Day 290 – Miami
Party City
I was rudely woken up at 4am to music still thumping from the Voodoo Club downstairs. The music only stopped at 5am! This was definitely the downside of sleeping in the party district of Miami Beach. We were surprised that we could even sleep, but it must have been the jet lag.
After a few more hours of hanging out at Blue Ocean Hostel, we decided to get out of bed. Despite having 10 other people in the dorm, everyone else must have partied late into the night, because we were the only ones up.
Car rentals on the Main Strip 
We had breakfast at a small café called Las Olas Café. We have actually been noticing a lot of people spoke what we assumed was Spanish, more than English here.
Miami Beach
After breakfast, we walked through South Pointe Park towards the Pier. In the early morning, the streets felt like walking around Melbourne. The streets were pretty empty on this Sunday morning. However, the average size of the cars felt massive. Even a Toyota Camry looked massive. We think it’s since the cars in the Middle East and Asia are typically tiny.
Once we made it to the famous Miami Beach, we were impressed. It honestly reminded us of the Gold Coast back in Australia. A massive beach front, with overlooking apartment buildings (albeit it, shorter buildings than on the Gold Coast). Despite the roads being empty, the beach wasn’t. The water was shallow for around 10-20 meters, making it very family friendly. Several life guard towers were also visible along the beach.
I’m impressed.
My wife
Unfortunately, we didn’t have any swimming gear on us at the time, but as we decided to get some from the hostel, cue the lightning and thunder. We started walking towards our hostel, but we got drenched in the process. Back at the hostel, we dried off as the rain subsided.
Miami Beach Botanical Garden
Since we thought that the storms might come back, we just walked along the rest of the beach and then turned off so we could go to the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens.
Art Deco District
The botanical gardens are smaller than most, but they are a very nice spot to have a picnic. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any food, so we just walked around. The gardens have a few pools. In one of the pools you can sit and watch a handful of turtles of different sizes swimming and basking in the sun. This is probably the highlight of the gardens. Also, the free water refilling machine. We always have our reusable bottles with us, so we were happy to refill with cold filtered water.
Holocaust Memorial
Right near the Botanical Gardens is a Holocaust Memorial. In my opinion, it’s done very nicely with plenty of information about the lead up to the Nazi death camps, and the camps themselves. The walls list thousands of names of people killed inside the camps. It was a very surreal experience to think about how recent this was. When travelling through the rest of the world, most of the other atrocities occurred long ago.
The memorial, took us back to our time in the death camps in Cambodia (Day 104 and Day 106) . I think it’s worth coming to places like this to remember, what can happen.
Downtown
We walked back towards Miami Beach, and decided to have some Subway along the way. I don’t know why, but the 12 foot sub felt a lot bigger than the ones back in Melbourne.
After lunch, we walked towards the Wolfsonian-Florida International University, which has a museum with good reviews. A sign on the door informed us that the museum was closed, due to damage from the midday thunderstorms.
We had dinner at Saffron Mediterranean Grill before heading back down the party streets of Miami Beach towards our hostel.