Our first port of call on our P&O Arvia Caribbean cruise was the British Virgin Island of Tortola.
We hadn’t booked a P&O excursion in Tortola, as we’d read that it’s easy enough to visit the Virgin Gorda baths yourself independently, so we decided to make our own way over to Virgin Gorda from Tortola by ferry.
P&O’s own excursions are great in that there’s never any risk of missing the ship, you always have the peace of mind that with a P&O-booked excursion, the ship will wait for you if there’s a problem and you’re late back.
However you pay a pretty high price for that reassurance – and on a two week cruise with loads of different shore excursions to do, the cost of booking every excursion with P&O would really ramp up the cost of the holiday.
The excursion to Virgin Gorda from Tortola is easy enough to do independently so as Arvia docked in Tortola at 7.30am, we were up early (which was no problem, as the jet lag had us awake easily before 6am anyway) for breakfast in the Horizon Buffet in order to get off the ship straight away.
Getting to Virgin Gorda from Tortola Cruise Port
Virgin Gorda is a separate island from Tortola – about half-an-hour away by ferry – and it’s a popular destination for cruise ship visitors, with the unique venue of the Virgin Gorda Baths.
The Virgin Gorda Baths is basically a small national park consisting of a series of beautiful white sandy beaches with huge volcanic rock boulders, which form a series of natural pools and caverns that you can climb and swim through and around.
We knew we had to make our way to Tortola ferry port, which we found on Google Maps, and which is an easy 5 to 10 minute walk from the cruise port.
To find the ferry to Virgin Gorda from Tortola cruise port…
Exit the cruise port ‘park’ and head left, walking along the main road and you’ll then reach the ferry port, which you can’t miss.
There are several ferry companies offering trips from Tortola to other islands in the BVI and we chose ’Speedy’s Ferries’, as they seemed to have the schedule of crossings which suited us best.
The 9am crossing would give us most of the day at Virgin Gorda, with a return crossing at 3.30pm, getting us back to Arvia in plenty of time for her departure at 5.30pm.
Speedy’s Ferries offer a Virgin Gorda crossing plus taxi package to the Baths (which is about a 20-minute bus ride from the ferry terminal the other side).
We paid about $150 for all four of us, and got on the fast catamaran-style ferry, sitting out on the top deck in the increasingly hot morning Caribbean sun, enjoying the views of Tortola and the other nearby British Virgin Islands as we headed for Virgin Gorda.
After about half-an-hour on the ferry, we arrived and were directed to some open-sided minibus vehicles, which took us the 15-minute or so drive to the car park of Virgin Gorda baths.
The driver told us to be back at the drop-off point for 3pm, ready for the return ferry at 3.30pm, then left us to our own devices to explore the Baths national park.
We followed the signs along a narrow trail through the undergrowth, which winds its way through huge cacti and large bushes swarming with hundreds of butterflies.
Colourful lizards darted away off the path ahead of us as we made our way down to the beach, our first stop being ‘Devil’s Bay’.
Devil’s Bay is a small beach – our first experience on this holiday of a real Caribbean beach, with its white sand and clear turquoise water – and was an extremely welcome sight as the temperatures climbed under the hot sun.
We’d brought with us our full face snorkelling masks, and spent time swimming around looking at the tropical fish in the clear, warm water and climbing around the big rocks which form shallow pools of clear water at the edge of the bay.
After an hour or so here, we picked up our stuff and headed back along the pathway signposted to ‘The Baths’.
They aren’t actual baths, in the sense of being like natural springs or anything like that – they are pools of crystal clear, shallow, warm seawater formed by the placement of these enormous rocks.
The path takes you in and around little caverns, clambering up and down, through narrow gaps and up on top of the huge boulders.
It’s not overly difficult, but there is a bit of climbing down steep steps and having to crouch to get through small gaps, so you need to be able-bodied and agile enough to do so (though you can just visit the beaches if you’d rather not navigate your way through the baths themselves).
Eventually the path exits the boulders / baths to another classic Caribbean sandy beach – this one with a bar selling food and drink and more places to sit or lay in the sun.
Here is where we stayed for the rest of the day, snorkelling, swimming and sunbathing and enjoying our first taste of the Caribbean, after the previous full day at sea on board Arvia.
As 3pm approached, we made the 5-minute walk back up to the car park, where the Speedy’s Ferries bus was waiting for us.
A very enjoyable ferry crossing back over to Tortola in the setting sun took us right alongside Arvia, with plenty of opportunities to photograph the incredible ship against the backdrop of Tortola’s lush green hillsides.
By 4.30pm we were back on board, pleased we’d managed to make our own way over to Virgin Gorda in a very easy and stress-free way.
If you’re looking for an easy independent shore excursion to plan yourself, then Tortola to Virgin Gorda is ideal – with the transport links within easy reach of the port and the whole process needing little more than a short walk to the ferry terminal and a few tickets purchased from the clearly signposted ticket office.