Oh yes, another day…another sunny Caribbean port!
This time we were tendered out in the harbour and took a smaller boat into Georgetown, Grand Cayman.
We actually messed up our timing for which tender boat we should have been on and missed our originally planned excursion. It put a bit of a hitch in our morning, but the Royal Caribbean staff rescheduled us on an afternoon excursion so we took the spare time to just wander the town.
There isn’t a lot to do right in Georgetown (it’s mostly high end shopping) but we found a wee bit of beach, iced coffees, and cold beers so we were ok.
Our excursion was incredible. One of the top highlights of the trip for me for sure. Swimming with stingrays!!
We were bussed to a local marina where we boarded a catamaran and sailed out to a sandbar in the open ocean. It was so beautiful!
Once we reached the sandbar, we were given instructions on how to interact with the stingrays, and then led into the water. They are very friendly, not dangerous, and the key is to shuffle your feet along the bottom so you don’t accidentally step on one (on the sandbar the water is only shoulder deep).
I don’t swim much so I was kind of nervous, but Michael encouraged me to just suck it up and enjoy myself. So I did! Michael was the first one off the boat and immediately became a stingray whisperer!!
We were given little squid to feed to the stingrays, and once you had one of those things in your hand the stingrays would seek you out and swarm like a pack of hungry puppies. They were so smooth and soft! They will swim right flat up onto your chest or through your legs or sneak up behind you, and at some point I had so many of them around me I was losing my balance. I thought I was going crowd surfing on a sea of stingrays!
The guides showed us how to ‘catch’ a stingray and once Michael got the hang of it he caught his own guy to have our pictures taken with. The kiss is good luck!
Stingray hugs!!
Our whole group was just laughing, squealing and having a great time the whole time. It was very quiet on the cruise out to the sandbar, but after our experience in the water everyone was super chatty and sociable on the cruise back.
Definitely do this if you ever have the opportunity!
After bussing back to town and taking the tender back to the cruise ship we decided to eat at the delicious buffet and just take it easy on board. After dinner we did some exploring of the upper decks. The basketball court was empty so we shot some hoops for fun.
I kept worrying we’d shoot the ball right overboard!! I think it’s hard to do that, but it seems like it would be easy! There’s no netting or anything.
Before calling it a night we popped into one of the lounges to hear a few of the Royal Caribbean singers. We’d really enjoyed this guy during the dance show the night before and he didn’t disappoint in the smaller venue.
Some of the talented performers we saw really should be on Broadway!
{Next post: Jamaica}
No comments:
Post a Comment