Today I decided to drive back down The Keys for an hour to a lingerie shop I passed last night. It specialises in larger sizes and swimwear. I spent ages in there trying stuff on and eventually ended up spending loads of money but I finally got some swimmers that fit (and the sales assistant did such a good job of selling me other stuff I probably didn’t need or want, but oh well). After that I then headed back to Florida City and onto the Everglades National Park.
The main visitors centre was huge so I had a quick look around and then headed into the Park. First stop: Royal Palm where there was a free ranger guided walk on. It went for 30 min and surprisingly, it wasn’t as good as I had expected. Interestingly though, it only drew a crowd of 10 people, yet there were at least 100 people there and the numbers dropped off as we moved further along the boardwalk, so not really that different to home. The USA Parks uniform is very impressive though.
After the talk was over, I continued on the Anhinga Trail boardwalk in its entirety. Saw a few Alligators and lots of birds – Anhinga’s and Great Egret’s mainly. Once I finished that, I then did the Gumbo Limbo Trail. Oh my goodness…how bad are the mozzies, and apparently this isn’t even mozzie season! I put loads of RID on but it didn’t do a great deal. I got eaten alive. Having said that, the bites come up and itch for several hours, but then they go away.
Along this walk I saw lots of lizards and one tree snail. They have like 600+ species of tree snails and they are big colourful snails that live on trees. Every island hummock of vegetation has its own sub species of snail, not found anywhere else except on that particular hummock and many of them have become extinct because snail collectors would collect some species and then burn the vegetation stand they were found on so no one else could get a specimen. Now I get why there is a Snail Kite here. The snails thankfully are a decent enough size to sustain a bird of prey.
From there I drove down to Pinelands, Pa-hay-okee Overlook, Mahogany Hammock and Flamingo stopping at all of them and doing the walks on offer. There is some really nice vegetation along the way and plenty of swampy land to glimpse Alligators and water birds and the odd turtle. From Flamingo it was starting to get dark so I started driving back and stopped at Long Pine Key to have a look at the campground and general setup for RV’s. I headed back into Royal Palm just on dusk to look for the Florida Panther but didn’t see any. I walked out on the Anhinga Walk again with my head torch and was completely inundated with insects. Thankfully they disappeared after about 15min. I did a bit of spotlighting in the dark and saw lots of Leopard Frogs and Southern Toads and Alligators. There was a lot just sitting on the waters edge and up on the banks. All I could think the whole time I was out there is that Mum would die if she saw me right about now! Once I left the walk I drove back slowly out of the park looking for snakes on the road. I saw a couple of dead ones and a couple of live ones – the Cottonmouth Water Moccasin, Eastern Garter Snake and a dead Eastern Diamond backed Rattlesnake.
I cooked rice for dinner and talked to a few guests at the hostel before heading to bed – only two of us in the room tonight. Thankfully there is an air conditioner because it is just so hot and humid inside. There was a fan as well, but I broke it, although I don’t know how but it stopped working after I touched it.
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