Caribbean Island Activities

• At the end of the day, enjoy a Caribbean sunset. Caribbean Sunset image by DPix Center from Fotolia.com

  The islands of the Caribbean are replete with attractions and activities for the young and young-at-heart. Water-lovers can spend an entire vacation on the beach, swimming, snorkeling, waterskiing and parasailing, while adventure enthusiasts can take a zip-line tour or try cage diving with sharks. The islands also offer historical attraction walking tours, shipwreck diving, hiking and interactive dolphin and sea lion programs.

Dolphin Cay

• Vacationers to the Bahamas can visit Dolphin Cay at the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island. The 14-acre marine habitat offers interactive dolphin, sea lion and stingray adventures, as well as a private beach for lounging around. Dolphin programs include a half hour shallow-water interaction, a deep-water swim and a trainer-for-the-day program where guests can take part in feeding, training and caring for the dolphins and sea lions that reside at Dolphin Cay. Sea lion programs include a one-on-one experience and a behind-the-scenes tour to learn about the care these mammals require. Visitors can also get in the water with hundreds of cow nose stingrays for feeding and petting. Finally, visitors can take a 60-minute guided snorkeling tour of Paradise Islands Ruin Lagoon, teeming with sharks, spotted rays and other tropical fish.

Zipline Tours

• Caribbean vacationers can go on a zipline tour through rainforests and over valleys on the islands. Visitors to Jamaica can travel above the treetops on more than a half-mile zipline canopy tour in Ocho Rios. The tour begins in the Cranbrook Flowering Tree Sanctuary and brings participants to heights of more than 325 feet above ground level. Throughout the two-hour tour, participants can enjoy views of the valley and forests below that have formed over millions of years. For vacationers in Antigua, the Antigua Rainforest Canopy Tour company offers two and a half hour zipline rainforest tours six days a week. The tour takes travelers over suspension bridges, using nine long ziplines, to heights of up to 350 feet in the air and down a 36-foot controlled vertical descent.

Shark Diving

• Many tour and diving operators in the Caribbean offer shark diving throughout the year. Visitors to the Bahamas can participate in a cage dive to see tiger sharks, reef sharks, hammerhead sharks and more, with the Incredible Adventures company. The program travels to Tiger Beach from the Old Bahama Bay Marina, where participants then spend the day on unlimited cage dives to see these creatures up close. No scuba certification is required for this program. The Waihuka Adventure Divers offer daily dives throughout the day that bring visitors face-to-face with reef sharks in Honduras. The sharks range in size between six and nine feet long and participants see a shark feeding during the dive, as well as other fish, including grouper, snapper and green moray eels. For a deeper look, visitors can travel aboard a commercial submarine to a depth of 2,000 feet in the Caribbean Sea`s Cayman Trench, located between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. From this vantage point, participants see deepwater 20-foot-long six-gill sharks which are usually at depths too great for scuba divers to see.