Coast to Coast ---------------------------------

August 01, 2004

Great drives: Coast to coast in 150 miles ... but watch out for the alligators
The Sunday Times
Jeremy Hart put on his best shades and took the coolest route across America, from Miami through the everglades to the white beaches of the Gulf of Mexico






Life doesn’t get much better. Sunshine FM or something similarly named is blasting Beyoncé out of the speakers in my BMW 645Ci convertible. The sun itself beats even harder, striking the white art-deco buildings of Miami’s cool South Beach.
This is the glamorous starting point for America’s other coast-to-coast drive. The main one — from the Atlantic to the Pacific — stretches for at least 3,500 miles and would take weeks to do justice to. This one is rather more suited to a short family fly-drive: at about 150 miles inlcuding detours it goes from the Atlantic coast across Florida to the Gulf of Mexico. There are beautiful beaches at each end, separated by mangrove swamps, alligators and airboat rides.

But Miami is a big attraction in itself. Crockett and Tubbs (the white-suited, Ferrari-driving detectives of the cult television show Miami Vice) are long gone but their style lives on. Deep tans and deep pockets still drive America’s Latino capital. Just look at the address book of A-list Miami inhabitants: J Lo, Anna Kournikova, Ricky Martin and Formula One’s richest old boy, Eddie Irvine.



Five minutes parked outside South Beach’s Ritz-Carlton hotel means five minutes of supercar fiesta. I count Ferraris (three), a Maybach, Hummers (six), a Lamborghini Gallardo, and blinged rapmobiles such as Cadillac Escalades and Ford Expeditions (eight). Miami car owners are like kids: they like things shiny.

However, my BMW is getting its share of attention. A brand-new four-seater convertible with cream leather, it ticks all the boxes for the perfect south Florida cruiser. Irvine has a convertible too — a late-1960s Mustang in red.

He is not only a new entry in The Sunday Times Rich List but one of the last of the playboy racers. Miami is his winter retreat and I meet up with him to get his take on its attractions. Irvine is not keen to mix with the Miami celebrity set. He prefers to hang out with a gang of expat Europeans, trawling the South Beach bars and then testing an electronic speed sign put up on Venetian Causeway, which links downtown to South Beach.

“It shows how fast you are going — 35, 45. I got the moped up to 69,” he brags as we head out for a night of mojitos and Cuban cuisine. It’s spring break this week. Miami is humming and Irvine is high on anticipation.

“There are girls everywhere, parties every night and a music festival all week. I haven’t slept much,” Irvine says. I feign sympathy. He is not looking for any. “Then during the day I am busy with my properties.”

Property is what has made Irvine worth around £150m and he can smell a deal. He bought the house of his near-neighbour Ricky Martin, the Latino singer, for cash at 25% less than the multi-million-dollar asking price, then demanded a further $70,000 off after a poor survey. However, when Martin’s estate agent spotted Irvine giggling, they refused.

“That smile cost me tens of thousands,” shrugs Irvine. The rest of the evening becomes a blur as with — and without — Irvine we hop in and out of South Beach’s top nightspots such as Mynt and Crobar.

Next day is road-trip time. “Where you going in that beautiful car?” demands the valet at the Ritz-Carlton. “The Everglades, then a beach,” I tell him. “Sounds a plan,” he smiles as I press a tip into his hand. “Have a nice day.”

The antidote to the night before is a stop at Miami Beach’s best coffee shop, David’s, a Cuban cafe where the espressos are the most heavenly anywhere in the world, including Italy. Cuba is only 90 miles off the coast of Florida and Miami has the second-biggest population of Cubans after Havana. The place throbs to the sound of its salsa, wafts in the aromas of its cuisine and dresses in its fabulous guayabera embroidered shirts.

Little Havana is bisected by 8th Avenue, which in a couple of minutes metamorphoses from giant dual carriageway to a thin ribbon of tarmac heading out into the Everglades. One moment I am at La Casa de las Guayabera buying a Cuban shirt, then I am out of the city and surrounded by mangroves on Highway 41, otherwise known here as the Tamiami trail (running from Tampa to Miami).

From the world of convenience stores and strip malls, driving into the Everglades National Park is like driving back in time. An airboat is the best way to see the region. Flat-bottomed for easy access to the parts where there is more mud than water, and powered by massive 425hp aero engines and propeller, the machines are the backbone of the tourist industry, zipping visitors swiftly past the alligators.

There are many roadside outfits along the Tamiami trail that run Everglade experiences and I jump in one. Ten minutes into the wilderness and our driver Dave shuts down the massive engine at the stern and we glide to a stop midstream.

“It’s easy to get lost back here,” he says, breaking the silence. “The best way to remember which way you are going is to look at the current. It only goes east and west. If there is no current I won’t go up that creek.”

Even in the bright sunlight of a Florida midday, the overgrown mangrove swamps and murky waters are eerie. The sudden flapping of a curlew or “Chokoloskee chicken” in the undergrowth, or the splash of a snake or alligator slithering into the brackish waters, is enough to turn your tanned skin goose-pimply.

Bisecting the waterway where we wallowed was a still tributary, its waters as flat as a mill pond. “I’ve found more alligators down there than most people will see in their lives,” boasts the driver. Sure enough, the water erupts into bubbles as a pair of alligators break the still surface.

Highway 41 divides a saltwater and freshwater environment, and most of the smaller roads through the Everglades run straight along the tops of levees. The local car of choice is a rusting 1970s sedan or pick-up, or a swamp buggy, a strange motorised platform with giant tractor-like tyres normally topped off with a group of gun-toting men off to hunt in the mangroves.

The only town of note in the region is the endearingly ramshackle Everglades City, a tiny conurbation of stilted houses occupied by fishermen and hunters who could be straight out of an Ernest Hemingway novel.

It is somewhere to visit but not necessarily to stay, especially as just a few miles beyond the western limits of the Everglades National Park the wilderness and the frontier life end at the coast as abruptly as they began back on Miami’s city limits.

It is not suburban gardens that border the swamps out west but four miles of white beaches on Marco Island, a former navy radar base and now a collection of smart homes, chic hotels and well-heeled people. This haven is certainly a world away from Everglades City.

It is a place where the roads are cleaner than the cars, where the sand is brushed spotless every morning and where the spectacular sunsets across the Gulf of Mexico are almost as predictable as the pina coladas.

SUNSHINE EXPRESS: THE TAMIAMI TRAIL

Location: the Tamiami trail (from Tampa to Miami) is the final section of Highway 41. The stretch between Miami and Marco Island includes most attractions and can be completed in a day.

Length: about 150 miles.

Ideal season: winter, as in summer humidity and mosquitoes can be a real problem.

Highlights: cruising down the art-deco boulevards of Miami’s South Beach, alligator-spotting on an Everglades airboat ride, beautiful white Gulf of Mexico beaches.

For more information: Visit Florida, the state’s privatised tourism agency, is at www.flausa.com/ 001 850 488 5607, or in London on 020 7932 2406
Image Unavailable, Please Login