Swamp things

It's been suggested to me that I'm not properly fulfilling my remit here. Never mind the academic stuff - what about the beaches? The rollerbladers? The vice? What about Disneyworld?

Well, all in time, apart from the last, but one's off the list now. Yesterday, I went to the Everglades, or a small part of it. The area designated as a national park is 2357 sq miles (the Lake District national park is 885 sq miles), so you can only take in a small part on a day trip. Of course, not that much of it is really accessible, being wild marshland, but anyway.

I went with a couple of philosophy grads and one of their friends, visiting from Estonia. The hour and a half drive from Miami impressed upon me just how flat Florida is (highest point: 345 feet). It reminded me of the Netherlands, or more precisely, those seventeenth century Dutch landscape paintings where the sky takes up three quarters of the canvas and accounts for most of the picture's expressive content and interest.

We stopped at Shark Valley visitor centre and hired bikes to take a 15-mile circuit along a wide asphalt road through part of the area called the Shark River Slough, or Sea of Grass. This is a formed by a vast, slow-moving flow of fresh water from Lake Okeechobee in the middle of the state to the south coast. The water spreads across and flows south down a flat limestone shelf about 40 miles wide, creating an enormous marshy plain. The swampy cliche of the Everglades is fulfilled in the south, but here and for much of the area, the landscape is covered by knee-high sawgrass (sedge) growing from the marsh, interspersed with 'hammocks', small raised areas of land on which scrubby clumps of trees grow. So as a landscape, it's open and fairly featureless.

The interest comes from spotting the beasties. There were plenty of beautiful flying insects, dragonflies and butterflies, an enormous variety of colours. There were several wading birds, herons and the like, and a wide -winged cormorant-like one that I later found out is called an anhinga. Floating in the thermals, we saw several raptors of some description, probably red-shouldered hawks, maybe ospreys. Also, a few turtles, swimming around in the water by the side of the track.

And, yes, alligators. Plenty of them, lying in the water about ten yards from us as we cycled by, the largest about seven feet long, the smallest a little six-inch baby that scurried off the road as we approached. They're obviously quite placid creatures, otherwise one wouldn't be allowed to get so close, but there's still an air of menace around them; that feeling that if they wanted to, they could have your leg for dinner.

We did the circuit in a couple of hours, finishing thoroughly soaked from the predictable 30C+ heat. We then went on a looping drive along a rough road that left the national park, but took us through a more wooded area of the Everglades. The dominant tree species was cypress - I think mangroves are more common in the south where the fresh water meets the salt. We saw, again, a couple of alligators, one slinking off the road in front of us, and a few racoons. At one point, we stopped and followed on foot a boardwalk about a mile into the woods, hoping to see some more big lizards, but got no reward except another couple of anhingas.

Still, some alligators is an improvement on my score of none till then, and it was good to get out of the city for a while. So, one item on the cliche list experienced and recorded. Next, Nick goes rollerblading. Maybe.