If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Grand Cayman! | Travel + Leisure
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If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Grand Cayman!

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"Ports of call" is the official term for the stops that a cruise ship makes, and even now those words conjure images of romance, mystery—and, in the case of the Caribbean, skulduggery.

On board, your first view from the porthole of a stateroom or the deck of the ship might indeed be of impossibly pure azure waters lapping upon achingly white beaches that recede to a misty horizon where hills and heavens remain forever indistinguishable. Here, you might tell yourself, is a place unlike any other you've ever been—until you see the Hard Rock Café across the main drag from the pier.

So what's a tourist to do? First, admit you're a tourist. Your options are therefore limited. Unlike a visitor landing on virgin soil, you're looking at a dock that's there only because any number of cruise ships have already considered it anchor-worthy.

Most cruise lines that traverse the western Caribbean stop at the same series of islands. Though passengers usually reserve their shore excursions through the cruise line itself, either before the trip begins or once on board, the trips are run by outside operators. Except for a few tonal touches (Royal Caribbean trusts passengers to meet up with local guides; Disney often starts the tour on the vessel and its leaders say things like, and we quote, "Give yourselves a round of applause for choosing an absolutely fantastic excursion"), the jaunts themselves are identical in almost every meaningful way.

In keeping with that ancient adage "When in the Caribbean, do as other tourists in the Caribbean do," we passed our days in the following ways:

Dolphin Encounter, Cozumel
It doesn't come cheap ($99 per person), but both our kids (and their mother) loved the whole shticky experience, which included standing in a roped-off area of the sea and hugging and kissing a show-off dolphin named Apollo. Note: This is different from actually riding the dolphins, a far more expensive experience that you need to reserve independently of the cruises.

Stingray City, Grand Cayman
If we learned one thing from this outing, it's that we should never buy a stingray as a pet for our son Gabriel. A motorboat took us on a 40-minute ride out to a kind of gathering place for rays, where these oddball animals simply convene and rub up against the ankles of tourists like ourselves. The problem is thatmany tourists like ourselves, from many different cruise ships, come to Stingray City. When we got there, the place was hopping, the waves were high, and Gabriel freaked out each time one of the creatures, with its signature wet-bath-mat feel, rubbed against his legs. Or maybe it was one of the other tourists. Who knows?

River-Raft Tubing, Jamaica
We think we know why Disney doesn't stop at this island. Right away, when the Navigator took us to Ocho Rios, we were aware of its liveliness and unsavoriness quotient. (Marijuana was flagrantly for sale by the side of the road.) Our excursion was not only memorable but also something of a terror ride—and that was before we hit the water. The minivan that met us at the dock was, shall we say, rickety, and it had no seat belts. Many people were crammed in, including a father and son who made nonstop, offensive jokes with the driver and one of the tour guides, who said his name was "John Wayne Bobbitt."

We all bounced around while the driver tore along the one-lane, two-way highway, leaning on his horn much of the time. Another guide pointed out the hillside houses owned by Mick Jagger and Grace Jones, led us in a rendition of "The More We Get Together," and lectured us cheerfully about C.J.'s (Crazy Jamaicans), who supposedly populate the roads of this place.

Amazingly, we made it to our destination. The life vests smelled cadaverously bad, and most of us were suckered into purchasing water shoes from a shack whe we learned that we'd have to wade into the river to get to our tubes. Then we discovered there weren't enough oars, and so one of our kids was literally left up a creek without a paddle, needing to be pushed along from time to time by the guide.

The White River itself was alternately peaceful and, as the name suggests, white, and in the end we had an excellent and bracing time—the Van of Death even managed to return us to the dock intact.

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