After meeting up with Dick Cheney and negotiating our exit from Miami (a long, arduous experience that does not need spelt out as it involves too many toll roads and expletives), we headed south to the Everglades National park - specifically Shark Valley. We've always wanted to go to the Everglades - and had really hoped to make it here during our last expedition - because it's the only place in the world where crocodiles and alligators naturally co-exist. The Everglades are massive wetlands covering a large chunk of southern Florida - they used to be a lot bigger, but the growth of nearby cities, as well as a misguided drainage project started in the early 1900s substantially reduced the Everglades. These days many people are dedicated to their survival - as well as the survival of the many species of wildlife that live there - plants, birds, reptiles and animals, including herons, egrets, otters, crocodiles, alligators, snakes and panthers. We spurned the tram ride and instead rented a couple of fixie bikes and biked the 24 kms of loop road through Shark Valley.
Within thirty seconds of hitting the road, we saw our first alligator. He was basking in the sunshine a mere three metres from us. No wall, no moat, nothing between us. Excuse the slightly blurred photo, I didn't really want to stop.
By the end of our bike ride, we'd passed dozens of alligators, most of them were right next to us and some of them were massive. We also saw countless big turtles, a hawk hunting and ultimately eating a baby snake as well as many beautiful birds. The Everglades was awesome and a major highlight.
We followed our bike ride with a short drive. It would have been a long drive, but the recent rain storms had washed out a number of the back roads we wanted to take, and we were uneasy putting Dick Cheney up to the task so early in our relationship, especially given the 'Danger Panthers' signs and the alligators we saw chilling out roadside. So we headed back to the main highway and turned south. Another major highlight soon followed - sunset over the Florida Keys. Just us, miles of road skipping from island to island, a rainbow coloured sky that looked just like the cocktails we were planning on drinking and the Beach Boys singing Kokomo on Dick Cheney's sound system. We dotted from Key to Key, all the way down to the bottom - Key West. Just in time for a festival, as it turned out. So we checked into our hotel and Ray, our friendly hotel attendant, sent us out to Goombay - the weekend festival that kicks of Fantasy Fest - Key West's slightly more grown up Halloween celebration, involving beer and occasional nudity and a little bit of gay pride for good measure. It was lots of fun to watch in short bursts, but the hangovers the next day would have been nasty, so we contented ourselves with some local beer, live music and a bit of seafood chowder.
The next day was a Key West special - sunny, calm and not too humid. We wandered through the local cemetery, famed for its examples of Key West local humour - the resident hypochondriac whose tombstone reads 'I told you I was sick', the cynic's 'I shall miss my so-called friends', the odd 'I'll be back' and the wife's choice 'At least I know where he's sleeping tonight'.
At the local French bakery we had a chat with a very cool, shaggy haired middle-aged English bloke who spends three months a year living in Key West, and he looked really, really familiar. We have a sneaking suspicion he was an aging rock star, but can't figure out which one (he's definitely not a Rolling Stone). Then to Ernest Hemingway's Key West house. He lived there with his second of four wives - the house was really hers more than his, as she inherited it - he had a habit of leaving one wife for the next. The house is beautiful - situated right next to the lighthouse, so Hemingway could easily find it on his way back from the pub, features the Keys' first swimming pool, a toilet right next to a window so Hemingway could wave to his friends as they passed, as well as 44 cats, all descended from Hemingway's favourite - Snowball, the six-toed cat, and around half of which have six toes themselves. As a keen sports fisherman, Hemingway subscribed to the sailors' superstitious love of six-toed cats. It was at this house that Hemingway wrote around 70% of his works, including A Farewell to Arms (but not The Old Man and the Sea, written in Havana).
Then a walk along the Waterfront, through Mallory Square and back to our hotel - we'd planned on doing a bit of laundry but a series of unfortunate events lead to nearly two hours lost in the launderette. Tempers flared (mostly mine. Mark was his usual calm self). Short swim, quick shower and off for a romantic dinner on a wide veranda of an old villa on Duval Street, surrounded by fairy lights, with a good view of the shenanigans going on by the barely clad festival goers, but no too close either. We jumped aboard the Ghost Train at 9pm, for a ghoul-filled history of Key West. Its past as a godless, yellow-fever infested pirate haven made for some great stories. The best two were definitely the story of the guy who fell in love with a tuberculosis sufferer on her last legs as he was giving her radiation treatment, who then stole her dead body and hid it all over Key West until the chase was up seven years later (her current burial plot is unknown, leading many to believe he stole her body again before his own death), as well as the story of Robert The Doll - a three and a half foot sailor doll - he's roughly the size of a four year old - whose creepy history inspired Chucky, and the Child's Play films. We met Robert at a creepy dark museum that night - he's a beautiful, eerily calm looking doll, with a wall of testimonials and apologies form people who didn't follow his rules when they met him, who then had a series of mostly harmless if somewhat creepy events befall them.
We were really sad to leave Key West the next day. We both agree that given the opportunity (and the cash), we'd happily live in one of its picturesque wooden villas and beautiful climate.
No comments:
Post a Comment