What to do in St. Thomas' port for just a few hours, on foot?

[puablo]

When our Carnival ship is in St. Thomas it will be from 7am to 5pm, and we're doing a St. John / Trunk Bay excursion that lasts from about 11:30am to 4pm. So that said, we'll have a couple hours in the morning to explore the port area (I'm assuming it's Charlotte Amalie).

 

Is there anything noteworthy to see or do (beaches, scenic views, etc.) besides the typical port shopping? I am not interested in the same lame jewelry stores that are in every Caribbean port. But I'm having a hard time finding if there is anything worthwhile to do on foot near the port for just 2 hours or so, besides shopping.

 

By the way, saying "St. Thomas has a beautiful port and you'll love just walking around the shopping district!" is an acceptable answer, but somehow I am not anticipating that to be the case. :)

[beentravelin]

Hey Puablo! It's me, beentravelin. We didd the Trunk Bay tour before and found we had time to ride the Skytram thing up to Paradise Point. The views are amazing.

[rjscott]

There is a self-guided walking tour of Charlotte Amalie that you may find interesting: http://www.**********/stthomas/attractions_stt/attractions_town.php

[Ms411]

There's the Butterfly Farm right at Havensight. It's fun if you've never been to one. Beautiful flowers, too.

 

You can walk over to Yacht Haven Grande and gawk at the yachts or sit on one of the benches and just people watch and enjoy the view. There are usually pelicans diving, sometimes egrets/herons, iguanas, etc so it's always fun taking photos of them if you can.

[puablo]

Thanks for the suggestions, I think we're going to end up checking out the stores first then doing the self-guided walking tour for the remaining time if we get bored with the stores. We're on a busy sailing with full day excursions every day but this one, so this will be the only port we will even see, and thus seeing the stores once - as opposed to seeing the same things repeatedly on every island - won't be all that bad.

[The Islander]

Carnival ships usually dock in Havensight, http://www.havensightmall.com. There are shops there and tram to Paradise Point http://www.stthomasskyride.com, Butterfly Farm and Yacht Haven that were suggested are there... all in walking distance. The self guided walking tour of the historic buildings in Charlotte Amalie are in town, you'd have to take a taxi from Havensight to town - takes about 8 minutes in low traffic, longer with traffic. More ships means more traffic. Or you can walk to town, but that takes 30 minutes, its about 1.4 miles. You can find more info on the historic sites downtown at http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=historic+charlotte+amalie.

 

--Islander