This was my 9th cruise, so Iâve gone on my fair share of shore excursion tours. With that said, this experience was phenomenal. Iâd say top 5 all time in my experience. Weâve gone tubing in Belize before, but this tubing tour blows that other one out of the water.
Despite the adventurous nature of this excursion, it also felt perfectly safe throughout. We took our 3 kids (the youngest being 4) and no one was scared at any point. The kids all said this was better than swimming with the stingrays in the Cayman Islands (which we did the following day), so thatâs something.
We booked the tour through TripAdvisor and was able to communicate via e-mail with the tour operator to confirm our departure time and meeting location. Our cruise ship was arriving at the pier in Falmouth at 10am, which is later than typical for a cruise ship. They were able to switch us from the 10am tour to the 11am tour with no fuss.
We were met by our shuttle driver Doc at the Falmouth cruise port and he drove my family and one other family from the port to the starting point of the excursion.
From there, we were picked up by our tour guides and got fitted for our tube, life jacket, and helmet. They had a tour guide assigned to each family group, and Chemo, who was my familyâs guide, was phenomenal.
We had to walk a short distance through the forest to reach our entry point on the Rio Bueno. During the trek, our guides took some time to show us a Pimenta tree, whose leaves the spice Allspice is made. Chemo knocked off a few leaves and passed them around so that we can all smell the spice as we ground up the leaves between our hands.
Once we were all sitting on our tubes in the river, our guides secured the tubes together for each family group and swam around on a tube himself to help guide us through the river. The river flows pretty quickly, and was much more adventurous than I expected. There were definitely some class 1 rapids on our route! Despite that, Chemo worked tirelessly to keep our tubes positioned perfectly. No one flipped off our tubes, and no one hit the edge of the river, even once. The personal touch of service was amazing. As an added bonus, we also got to jump off a âbridgeâ build over the river.
After the tubing, we switched to a larger inflatable raft to navigate down the mouth of the river and into the ocean. We then took the boat to a nearby beach, which based on Google Maps might be Turtle Beach. We were then picked up by Doc at the beach then driven back to the port.
I canât say enough good things about this tour, and Iâd definitely be interested in going on this tour again if we visit Falmouth again!