Carnival Best of the East Jeep Safari

Looking at doing this excursion next month. Has anyone out there done this before that could comment on it?

Anything? Good, bad, and indifferent reports all welcome. :)

Back to report on this tour. Booked through Carnival for 89.95. There were eight of us in the jeep with the driver. I sat up front because it did not look super roomy in back. Call shotgun if you get the chance. Our driver has lived on the island for over 30 years and had lots of interesting facts about the island. We stopped at the Shoe Tree and he talked about it for a few minutes and gave us the chance to get out and get pictures (nobody did.) We then went to the oldest building on the island, we had time in the gift shop before the presentation (prices are better here on their limited number of items than they are near the ship.) The presentation was mostly a film about half an hour long. After that we went on a tour of the house led by the guide. That was probably another half hour. Back in the Jeep and we rode quite a while to the Botanical Gardens. Very interesting, lots of different plants to see and we spotted a couple of blue iguanas. There was also a gift shop here with snacks which was good because by this point it was after lunch time and there is no meal or snack included. (Dear Carnival, if the excursion starts at 10 and ends at 2 it might be a good idea to include some way to get actual food at some point.) The itinerary had us going to the local craft market but the driver offered the option of going to look for some more iguanas and we opted to do that. Then we went back to the ship.

Pros - got to see a lot of the island, all admissions were included,the guide was very knowledgeable

Cons - ran over lunchtime and had to buy snacks (should have but had not anticipated this) There was bottled water in the jeep but that was it. There was another jeep full of people on the same excursion and their guide did not seem to know quite as much as ours - they actually spent the out of car time with us listening to our guide and i'm guessing did not get as much info in the car as we did. The jeep was not roomy for those folks sitting in back.