Excursions on POA

[birdcat]

Hey Kids -

 

I will be on the POA in June and was wondering about some excursions. I tend to take the ships excursions due to my overwhelming fear of being left at the dock somewhere , plus I have had mostly good experiences in the past this way.

 

I wanted to do the Haleakala Sunrise on Maui and one of the "see the lava" ones on the big island. Has anyone done any of these from NCL and if so, what were your experiences?

 

Thanks.

[orcatek]

I understand your fear, but with Kauai and Maui you are in port for 2 days, so the first day you can book on your own without any fear of being left.

 

I only took one ship tour on my trip and it was a last minute decision.

 

I'm sure others will have lots of recommendations.

 

To see the Lava you have two choices, Helicopter or Hike. The hike is supposed to be a for someone ready to walk a fair amount over rough ground. Depending on where the lava is it may be a hike of an hour each way. Not sure how far the ship tour is willing to hike - do they limit it based upon the tour mix (I've been on tours that did this in the past). I flew it on the Star and it was great, but pricey.

 

I've done Haleakala, but not at sunrise. Hope you don't like to sleep in because you do have to get up very, very early to make the drive to the top in time. Supposed to be amazing - based upon how it was during the day I believe it. Also it is freezing up there.

 

Good luck.

[cdbisme]

We were on the Wind, but many of the shore excursions are the same.

 

We did the helicopter over the lava. As the previous poster mentioned, you either hike or helicopter if you want to see lava. And also as the previous poster mentioned, the helicopter is pricey but you have mant good views.

 

As far as Haleakala, our ship was only in port one day, so we did not get to see the sunrise. However, we did do the bike ride down the mountain and that was the best thing that we did on our trip. It was a little scary as you are driving up around all those turns through the clouds (because the mountain top is above the cloud level), but it was a lot of fun on the way down. Not physically demanding at all (no pedalling) but your hands were a little sore from continuously braking. I have heard that the sunrise bike tour is not one to be missed. So if you are a little adventurous, you may want to try this. We booked our tour through the ship, but if the sunrise version is not available, the tour provider was Maui Downhill and I would highly recommend it.

 

We also did all ship excursions on our cruise and had excellent experiences with all of them. We choose the more active excursions and they had smaller groups. I think that is my biggest problem with the ship excursions - you feel like part of the herd. But since we chose only excursions that we knew would be small, we didn't have any of those issues at all.