Good Hope Great House Tour FY16

Would love to hear about this tour...am very interested to hear if this excursion is as interesting as the write-up makes it out to be....

Ditto; my group is also considering this for an upcoming cruise.

Bumping. Would really love some feedback on this from anyone who's done it!

My mom and I did this tour on our recent Allure cruise. We boarded a tour bus inside the enclosed port area at Falmouth and traveled about 20 minutes to the estate. The drive there was interesting -- we saw a few villages, sugar cane fields, banana trees, bamboo, etc -- and the driver acted as our tour guide, narrating what we were seeing and teaching us some local slang.

Once we got to the plantation, we were divided into two smaller groups -- half went on the tour of the grounds first, and the other half (my mom and I included) went to the house first. Our tour guide told us all about the history of the plantation, and she was able to answer every single question anyone could think of. We walked around outside for a few minutes and got some good pictures of the house itself and the view from the front yard (which was amazing), but while we were inside the house, a storm blew up that included the hardest rain I think I've ever seen. We were glad to be inside and felt bad for the other half of our group, who had left in a covered but open air vehicle.

The rain continued for so long (about 1.5 hours) that it ultimately ended up affecting the remainder of our tour. Our guide had to skip a couple parts she would've normally shown us, and for the second half they loaded us into a shuttle van, where we were dry but unfortunately couldn't see much through the rain-streaked windows. The guide did a great job of describing everything, though, and she and the driver were so rowdy and goofy and cheerful that we were all able to just treat it as a fun adventure instead of being disappointed that it didn't go exactly according to plan.

The tour ends with lunch, but the seating area was outdoors, and it was still raining much too hard to sit out there. So the guides improvised yet again and packed our lunches to go. This process wasn't very well organized, and it took so long that most of us were able to eat while we were standing around waiting instead of trying to eat on the bus on the way back to the port. The jerk chicken and salad were good, but the chicken wasn't nearly as spicy as I expected. They also served bread that was literally the best bread I've ever eaten; it was like the consistency and shape of a regular breadstick, but coated in sugar and deep fried like a funnel cake. I heard one of the guides refer to it as "festival", which I just now Googled and confirmed. It was so amazing that my mom and I begged for another piece!

Overall I was really happy with this experience, and I would recommend it to someone else who's looking for something different to do in Falmouth. It was informative, unique and fun. The weather was unfortunate, but the guides made the best of it, and it's not an excursion I'll soon forget.

Thank you for the review. This is a tour I would consider. We will have beach days in our other ports and would like to do something different in Jamaica. My 85yo mother will be with us and while she is active she had a stroke last year and does use a walker occasionally (she walks over a mile a day with it around the perimeter of her independent living complex) and I don't want to tire her out. Any other feed back on this tour?

How difficult was the entry into the 4X4?

How difficult was the entry into the 4X4?

Because of the torrential downpour, our second half of the tour (the grounds) took place in a regular tour bus, not the open-air 4x4. I did see the 4x4 when the first group loaded into it, but I don't remember paying special attention to the steps to get up into it. No one seemed to have a problem, though, and the guides were very attentive and helpful. There were several older folks on our tour, and it didn't seem too strenuous for them.