Swimming with rays and beach hopping from New York to Jamaica-Antigua with the Mein Schiff 6

Supposedly, Antigua has 365 wonderful beaches. One for every day. But that seems to be urgently needed as well. With us, there were still 3 cruise ships in the harbor. The Antiguans also call their island "The Heart of the Caribbean" and of course, we wanted to conquer that. Our first excursion was swimming with rays. We were really looking forward to this excursion and were curious how close we would get to the rays. We were taken to the ray station by minibusses. Here we received some instructions. We were told that we had to be careful not to step on the rays, but that they were otherwise very peaceful. It was also funny when the guide explained that with rays, the eyes and nose are on top but the mouth is below. We were never to try to feed the rays through their noses. Then we were distributed to small speedboats and off we went on a fast ride to the ray sandbank. Here we could already see from the boat that there were loads of rays here and our guides were eagerly awaited with their feeding pails. The water was wonderfully warm and we ventured in. Immediately, the rays swam around us. What a feeling. Especially at the beginning, it was quite unusual and every time we felt one on our leg, we got a little scared. Every now and then, one of them was quite cheeky and simply swam over us. They made it very clear to us that we were swimming in their territory and were only guests. Ronald was very brave and tried to feed a ray. It stuck to his hand pretty tightly, which changed his opinion afterwards. Luckily, he didn't get a hickey. Then we were allowed to hold the rays on our arms as well. They felt very soft and quite heavy. Holding them was already a great feeling. Unfortunately, the time was over too quickly and we had to go back. We were able to look at the pictures of the adventure while enjoying a rum punch before returning to the ship. We just had enough time to have a little bite to eat at Ankelsmannplatz before our afternoon excursion started. Here, we decided on a tour from beach to beach in an open safari bus. Our driver was really in a good mood and so we raced to the first beach with Caribbean sounds. The Dicksonbeach is part of a 5-star hotel resort. Very clean with a beach bar and an impressive bridge in the water. We got a rum punch and beach chairs; we had 60 minutes to splash around in the water. Then we continued to two more beaches, with the last one being really nice and wide, and empty. This is how you imagine the Caribbean. Of course, we got the delicious rum punch everywhere and so the trip became more and more fun and the atmosphere more and more exuberant. Our last stop was an old fort. Very romantically situated for taking photos. On the last part of the trip, our driver put a German party song CD on the stereo. So we drove through the neighborhoods of the locals singing along loudly through the microphone with songs like: Und dann die Hände zum Himmel, Ein Stern der Deinen Namen trägt, and Lalapalu. No wonder that everyone on the roadside stopped, looked amazed, and of course waved at us. A truly great excursion came to an end.

Continuation: https://vakantio.de/tourdesilke/mit-der-mein-schiff-6-von-new-york-nach-jamaika-guadeloupe