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DESTINATION USA
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iami feels, sounds, perhaps thinks like a movie set. Which movie? Let’s take Scooby Doo. In Miami you are in the middle of the set of Scooby Doo, and there is a Shaggy at every corner. Journeys along the seafront bring you through places so familiar that you feel like grabbing the remote control. The Art Deco buildings that were decaying in the opening sequence of A Scarface have all been restored to make them look gleaming and new like this was the 1920s again. The trip by bridge and causeway through the implausibly blue harbour makes you wonder if the technicolour people have been working overtime. In the evening the effect is exaggerated. A group of lawyers haggle for the pool table, cocktails and beers are downed and the conversation is lively with promise. Oceans breezes, Sunburns, Passion Pits, Passion Pits, King Kongs, Goombay Smashes, Electric Bananas, Planter’s Punches, Bushwhackers and the ubiquitous Mojito in its many manifestations. Miami was transformed in the 1980s into the sot of place all of us like to escape to. It was transformed, not by the guys who fly planes or design holiday brochures, but by the movie and TV companies.
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Miami advice Eoghan Corry dons Don Johnson the stubble and heads west Eoghan Corry meets a finned friend in Miami Seaquarium
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here is one mustdo in town. Miami Seaquarium offers a “swim with dolphins” experience whose memory will stay with everyone who has ever done it. Catch the fin and hold on, the world whips by. The dolphins were born in captivity, the defence against animal rights activists who decry
light BA845 departed Dublin Airport on time, my first time on BA’s Dublin to Heathrow service since their return to the route last summer. The airline gets tons of business from Ireland, about 500,000 transfers through Heathrow each year and since their takeover of BMI the livery can be seen here once more. T5 in Heathrow is a sea of calm, and the spacious business class lounge busy. T5 is like an airport in itself, with its own train to the satellite where we join flight B208 on gate C22.
the up close dolphin experiences. The names are Disnified, dolphins called Echo, Croix, Zoe and Cobalt are introduced by a trio of handlers, Shannon, Jenny, and Cristen. The complex offers fish, sharks, sea turtles, birds, reptiles, and manatees, water shows and the performing fish that you find in the big-buck wa-
terparks across Florida, California and a few other states. But the swim with dolphins experience is what we have come for. They robe you in blue wetsuits, and bring you to a pod where the dolphins are enticed to come round and inter-act with the next batch of paying guests, $139 per adult, $99 per child.
The park has been running since 1955. They say that getting tourists to play with dolphins named Croix helps fund their conservation efforts elsewhere. It too was a movie set, for Flipper. “Do not hit, bite, scratch or kick the dolphins” say the instructions before we begin. This is Miami after all.
GETTING THERE: BA & AA
BA’s business class orientates its seats opposing each other and that is where I find myself on flight BA 208 on a plush two year old Boeing 777 with the chance to bed down fully flat, after indulging in the food. Starters are crayfish on brown rice salad with pumpkin. Leading the choice of four main courses is beef or salmon. That’s not what they call it. The beef is Hereford fillet with béarnaise sauce, the salmon is Scottish seared salmon with lobster sauce. There is also gnocchi bake and roasted cornfed
chicken with pistachio. Dessert is triple chocolate delice or Barber’s cheddar, washed down by 2008 Château Clos Magne Figeac or Sebastian Pinot Noir from Santa Maria Valley. We make good time over the Atlantic but it is all swallowed up again in the dull regimented boredom of a two hour queue for immigration at Miami airport. Immigration queues are a worldwide hazard. It is just that America’s tend to be longer and extremely poorly managed, with an air of menace among the offi-
cials that is in stark contrast to the humour of the customers, many of them tired and overheated. A man in front of me is wrongly accused of jumping the queue pulled out and humiliated by a snarling official. Another person who complains they are in danger of missing a connection is presented to the police by an official who, again wrongly, complains that he was “trying to pick a fight.” And these are the Europeans – the South Americans get much worse treatment. There HAS to be a better way.
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he further north you go, the more southern it gets, Frank Shena a local tour guide tells us. His brief summary of Florida politics is a highlight of the tour that takes in the planned parklands and art deco architecture of Coral Gables, the scattered little streets of the displaced at
By evening all the discomfort is forgotten amidst the warm sun and the cold beer. Funny how that ALWAYS happens. America is a fabulous country with some of the warmest hospitality and the rudest gatekeepers on the planet. I sample a new airline on the way back, business class in American, who are flying daily from Dublin to JFK this summer. Their lounges do not compare with BA’s, even at their Miami hub but the noise cancelling headsets are the coolest earpieces I have sampled in my airborne lifestyle.