The Never Everglades

The tour kicked off to a fantastic start by being about late. Whilst I had been waiting for the tour bus to arrive at my hotel and pick me up, I noticed a number of flashing police lights in the far distance. I found out very soon there had been a gang-related drive-by shooting early that morning. As a consequence a number of streets were locked down (and for well over 48 hours!) and traffic was extremely heavy due to makeshift detours.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDs-Wp_TN2c to see shooting footage.

The drive itself to the Everglades isn't very exciting. As seen on TV, you travel along a vast highway network which from an aerial view (like the helicopter view in those police chase shows) look very impressive but when driven, are very very very boring. I even fell asleep at some parts. I did take random photos to show people on the bus that I was alive at some point during the drive.

BK HQ

Cruise ships docked in their... docking area

The dome looked interesting. I think it's a stadium

 After about an hour of driving we arrived at the Everglades Safari Park. We were to go on an air boat ride through the canals in search of alligators, followed by an alligator show.

Docked air boat at the safari park

The air boat novelty was pretty cool. It reminded of Police Academy 5. As a 9 yr old, I remember two things from that movie: one was that you could write rude words on undesired people's foreheads in sunscreen so that when they went to tan, DORK would be appear. The second thing I remembered was a bad guy chase through the Everglades on the air boat. I wasn't expecting the same type of reckless rampaging through a protected park but it would have been fun. 

View down the canal

Due to the dry season, the canals that we would have cruised along were above the sea level. We literally went up and down one canal. Some alligators were spotted so all was not lost. Surprisingly I thought it would smell swampish because of how it looked. It turns out that the Everglades is not actually a swamp but it is an extremely slow moving river.

Everglades banks

Can you see the baby alligators?

After getting off the boat, I met Justine from Perth who was also on her own. Only thing was that she was on her own in Miami till Thursday and then off to the Carribbean for 3 weeks. So so so lucky! We watched the alligator show and wandered around the park together until it was time to leave. For $3 I became a proper tourist and had my photo taken with Snappy, the resident 3 yr old alligator. 

Justine and I decided to spend the rest of the day at the beach so when we arrived back at South Beach, we promptly had lunch. Lunch was super disturbing as a bunch of drunken loud black chicks thought it would a good idea to start grinding this fellow black guy. They proceeded to pour their cocktail all over his head and then two of the girls started licking the liquid that had dribbled down his neck. For the record, one of the girls had a HUGE dimply stretchmarked ass. Ew. At some point some other random guy thought it was all fun and started tossing 1 dollar notes on the ground. Animals groped for the notes, picking it up and stuffing in places where strippers would store stripper dollars and would go even more wilder with their booty grinding. 

Afterwards Justine was saying that the expression on my face was gold. I apparently had a look of disbelief and distate on my face but it was like a train wreck - I couldn't look away! As a result I would study my salad intensely, look up at the girls and then study my salad again as though nothing was happening.

We also ended up getting rorted with the 2 for 1 drinks. To compensate, the restaurant charges one drink at $35 so even though our meals were less than $10, the bill came out to be about $90. No wonder the prices weren't on the drinks menu! There was a cigar seller nearby so we bought an el cheapo $5 cigar to try out later that evening. What rebels.

After all the excitement we finally got to the beach. It was awesome fun to just hang out there and feel safe and non-intimidated. We departed around 5.30ish so that we could freshen up and meet up for drinks and dinner around 7ish. 


Walking over to Justine's, I became caught at the start of a tropical outpouring of rain which ended just as abruptly as it started 20 minutes later. We lit up the cigar walking to dinner, took a few puffs, declared it nasty as hell and dumped it in a gutter. Luckily it was only $5.

S*%t going down during dinner

Ended up having dinner in a diner nearby as we declared ourselves grandmas and wanted an early night of 11pm. As we were eating, a whole squad of cops on pushbikes, followed by a police van and several cars came flying down the side street. Being seated outside we immediately stood up to see what was going on. It looked like a black van - you know, the ones with no windows that they use for kidnapping in movies - was being searched and two guys were being arrested.
I sculled my peanut butter milkshake, Justine downed her drink and we left our food (really dry chicken wings and I had spicy buffalo wings which considering my chilli tolerance, even I couldn't eat much of!) and had our early night.


The street was cordoned off so it meant having to go another way home.


I was kept up that night by the sounds of louts that were either coming or going to/from their room yelling down the hallway. Grrrrrrrrrr!