We hired a bird guide, Bertrand Jno Baptiste, also known as Dr. Birdy, and he took us and two others to the Syndicate Trail for the day. He is very good at identifying the local birds and other animals.

We have a tour in the afternoon, so went birding on our own in the morning. There is a little canal that leads to Aimé Césaire park a half-mile from the dock. We started in the little green space by the hotel by the dock and then walked up along the canal.

In Antigua we booked a tour to go to the south side of the island to take a short kayak ride through the mangroves out to the sea and then go snorkeling out on the reef followed by lunch a beach resort.

The directions to find the meeting point were complicated, but our ship ended up docking on the pier right by the meeting point, so we didn’t need go out through the port complex and walk around. The directions would have been needed if we had docked on the other pier.

We visited St. Maarten in 2022 on our cruise to the Amazon River.

The cruise we booked is actually two back-to-back cruises sold as a bundle. The ship returned to Ft. Lauderdale.

This stop becomes our first chance to get in the water since our Half Moon Cay stop on the first day was canceled due to high winds.

We were notified by Holland America when our cruise left a few days ago that Roatan was turning into a tender port because another big ship came. It rained cats and dogs on Roatan yesterday and the forecast calls for more rain today. The wind and swell on the sea is also bad.

We visited Belize in 2023, but didn’t spend any time in Belize City. The ship has to stay outside the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, so the tender ride to the dock takes 40 minutes.

The Cayman Islands are small, only 69,000 people across three islands. It is a tender port, but the ship uses local tenders that are bigger than the ship’s tenders, so it goes pretty fast. Our tour group is split across two small buses, but we tour as a group with the two driver/guides, Carl and Ashton, each talking about their specialties.

We were supposed to visit Falmouth on our Amazon cruise in 2022, but there were going to be too many ships in port and our ship switched to Ocho Rios.