Welcome to Miami

You know that Will Smith song, Welcome to Miami? Well, I had it running through my head on loop the entire time I was there, despite the fact I'm not a big fan of the song.

Turns out, though, that Miami itself is pretty cool.

I ended up flying home through Miami because I couldn't find any reasonably-priced direct flights from Lima. All the cheaper ones involved a change somewhere, mostly in the US. So then I thought, how about a stopover in the US on the way home? Further investigation revealed that US budget airline JetBlue has Fort Lauderdale as its hub, and flies between there and Lima; and Norwegian Airlines has incredibly cheap flights between the US and UK. So I spent the money I saved by not flying direct in Miami, which was a much more pleasurable way of spending it!

Vizcaya

I had essentially two days and one night there, and tried to go for a mixture of things to see and do. First up, after an American breakfast of pancakes and bacon in a diner, was the Vizcaya Museum, a beautiful mansion built in the early 20th century by a very rich American called James Deering. Annoyingly they didn't allow pictures inside the house and it was a bit drizzly so my pictures outside in the gardens weren't amazing either, but it was well worth the visit. The place was stunning, each room themed with art and furniture sourced to fit the theme. It was a bit OTT but I really liked it.

After Vizcaya I headed to Little Havana, which was weird. Not Little Havana in and of itself, but because I'd just spent a month in a Spanish-speaking country. Now here I was in an Anglophone country and all the signs were in Spanish, and people were speaking Spanish on the street. The sense of slight displacement, exacerbated by an overnight flight the night before, was very odd.

Domino Park in Little Havana

Dinner was in yet another bit of Miami, the up-and-coming area of Brickell where there's lots of new development and some funky restaurants. I'd also just been paid by Rio 2016 had a Happy Hour cocktail with dinner and then went back to the hotel for a nightcap in the roof bar before crashing.

Day two dawned hot and sunny with no sign of the previous day's drizzle. Conscious that within 24 hours I'd be shivering in British November I donned shorts and a vest top and spent the day dodging the sun.

Wynwood Walls

Across the course of my trip I'd discovered that I really like street art. So when I read about the Wynwood Walls I added it to my list of Things To Do in Miami. Wynwood was a deprived area of the city and indeed still has a slight air of deprivation to it, but it is sprucing itself up largely thanks to street art. In the centre, there's a complex called the Wynwood Walls where street artists are invited to come and add their work to the walls. All around, other artists have decorated houses, shops and even the street furniture with vibrant colour. It was stunning.

Art at the Perez

To continue the art theme the next stop was the Perez Art Gallery. Compared to the cost of museums in South America the entry fee was a bit eye-watering for a relatively sparse gallery, but that said, I liked pretty much all the art in there. Sometimes modern art can be pretentious - I can never quite understand how a canvas of just one colour gets to be in a museum - but most of the Perez collection was nice to look at and thought-provoking. I especially liked a sort of video/audio installation where the artist had collected audio files of people speaking endangered languages.

After such a surfeit of art it was on to a bus - Miami has a great public transport system, which includes a free monorail - to go to Miami Beach. I'm not a massive beach person and felt I got my year's fill in Rio, but it was nice to see the beach and have lunch wave and people-watching.

Ocean Drive art deco

As well as a large golden beach Miami Beach is also where you go to see art deco buildings. I walked down Ocean Drive, a whole street of beautiful former hotels and apartment blocks which are now mainly restaurants. On a sunny Friday they were packed with people eating vast American portions and drinking the largest cocktails I've ever seen in my life. I was kind of tempted actually, but I'd planned dinner at a Miami Beach institution, Joe's Stone Crabs.

There's a weird little backstory to why I went for this. I have the full collection of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, a mixture of modern paperbacks and the 1960s hardbacks collected by my dad and his brothers when they were teenagers. I love them - they're totally of their time and there is a huge amount of misogyny and racism in several, but the stories are fast-paced and exciting. Anyway, in Goldfinger Bond goes to Miami and eats stone crabs (and pink champagne) at 'Bill's on the Beach' and thinks it's one of the best meals of his life. Bill's was apparently inspired by Joe's and I like crab anyway, so the thought of stone crabs appealed. And they were good; crab claws packed with meat followed by a slice of key lime pie. A quintessential Florida meal to finish off my day, walked off along the marina before I caught the bus back to downtown and a taxi to the airport. And that was my trip, done.

Miami Beach