Tampa (Sunday)

Can you smoke a cigar backwards? I think I just have! Should have got instructions with these things! It seemed like a good idea at the time!

I caught a bus to the airport and picked up my little hire car. You can get great walk-in deals with hire cars, less than half of what I would pay if I pre-booked. Suzy gave me a great deal and she is from Peru so she gave me great advice on what to do when I get to Lima next week, including traditional foods and drinks, alcoholic and non-alcoholic. I can’t wait to get there. But for now I have to negotiate the American style of driving! It doesn’t start well as I try to get into the car via the passenger side rather than the driving seat (what hope is there for me)! Anyway I head off. I’m told it’s straight forward but it isn’t! I struggle to get it right at first and I’m following the instructions of a gps, which I’ve never used before. There is a lot of ‘recalculating’ coming out of the gps as I take the wrong turn and I swear each consecutive ‘recalculating’ comes with a more sarcastic tone than the previous as the journey continues! The voice has quite an attitude I think! I eventually get back to the hotel without incident. I want to visit an aquarium I have found on the tourist brochures that features manatees. Manatees are cousins to our beautiful dugong and this is their territory – fantastic. I set the gps and away I go. It’s about 80 kilometers away and the trip takes me onto some amazing skyways over water. These bridges are four lanes each way, eight lanes in all – just amazing. And miss gps has to do many sarcastic ‘recalculations’ before I eventually get to the aquarium. It is the Mote Aquarium, which is an active marine research centre started by a Mr Mote. Sarasota Bay is full of manatees, dolphins and many birds. They have two beautiful captive manatees in a large glass-walled aquarium. They are brothers and huge! Manatees are about twice the size of our dugongs and the obvious difference is in the tail. They have a large paddle-like tail. They rely on sea grass for food, a lot of seagrass!

Surprisingly they are sensitive to the cold so follow the warm waters around. The manatees here have found a consistent source of warm water all-year-round. The power stations purge heated water from their cooling towers into the bay so the manatees flick there during the winter. This change in their behaviour can be a problem because if for any reason the powered station shuts down for an amount of time, these manatees can die from cold.

I also do a narrated cruise around Sarasota Bay and Roberts Bay. We find plenty of dolphins and birds but no wild manatees. The water in these bays is shallow, only a couple of meters deep for most of it. The dolphins like it because there are no sharks. The human element is at the top of the economic scale with the water line solid with exclusive looking homes and private jetties, complete with boat hoists. Our guide takes us to some islands in the bay that are man-made from dredgings. Trees were planted there including a pine from Australia that looks like our casuarinas. Apparently they are now a pest and the guide scathingly attacked them. I kept very quiet.