Warning: Long Post, too much cool stuff to share A few weeks ago I sailed with Royal Caribbean for four days with stops in Key West and Cuba. The first stop in Key West was for about 6 hours and we did a bar crawl, booked via Royal Caribbean. My parents have become quite the regular cruisers these days and visited Key West a few months ago. Since we still had a few more hours to spend, we opted to go in the Hemingway House. Lets be real, I wanted to see the cats! I have plenty of photos to share. After boarding the ship in Key West, we made the short trip to Cuba to arrive early in the morning. The port is very small and limited in terms of what I was used to. Before we disembarked another ship pulled in next to us. We did attend the on ship information session the day before to get more information. I had done a fair amount of research prior but it was helpful to get more detailed information about customs from the cruise director. We purchased our visas through the cruise ship for $75 and they were given to us when we checked in at the Tampa port. A few panoramics from the boat and the customs area.Since we had booked a tour with Royal Caribbean we exited the boat in groups to go through customs together. We also exchanged our money in the customs building. It is recommended to take Euros or CAD to exchange instead of USD. I exchanged about $115 Euro, which was roughly $150 USD. The CUC is about $1 USD currently, however, many things are very cheap, like the rum which you can purchase for about 4-15 CUC's. Depending on how much you want to buy and how many taxi's you plan to take $150-$200 exchanged should be enough for one day. |
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