Cruises To St Croix

One of the best ways of visiting St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands is on a Caribbean cruise. If you take one of the many cruises to Saint Croix, you will get a taster of half-a-dozen Caribbean ports of call, so that you can go back and spend longer on your favourite island the following year.

Cruises To St Croix

Cruises to St Croix leave Miami and about a dozen or so other ports on the south-east coast of the United States. Prices vary considerably, depending on how long your cruise is for (three to fourteen days), how new the cruise liner is, the time of the year and which islands it visits.

In fact, cruises to St Croix are just starting to come out of the doldrums because of a bout of crime in 2004. Despite that, St. Thomas is one of the most popular passenger cruising destinations in the eastern Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands as a whole is very popular too, especially with Americans, because the U.S. Virgin Islands is a legal part of the United States.

Cruises to beautiful Saint Croix make a shore excursion at historic Frederiksted, which is the only sea port capable of receiving large ships, although it is only the second largest town on the island.

Frederiksted is a several hundred year old Danish colonial town, which has undergone extensive renovation in recent years in an attempt to raise its international reputation as a holiday destination, or at least as a cruise ship port of call.

Frederiksted and St Croix in general had always been popular, but Saint Croix did not rely on tourism as much as the two other main islands. So when the global economy turned down and industry started laying people off, some Crucians turned to mugging visitors.

This problem has been recognised and and the local government has picked up the slack in unemployment by instituting public renovation works. The result has been fantastic: the town looks better and the crime rate has fallen.

It will take a while for cruise liners to divert from St. Thomas and go back to St Croix, but the signs are that it will balance out again because St Thomas is getting up to six cruise liners in a day in the high season and that is just too many 'foreigners' in a small town at one time. I am sure that cruises to St Croix will pick up again.

When you land at Frederiksted, pick up a free town map from the information centre on the pier and walk off the pier into the town. You may decide to leave discovering the town until the evening in which case you can take a taxi to the island's nearby capital, Christiansted.

There is more to do and see in Christiansted, but you could leave that until after lunch too and take a tour a few miles along the coast or into the 'interior'.

Whatever way you decide to spend your day ashore on your cruise to St Croix, you will not regret it, although it may be wise not to venture too far off the beaten track unless you are in a group for safety reasons.

I am sure that the tide has turned for Santa Cruz and that dream cruises to St Croix will once again become as popular as ever they were because St Croix is one the most beautiful vacation islands in the Caribbean - it is America's own little luxury paradise.