Wednesday, March 13, 2019- Falmouth, Jamaica

Wednesday, March 13, 2019- Falmouth, Jamaica

The Regal Princess arrived off Falmouth, Jamaica in the early morning, and backed into it’s slip.  We had breakfast in the buffet and watched the Royal Caribbean Harmony of the Seas backing into the slip across the pier from us.  There is a huge twisting multi-story waterslide off the stern of the ship that looks like a giant angler fish.  The Harmony of the Seas is one of the Oasis class cruise ships with a central open mall.  The balconies looked just barely wide enough to place two chairs side by side with a small coffee table between them.  

Falmouth was recently redeveloped into a cruise port  for large cruise ships.  There is a very large, modern terminal building opening onto a large and modern open air mall with lots of restaurants, bars and stores.  There are also buildings housing tour operators with shaded waiting areas.  

The cruise port areas seemed to be able to handle the Regal Princess and Harmony of the Seas without trouble.  There are a lot of fast food restaurants that would make American tourists feel right at home like Dairy Queen and Nathan’s Hot Dogs.  There are no end to the jewelry stores and Jamaican merchandise stores festooned with the Green, Yellow and Black cruciate Jamaican flag.  It was all very clean and festive, but there was a noticeable absence of a live steel drum band to welcome all the passengers coming off these two huge cruise ships.  Instead, there was canned pop and rock music coming from the various bars and lounges.  

We made our way to the Chuka tour building where our horseback riding tour was meeting up.  We met with other couples who had come off the Regal Princess and were doing the tour with us.  We were shortly joined by hoards of people coming off the Harmony of the Seas.  Most of them were much younger and had children of all ages in tow.  This was definitely now a fully Spring Break passenger manifest.  

There were 30 Regal Princess passengers in our excursion.  We took up a little more than half a 65 passenger bus, so we had room to spread out a bit.  The bus had AC, but it was pretty warm (85 degrees at 9:30AM), and the AC was just barely adequate.  It took about 30 minutes to drive along the northern coastline of Jamaica to the horse riding site.  We drove by a large bay with an industrial dock opposite a giant domed structure that looked like a UFO had landed on the island. This was a bauxite mine and transfer station.  There was also a large limestone quarry and processing plant along the way.  Jamaica had previously been an important sugar cane plantation island, but after abolition of slavery, economics changed the agricultural production towards fruits and coconuts, which reach maturity quicker than sugar cane, and are much less labor intensive. 

The horse riding ranch was quite a large operation, with over 200 horses.  There appeared to be several acres of lightly wooded scrub brush along the ocean shore, as well as a small private bay associated with the property.  It took a while to get riders paired with horses. They had a mounting station where you climbed some stairs to a horse height platform, mounted the horse, and then an assistant adjusted the stirrups and bridle to the rider.  We walked around in a circle for a while as the wranglers got the horses and riders organized so that people who were in the same family groups were together.  This was for the purpose of taking pictures of riders at various points along the trail, for separate purchase after the ride.  The guides were cheerful and helpful for the most part.  There was a boss that did seem to yell at a few of the hands that were just standing around rather than hustling to get horses ready for the growing cue of cruise ship passengers who were arriving by the bus load.  Our group of 30 from the Regal Princess seemed much more manageable than what looked like a group of 100 from the Harmony of the Seas.  

We did a trail ride for about a half hour, which required little horse riding skill.  You just needed to make sure your horse didn’t ride up onto the horse ahead and nip it in the rear, which would provoke a kick at the nipper.  Apparently, that’s what these horses like to do to each other.  We did ride along some pretty scenery along the coast, but it was hard to juggle the reins and an iPhone at the same time.  Texting while riding can lead to a horse doing unpredictable things.  

After our trail ride was over, we then had an opportunity to buy a lunch and shop for souvenirs while we waited to do the second part of our ride, which was to ride into the water, and swim across the small bay on horseback.  That was a first for both of us, and frankly as scary as it was exhilarating.  The horses make this crazy chuffing sound as they swim through the water with you on their backs, and it was tricky to stay centered on the horse as it swam with you on its back.  There was a special saddle which was more like a big sponge than a saddle.  It felt like you were sitting right on the horse’s spine.  We were in our swim suits, and the water was quite comfortable, but we did end up riding and swimming past floating horse dung.  Boy, were we glad we weren’t putting our heads in that water.  After we got back to the ship, we took long thorough showers.  We had fun, but don’t feel the need to do that again, not at least for quite a while.  I suspect the next ride will involve either elephants or camels, but I still prefer ATV’s.  

We rejuvenated ourselves with afternoon tea, and then joined in on the afternoon trivia game.  We teamed up with a couple from W. Virginia and a couple from Tennessee, both of whom we had teamed up with before.  We ended up bridesmaids again.  We didn’t know how many hurdles are in a 400m hurdle race, or that CS in CS Lewis stands for Clive Staples.  We also didn’t know what color a Canadian $10 bill was (purple).  

We had dinner in the main dining room, and marveled at how nice it was to be waited on with such fine service, and be freed from menu planning, meal preparation, and clean up on these cruises.  We could just live on cruise ships from here on out, if we could afford that.  

We joined a young Canadian family for the Disney Trivia.  They had an 8 year old daughter and 10 year old son who was super excited to be doing Disney Trivia.  Their wife was also very good at the Disney trivia.  We ended up with 20/23 possible, and were beat by one team with 22/23.  It would have been so fun to have won some prizes for those kids, but they were terribly thrilled none-the-less to have scored so well.  

The Princess Theater production of Fiera was simply amazing.  We have seen the show before, but the dance troupe and singers on this cruise are really terrific.  It had no trouble bringing the audience to their feet for a standing ovation. 

Janet retired to the stateroom to work on getting through a James Patterson book from the ship’s library, while Ben made a snack run, and watched the Liar’s Club to see what words they would come up with. He recognized 2 of the 4 words.  It’s amazing how Princess can come up with so many crazy words.  The four words were pogonophobia, cockatouche, wisteria and Baldersnatch.  We’ll leave it up to your imaginations or Wikipedia to figure out what they mean.

Tomorrow we arrive at Grand Cayman, where we have a Segway tour booked.  This will be our second call on Grand Cayman as it was on our very first Panama Canal cruise back in 2015 on the Coral Princess.  During our first visit, we visited Stingray beach and got to pet stingrays.  Nobody got killed or injured like Steve Irwin.