is that we did not really see any other groups all day. I detest crowds of any kind so having the rain forest and river to ourselves was heaven! This is exactly why I did not want to cave tube with the ship's group.

 

This excursion was the highlight of our week long cruise on Carnival Legend. I have no qualms in recommending JP or X-treme.

[tokathy]

We also used X-treme and the other tour company in the river near us was Reggie's Cave Tubing. We are in our late 50's early 60's and did fine, it was great, would go again in a minute. Both tours were smaller groups with 3 guides who watched over you and we felt safe. They were very aware of ship sailing time and got us back in time.

The depth of the water on the day you go depends on recent rain fall.......the less rain the more you are apt to drag your butt on the bottom! We went after a huge rain and could not do all the caves as the water level was too high......the ship's tour was cancelled the day we went because of the high water......

[Shell807]

I'm heading to Belize in February and want to go cave tubing and zip lining. Which tour companies did you like?

My husband, I and our 16 yr. old son went cave tubing and ziplining on 11/6/07 with Charlie Chan from Major Tom's. We had Charlie to ourselves and went ziplining first (and literally "zipped" through because we beat the ship excursion huge crowds). The ziplining was great fun and then Charlie took us over to cave tubing, we changed into our bathing suits and had him as our personal guide through the caves. I can't say enough good things about Charlie Chan--he was really great. Even though we had Charlie, we did meet Major Tom at the pier who was taking a group who just wanted to do the cavetubing. There was some confusion about our reservation but it was remedied immediately. We had a great experience with cave-tubing dot net-----good luck on your search.

[Rolandtgs]

I read through this post hoping that someone would post about NCQ Belize Adventures cave tubing excursion. I read about them on this borad a while back and it seemed like they were very good. Now I am a little concerned after not seeing them here.

 

I booked with them a few days ago and Nacho (tour operator) called me within 10 minutes. He stated that he called everyone to confirm because another operator has been booking slots with all of the other operators and wanted to be sure that I was in fact an actual client.

 

The main reason I booked with them is because they are the only operator that is allowed to go through a local resort to access the caves. This apparently cuts down the hike time from 55 minutes to 25 minutes (my wife has arthritis and I wanted to cut down the hike time).

 

Can anyone comment on tours with this operator, and more importantly, can anyone confirm hike times?

 

Thanks

[tokathy]

We never heard of NCQ or Major Tom until reading this thread. When we did research people on these boards were recommending Xtreme or Reggie, but that was well over a year ago, so maybe business starting booming and more tour operators opened up. We found info about those two on these sites:

 

Belizecruiseexcursions dot com

and

regtour dot com

 

We did Xtreme.

[Eileen G]

We just returned from cave tubing last week. We booked with Major Tom and I wanted to share our experience. There were four ships in port that day so things were crowded. We were the last ship to anchor at 8AM. We caught the first tender available to non-excurison passangers at 8:45. and arrived at the pier at 9. We looked for Major Tom with a sign with our name but had trouble finding him so we asked someone. We were told he meets his people at terminal one and we were at terminal four. We headed to terminal one looking for our name the whole way. When we arrived at terminal one we asked again where was Major Tom only to be told he just left. We were told to keep looking. We finally found someone with our names. Major Tom had given our names to a guide named Joel. We were told by Major Tom that our group would have six people in it. Joel got together the six people and asked us to wait a minute. He then added a family of eight to our six and off we went. Joel had a new A/C van that seated 13. So that made 14 of us plus Joel. The younger children shared a seat. Joel was very informative on the ride and encouraged questions. Since the family was from PR some of them didn't speak English so Joel translated everything for them. We arrived at the Jaguar Paw at 11 and changed into bathing suits. We were given our tubes and off we went. We had to hurry and were told several times to keep moving. We had no explanation of what plants, trees or bugs we were passing (this was the major reason I booked with Major Tom.) We quickly passed through the dry cave which was really beautiful and I had to hurry to take a picture. When we arrived at the put in place Major Tom was there with two other groups of about 10 each. Since there had been so much rain the day before the river was very fast so we were linked together. We had two rows of 6 all hooked together. Joel guided us throught the cave and it was very difficult to keep us from running onto the side of the cave or rocks. The cave was amazing and much longer than I thought. At one point we turned out our lights to see how dark it was. Some of the PR family started chanting something in Spanish which was annoying. We would have prefered it quiet is such an amzing place. We drifted through the cave and Joel pointed out a few formations. When we left the cave we stay linked together because the current was so strong. The ride down the rest of the river was beautiful. We could hear Major Tom ahead of us talking about the trees and plants but only got bits and pieces. When we got to the place where we needed to get out of the river by the rope, which we had crossed eariler, we were still hooked together and asumed Joel would guide us to the shore. It became apperent that this was not going to happen so we quickly unhooked but not in enough time to stop from crashing into the people who were crossing the river. I managed to grab the rope to keep from drifting down stream, get out of my tube, and make to the river bank without getting hurt or I hope hurting anyone else. We made it back to the van and changed. We inquired about lunch but Joel didn't know anything about lunch. He introduced us to Major Tom and he told us on busy days he gives excess people to other guides. We were told there wasn't enough time to stop for lunch since the family's boat left at 3 and we needed to get back to the pier. When we returned to the pier it was packed so we just returned to the ship to get lunch. Joel was a good guide but he was someone who stood on the pier with a sign for Belize tours that anyone could walk up to and hire. I know things would have been better if there weren't four ships in port and we had been lucky enough to be in Major Toms group and if all the recient rain didn't make the river so fast. All in all it was quite an adventure.