Our first port of call for the 7 day Southern Caribbean Cruise out of Puerto Rico was St. Thomas, USVI. There are a few very beautiful beaches in St. Thomas, namely Magens Bay and Coki Beach. However, I had read about the Trunk Bay (located in Virgin Islands National Park) in the neighboring island of St. John, USVI which has been listed among top 10 Caribbean beaches, and so I wanted to visit this one during our stop in St. Thomas.
Even though Carnival Cruises offers shore excursions for trips to St. John, I did enough research to figure out that it was cheaper to just take the trip ourselves. When the ship docked at Havensight in St. Thomas, we disembarked from the ship and walked a couple of blocks to the taxi stand. We took the shared van (open aired on the side) from Havensight to the Red Hook Terminal. The ride is $10/person.
After arriving at the Red Hook Ferry Terminal, I purchased 4 round-trip tickets from this terminal to the Cruz Bay Terminal, St. John. This ride is only 15 minutes and the ferries leave every hour on the hour. The cost of this ferry is $14 round-trip per person.
After arriving at Cruz Bay, St. John we got on another open-aired van ($6/person round trip) that drove us down the winding hills in St. John to the Virgin Islands National Park.
Before arriving at the national park, the driver gave us a brief history of the island of St. John and stopped by a cliff overlooking the gorgeous beach at Trunk Bay.
After arriving at the Virgin Islands National Park, we paid the entrance fee of $4 per person. There were clean restrooms and changing rooms right outside the beach and near the entrance.
The beach at Trunk Bay is gorgeous. There wasn’t too many waves and the water temperature was mild to warm.
We swam in the water for about 4 hours. While playing in the water, we were suddenly approached by another group who pointed out the wild sting ray that had wandered around very close to us to feed on the small fishes by the shore. It was very exciting to see the sting ray.
Around 2:30 PM we finally got out of the water, changed and took another van back to the Cruz Bay and then onwards to St. Thomas in the ferry.
After arriving back at the ferry terminal we again took another van back to the Cruise terminal at Havensight. After spending half an hour doing some souvenir shopping we finally returned back to the ship.