South Beach, Miami at 8pm on a Sunday night in a stylish townhouse and I'm surrounded by snoring people who have made it through 36 hours before succumbing to sleep. Today is my friend Jason's birthday; we began the celebration at midnight, went out dancing until about 5am and then went skinny dipping in the tepid Atlantic, at which point I came back to sleep but the others stayed to watch the sunrise with a bottle of champagne and ended up spending the day on the beach. The weather was difficult to ignore: although it is the middle of winter, it was a gorgeous day - just warm enough for swimming, but further pleasantly mild.
Before I arrived, almost all of my knowledge of Miami came from the 80's TV series Miami Vice. I haven't seen much of the city itself, but South Beach could have come straight out of the series: a mixture of pretty beaches with clear blue water, white and pastel art deco architecture, elegant cafes, endless tattoo parlors, houses straight out of the pages of architecture magazines and porn parlours - and that all on one city block. The streets are populated by an amicable mix of tourists, bikers, skateboarders, cubanos and muscle men. South Beach itself is on an elongated island reachable from the mainland by a series of bridges; like Manhattan, it feels like the distance from the mainland USA is much further than the lengths of those bridges.
Tomorrow, Jason and I are meeting Stacey and heading into the Everglades for a three day kayak tour
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