Around the States in Ninety Days: Day 60

Apologies

I feel I should start off my blog today (on my two thirds of the way through day!) with an apology - I've been doing my blog a little half heartedly for the past few days because I've been either driving insane hours or just feeling really pooped out. I have a lot to say, it just seems that by the time I get to a place with wifi it's generally a place with a bed and sleeping wins over fighting with my laptop.

Everglades

Today I spent the day in the Everglades National Park.

Mangroves

In keeping with local custom, even the visitor centre is pink and turquoise!

I have definitely lost my $80 annual National Parks pass (I spent hours checking all my stuff) but I convinced the hostel to let me use one of their passes so I didn't have to pay the $10. I'm going to have to think carefully about the National Parks that are left between here and the end of my trip and decide whether I should replace it.

Anyway, back to the Everglades. I started off by going on a Park Ranger led walk where he explained to us all about the park and the problems they are having trying to restore it to its natural state of forty years ago, before Florida's waters were all either drained or redirected to sugar plantations. They are also faced with a bunch of invasive creatures that people have dumped here, like pythons and all sorts of non-native fish.

I was lucky enough to see a bunch of alligators (the Ranger reckons we saw some of the biggest of the park's 1.5million) AND a crocodile. This is the only place in the world where those two species coexist, as one lives in fresh and the other in saltwater.

Can you see three alligators together in the middle of the picture?

This is the crocodile - the little gray thing between the parallel twigs

This is a guy taking a picture of the crocodile once I convinced him it was not a piece of floating rubbish (this was a corroborated by a local tour guide)

CROCODILE!! (just a picture of a poster, sorry)

Look how close it was to us!

I learned some cool stuff about alligators - did you know those bumps on their back are made of bone? Did you know that as they have no natural predators they normally die of starvation when they stop being able to grow teeth?

I also found out some cool facts about the local birds but I soon forgot because HELLO! there were ALLIGATORS nearby! Some of you may be interested in birdies though so here they are: