To start, out tour guide seemed like he didn't know what was going on. He couldn't figure out which bus to get us on for a bit. Lots of standing around and waiting. When finally on, for the hour trip out to the sharks he barely did anything other than "teach" us three Jamican phrases, point out one hotel and that was about it. Once there at 9:45, my family got a 10:00 time for the sharks. We were done by 10:20. I had no problems with the actual sharks. It was quite cool and loved that. However, everything from here on out just went downhill.
once we were done, we had to wait until almost 1:00pm to leave. There were only 15 of us on the bus and they spread out everyone that far. Some people's experiences were canceled for some reason. While not the tour guide's fault, we had three rain storms. What that did was hurry along the photographers to try and speed up the shark pictures. While waiting around for a couple of hours, our pics were finally processed. The price was $180 for ONE PHOTOGRAPH or all on a CD. However all were such terrible quality that it was a joke. Half the time the photographers got pics with the trainer blocking out my wife and son so many of the pics were useless from the getgo. Many others you were not able to tell what was in the picture. Downtrodden, I passed on any photographic memories of the experience.
To try and kill time, we were to go look at the iguanas, mini zoo, shops, etc. However most of the animals in the mini zoo were not on display, the shops were a joke and the iguanas were not out either. Basically we spent a lot of time twiddling out thumbs.
Next up was Dunn's River Falls. Things don't start off well when the tour guide gives you the standard speech about the peddlers trying to hock their wares and to keep close to him, keep the kids nearby and try to make it through the stalls. Great....
Walking toward the queue, it looked like the lines we saw for Pandora at Animal Kingdom. No joke, there were about 500 people waiting in line to get a guide to then go down the hill into the falls. Someone came from the bottom and said it was an hour wait to get to the bottom. They turned out to be nearly spot on. There were several of us from our group who were getting quite upset at this point and nearly mutinied our excursion and demanded to get back to the boat. With an hour wait, hour hike and hour drive we were going to be cutting it real close to the 4:45 all aboard. The hour long wait was compounded by our guide not knowing how to play the game with the gatekeepers at the bottom to get his tour group through. The other tour guides were able to sweet talk the gatekeepers and have their entire groups waltz by and into the falls. We stood there and waited. And waited. And waited.
The falls were nothing special to me but I knew that going in. I just hung on and did it for my 11 year old to experience it. The videographers were pushing the sale of the falls hike videos hard. Some were quite pushy to other groups.
Walking through the merchandise stalls on the way out and putting up with the vendors was not a pleasant experience. You were really in there tight with everyone trying to hound you and sell stuff. I am 6'5", 230 and was getting quite uncomfortable. Not to mention what my wife, 8 and 11 year old were feeling. Mercifully, we got back on the bus.
On the way back, our tour guide fell asleep. Icing on the cake.
Back on the ship, we heard from our friends how their tour guide was awesome, explained all about the island, pointed out things, showed them around and such. No joke, ours taught us to say Yaw Mon, No Problem and Irie, told us about a hotel not having windows and pointed out the bauxite mining operation. We saw hardly any scenery worth mentioning. Most of the journey from Falmouth to the sharks was in an incredibly run down part of the island which fails to make it onto most tourist brochures.
All said, we spent from 9:00-4:00 on a tour. We got 20 mins with the sharks and 20 mins of hiking time in Dunn's River Falls (my son and I left the falls at the first out as he didn't want to continue). THerefore, almost 6 hours was spent either driving or waiting around.
I couldn't wait for the boat to weigh anchor and get the heck out of Jamaica. It was a major disapointment.