The short little 5-day cruise is now over, and I am back on terra firma. Instead of flying straight home after the cruise, I am spending a little more time in Fort Lauderdale. Thank you, Hilton Honors loyalty programme. Five nights in a beach-front resort for free, including free internet and free breakfast, is a pretty decent deal.
And then there's the location: right smack on the beach, backing onto the Intracoastal Waterway, a ten minute drive from the airport or cruise port, and a 5-minute or less walk to the Water Taxi. These pictures give you the idea of the Bahia Mar by Doubletree, viewed from my top-floor room: the panorama from the tennis courts, and the second-floor pool deck and outdoor bar and café...
...to the low-rise south wing...
...and finally to the beach.
With all these places joined by overhead footbridges, you never need to dodge the crazy drivers on the waterfront to get to the sand, or the walkway, no matter which part of the resort you are coming from. Win-win situation in my mind. And in this view, a spectacular shot of Fort Lauderdale....
...in which, when you zoom in, you find no less than five cruise ships hiding between the high-rises. That's Port Everglades, the busiest single cruise port in the world by passenger numbers.
And then there's the location: right smack on the beach, backing onto the Intracoastal Waterway, a ten minute drive from the airport or cruise port, and a 5-minute or less walk to the Water Taxi. These pictures give you the idea of the Bahia Mar by Doubletree, viewed from my top-floor room: the panorama from the tennis courts, and the second-floor pool deck and outdoor bar and café...
...to the low-rise south wing...
...and finally to the beach.
With all these places joined by overhead footbridges, you never need to dodge the crazy drivers on the waterfront to get to the sand, or the walkway, no matter which part of the resort you are coming from. Win-win situation in my mind. And in this view, a spectacular shot of Fort Lauderdale....
...in which, when you zoom in, you find no less than five cruise ships hiding between the high-rises. That's Port Everglades, the busiest single cruise port in the world by passenger numbers.
The problem: what to do on the day the cruise arrives when they boot you out of your cabin by 8:00am and off the ship as soon as possible thereafter? (That's so they can get ready for the next 3,000 sucke..., I mean guests, who will be arriving by noon). There are a selection of debarcation tours available, which take you from the ship, show you some sights, and drop you off at the airport by 1:30pm, in time for later-in-the-day flights. These tours are also great for those staying on locally.
The tour I picked focused on the environment of the Everglades (yup, we're back out there to the River of Grass again!). On the bus, our tour guide shared this interesting statistic: in the last 20 years, the alligator has dropped from # 1 predator in the Everglades to a distant # 4 place. The reason is human stupidity, although it isn't humans doing the predation.
The problem is idiotic people who illegally import "exotic" animals as pets, and then have to get rid of them when the little darlings get too big to handle. The fools who dumped their Burmese pythons and such into the Everglades probably congratulated themselves on their cleverness, but there were enough pythons to mate and breed copiously, and no animal big enough to tackle them. Result: the pythons are now the rulers of the river. They're quite big enough to kill a small alligator, or anything else that crosses their path, and swallow it whole.
Our first stop was an airboat ride, and the captain of our boat told us that he also works as a volunteer on a project to try to sterilize the pythons. They're having some success, but it's going to be a long struggle. I just hope they can stop the giant pythons before everything else in the Everglades gets killed by them. At any rate, during our short ride into the Everglades we didn't see any pythons, but we did see a huge variety of water-based plant life, birds, Colombian iguanas (another exotic pet nuisance animal), and one wild alligator.
From the airboat, we drove on to the Flamingo Gardens -- and sure enough....
But there's a lot more to the Gardens than just flamingoes. Originally a private estate and tropical botanical garden, it has expanded scope to become a free sanctuary for wild birds, and also a refuge and safe haven for birds and animals which have been too severely injured to be able to survive in the wilderness -- a similar role to that played for marine life by the famous Clearwater Aquarium. Here are a few examples which I saw during the free hour for walking about the Gardens which our tour allowed for us.
As well, there are dozens of free-roaming ibis -- and they're pretty aggressive about food. If you sit down to eat at the outdoor snack bar, arm yourself first with a squirt bottle from the counter. The pesky critters know. Just aim it at them and they will run the other way. And there are other free-roaming birds of a decidedly more beautiful character.
I have no personal experience to draw on, but I've been told that the peacock is one of the most ornery and unpredictable birds alive, and also has a shatteringly raucous squawk which ill accords with the graceful elegance of its plumage. Just as a by-the-way note, the correct generic term for this species is peafowl. The male is the peacock, the female the peahen, and the children are known as peachicks or (in some regions) as peabiddies. I've also been reliably informed that when the peacock unfurls his spectacular tail plumage for his mating dance, any nearby peahen is just as likely to go on pecking in the dirt for food, completely ignoring the gorgeous colours of the fan waving at her.
Living the life on the beachfront in Fort Lauderdale, after a final tour from my cruise that took me back into the Everglades and to a wildlife park where I encountered more distinctive specimens of bird and animal fauna native to south Florida.
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