Disappointing trip to Harrison's Cave, Barbados

We like to visit caves when we're traveling, and we've been to quite a few. I don't think that we are cave snobs by any means, but we have been to the magical Kartchner Caverns in Arizona, and the huge Grutas de Garcia in Mexico. And we've done the wild cave tour in both Mammoth Cave, Kentucky and in South Africa. Among others.

So perhaps it is because of these past experiences that we were quite disappointed in Harrison's Cave.

But there's more to it.

Sure, the Harrison's Cave tour will show you some decent formations, but in order to see them you have to endure a Disney like tram tour that seems to have been designed to pack as many high paying cruise ship customers through the cave as possible.

And, perhaps that was their intention to begin with.

Harrison's Cave is owned and operated by the Barbados government. Back in 1974, they decided to commercialize the cave and make it accessible to the public. The plan included making several man made tunnels to access four or five of the attractions in the cave. They made the tunnels large enough to accommodate several electric trams at one time. The tunnels are much larger than the actual caves, although the cave system itself apparently goes on for about 2.3 kms. You don't get to see any of that though.

They spent a lot of money making the caves accessible to high numbers of visitors.

The grounds in the gully are very nice and lush!

We're not sure, but it looked like trams leave every ten minutes. First though, you sit through a 10 minute movie which we found interesting enough, but the video feed itself could be modernized. Very blurry picture at times.

Then, we were told to wait about ten minutes for the next tram.

Packed on to the tram. 

The first stop.

I'm actually surprised the photos turned out as well as they did. You're not given a lot of time to try and take decent photos, and often the tram will not stop at all... simply slow to a crawl. But with long exposure times, many photos will turn out blurry if you don't use a flash, and of course using the flash is often not the way to get a decent photo in a cave.

They call this the "village".

Stalactites.

There are two stops where you actually disembark from the tram. 

The waterfall.

The last stop was at a "waterfall". To me, it didn't look natural. And I found out later that it is not! Looks like someone simply turned a water hose on. In fact, for much of the cave it was difficult to tell what was real and what was man made. Definitely the most disturbed cave we have ever visited.

The tram tour is 50 minutes long and costs $60 BBD ($30 USD, $39 CAD) per person. Way overpriced in our opinion for this kind of tour. But, it's a free market and they have an endless supply of cruise ship passengers willing to pay the price. (Consider that the best public tour at Mammoth Caves costs $26 USD and lasts 4 hours...).

It's true that there are some interesting formations, and if you're a first time cave visitor you will probably find it informative. Or, if you are not very mobile, or disabled, this tour would be great for you. 

However for all others, unfortunately, we can't recommend this tour. Save your money for a real show cave.

There is though, some interesting vegetation in the gully outside the interpretive center...

They also advertise a Gully Walk Tour, but unfortunately it was closed and nobody knew anything about why it was closed, or when it would open, if ever.

There are wild monkeys in Barbados... approximately 14,000 green monkeys live here! They were brought from west Africa aboard slave ships in the 1600's. As were mongoose, which were brought here to control the rat population in the 1800's.

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