We're in Miami BITCH!

Welcome to Miami… or, as I like to call it, the Armpit of the United States.

Here we spent a week of our lives that we will never get back. We should have known to change our plans the minute we missed the flight in Las Vegas. Obviously the universe was trying to tell us something, “Don’t go to this shit-hole”. We should also have taken heed from other people’s reactions. Every time I mentioned that we were going to Miami, people looked at me as if I had just asked them to lend me their uterus, followed with a long whiny “WHYYYY?”.

We thought Miami would be fun. I mean, it’s MIAMI BITCH! Sounds great right? WRONG!

The town is filthy and disgusting. There’s no arts or culture at all – just drinking and partying. Lucky for us, we also arrived just in time for Spring Break. Thank goodness, because we were worried that there would not be enough drunken teenage idiots in town, but the Spring Breakers took care of that one.

Yes, that's a margarita and two beers. Classy!

We did get off to a very bad start here – first we missed the flight, THEN we arrived at our hotel at about 23h00 in the evening. The Princess Ann on Collins Ave. The most disgusting place on earth!

It's like Hotel California... you can check out but you can never leave...

 Our room was tiny and dank. There was black mound in the air-conditioning unit, rising damp throughout the room, mold in the cupboards, filthy crawling carpets, windows held shut by broken pieces of wood – we managed to get the window open, only to be met with the lovely view of the garbage dumpster out back. To top it all off, we had the lovely aroma of urine (not ours) wafting about the room.

We decided to go out and have a drink – hopefully the room wouldn’t seem as bad under the influence of 10 or so margarita/martinis.

Not even the uber-huge margarita could ease our pain

The restaurant had a pool above the dance floor - this was pretty cool.

 Drinking didn’t work. Naturally we couldn’t stay here for fear that the bed bugs might steal our luggage. So we asked to be moved to a different room.

The new room was a little better – the urine scent was not quite as strong, and the room was much cleaner - even though the refrigerator looked like someone had smeared pooh all over it, and put out about 60 cigarettes on the door. So we decided to turn in for the night, with the view of finding new accommodation the next day.

Morning came, and we decided to try and stick it out in Chateau Crappo for a bit.

We went for a little stroll about town. We were staying in South Beach, which is the Historic Art Deco district. If you can overlook the filth and vomit on the side of the road, you can really appreciate the beautiful Art Deco buildings.

THE Versace mansion where it all went down. Recently sold for $50mil!

 

I will say one good thing – at least – the beaches here are quite beautiful. With long, white sandy beaches and turquoise blue waters, and thousands of hopeless, plastic, wannabes cluttering and spoiling the area.

We also rented a bicycle for the day, and rode up and down the esplanade, which was a fun and pretty ride.

Our rental bikes. FUN!

After three nights at Chateau Crappo, we decided we couldn’t take it anymore. So we checked out, and booked ourselves into the Chesterfield Hotel across the road. Ah! This was much better. Extremely clean and ultra modern rooms, fabulous décor, a bar in the lobby, flat-screen TVs and iPod docks in every room. FAB! 

Except for one minor, itty bitty little detail which no-one mentioned before we checked in… The lobby and bar area becomes a CLUB at night – from at 17h00 to 05h00 every day!! The iPod docks in the rooms also meant that guests could play their own music in their rooms too, as loudly as they wanted. 

Yay us! We moved from Disgusting Hell on Earth, to NOISY Hell on Earth. Way to go! This holiday just keeps getting better!

Our room in the Chesterfield

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Anyway, we could deal with the noise – mainly by drinking our body weight in cocktails at night to make sure we would be out the minute our heads hit the pillow at night.

Mmmm, dirty martinis!

We decided to take a tour of Miami. This tour consisted of a coach city tour, a boat tour of the harbor, and a tour to the Everglades. We booked it through Half Price tickets. If you ever go to Miami, DO NOT BOOK ANYTHING THROUGH THEM!

We started off with the city tour – in a bus which was about as comfortable and clean as a prison cell on Alcatraz. The seats were broken, the windows were filthy, with anti-glare on them which meant you couldn’t see out of them – not sure how effective this tour company thought this would be – if they even think about anything at all. From the minute we stepped onto the bus, it was evident that the city tour was going to be pointless, so I sat back in my little seat and had a little nap.

I did wake up for our brief stop in Little Havana. This area has the highest concentration of Hispanics in Miami - so named after Havana in Cuba as it is home to many Cuban immigrants.

We went to a local cigar maker to see how they make Cuban cigars –rolled by hand. We had a little shot of Cuban Coffee, and walked around the town for a bit, before hopping back on the bus for the next leg. 

 

 Next up was our tour of the Miami Harbour and islands. We got onto the little boat, only to be told that the tour guide was off sick, and that the taxi driver would be handling the tour. HELLO?? WTF am I paying for??

Anyway. Despite our tour-guide-taxi-driver and his lack of information, the ride was quite enjoyable as the islands and waters are beautiful, so it was nice to relax on the ride and take in the sights.

We saw dolphins in the harbour!

Dolphin!

Fisher Island - where all the rich people live. You can only get onto the island by boat, and if you have a personal invite from a resident

The house from Scarface

Elizabeth Taylor's house - the rabbit in front was a gift from Michael Jackson

Frank Sinatra's house

This house belongs to the dude who invented Viagra. It's the biggest house on the island

Apparently this is Barbra Streisand's house... but I think it's too ugly to be hers...

We came across this little tug boat... only something as gay as this could come from Canada....

It was now time for our Everglades tour. So we boarded our bus – The Death-Trap-On-Wheels – for our 60min drive to the Everglades National Park. Did I mention that the bus had no air-conditioning? Yes! So you can imagine how much FUN this drive was!!

We arrived at the Everglades, drenched in sweat and feeling light-headed from heat-stroke, ready for our ride on the air-boat!

This proved to be the most enjoyable part of our Miami holiday. The air-boats were SO MUCH fun! Driving out at high speeds into the Everglades to go Alligator spotting was so awesome!

Little terrapins

This is fun!!

Ooo! A 'gator!

Looking for swamp folk!

We had to wear earplugs because the motor was so loud

 

WTF is that?

 By now we only had two days left in Miami – thank god! We decided to take a bus out to Key West for a day.

 This was about a 4 hour bus ride, over all the Keys, right to the tip of Florida – naturally we booked this through a different tour company.

We were in town for the St Patrick’s Day celebrations! So there were loads of Green tourists around, making quite a festive experience.

World's Smallest Bar

 

Hemingway house

I LOVED Key West. It was so relaxing just walk around this beautiful historic town. Sit on the lovely white beaches and have a couple of drinks before heading back to the Spawn of Satan that is Miami.

On our last day, we decided to rent a car and drive to Fort Lauderdale for the day. Liesl used to live here, so we were going to visit all her old haunts, as well as meet up with a couple of her friends.

Fort Lauderdal was amazing. So pretty and calm and refined – compared to Miami.

We arrived in time for lunch, had a bit to eat and then went to the beach for a couple of hours – mainly to catch up on sleep seen as we weren’t getting much of that at our Hotel-Club.

 In the early evening we headed out to the Marina to meet up with Liesl’s peeps.

Mark, Liesl and Melinda

Nancy, Liesl and Buddy

There were loads of beautiful yachts, and cruise ships docked.

Then we went for drinks at marina café – which was overlooking THIS:

This is MASSIVE!

This is the biggest fucking private yacht I have ever seen. The pictures don’t do it justice. I really can’t describe the size and splendor of this thing – it was so big we couldn’t get all of it into a photo!

It’s so big, it has a boat on board the boat! The entire thing is 6 levels, and each cabin has it’s own private sunning deck – the side of the boat opens up at each cabin into the ocean. So you can dive out the side of the boat, have a swim and get straight back into your cabin. Just beautiful. I want one!

 

Naturally, Liesl and were speculating as to who this floating mansion must belong to… Someone really rich! 

Yeah, it belongs to Steven Spielberg.

Steven Spielberg is really rich

 That was our last day in Florida (Miami). We had a 7am flight the next day to New York. Thank god this part of the holiday was finally over! (or was it?!)

When we got back to Miami, we packed our bags, and went out for dinner. We planned to wake up at 4am, so that we could check out ASAP and just go hang out at the airport until our flight – that’s how desperate we were to leave!

So in the morning, I woke up, ready to leave, only to notice that it was 06h00!!!! Our flight was due to leave at 07h00, and we were nowhere near the airport! The fucking alarm didn’t go off – or if it did, we didn’t hear it!!

So we, once again, missed our flight!!!!!!!! Words cannot describe how upset and irritated we were by this point. I actually thought I was going to throw myself out of the window. Not only do we now have to book new flights, BUT we have to spend MORE time in disgusting Miami!

Anyway, we managed to get onto the next available flight, which was in the afternoon. So by 14h00, we were, at last, on our way to New York City – FREEDOM!!

xxx