When we walked up to the visitor center desk to buy tickets for the park's two hour tram tour which we planned to attend, I went to ask the attendant why the park in the Everglades, which was known for its alligators, not its sharks, was called shark valley.
Apparently, however, I was not the first one to ask this question because I had scarcely asked, "Why is the pa-" before I was interrupted.
"Why is the park called Shark Valley?" The attendant finished, "I would tell you, but all the tram guides have a different way of telling the story, and get mad at me for telling the tourists."
With that we were forced to wait for the tour guide and for the next tram tour to start, so we visited the gift shop and museum.
In the museum, we found some samples of wildlife from the area, like feathers and fossils, and an exhibit on the history of hunters in the area slaughtering birds for their feathers, when rare and exotic feathers on hats and other garments were the fashion.
The exhibit was even complete with a children's book detailing the struggles of two women who founded a club that helped control the slaughter of the birds, by passing a law that forbid the hunting of them.
In the gift shop, we found a pair of alligator earring that we knew Jaime would love and I found a pair of turtle earrings that were cute, simple and silver.
But, by the time we purchased the earrings, the tram had arrived and the tour had started.
The Everglades were beautiful and our tour guide pointed out many types of wildlife.
We saw great gray herons, great white herons, tricolored egrets, blue herons, wood storks, grackles, cormorants, crows, a bird our guide called the "Jewel of the Everglades," and more.
We even saw two baby alligators and, by the end of the tour, twenty two adult alligators in total. (You can play a fun game of spot the alligator with these pictures!)
Halfway throught he tour, we visited an observation tower which had a great great view and was next to the a lily pond.
From the tower, we could see for miles, and the tower even overlooked a river, in which we spied many more alligators and a even pair of two turtles, swimming next to each other.
On the way back to the parking lot, our guide finally told us the story of how Shark Valley got its name. He said that in Shark Valley there was a river near the sea with brackish water that early explores had seen sharks giving birth in and named Shark river.
In addition, the park was the low point between two high points of land, only 6 feet above sea water compared to the two high points, with Miami being 15 feet above sea level and Fort Meyers a whopping 24 feet, making it a valley.
Also, our tour guide told us about the growing python population in the parks and how dangerous they were to the natural wildlife.
People abandoned their pet pythons in the Everglades, and a single python could lay thousands if eggs. Pythons had also caused the extinction of the marsh hare, he said, taken over the alligator's place as top predator of the Everglades, and could eat alligators whole (at this point he recommended we watch a video titled Pythin vs. Alligator in which a python wrestled and overtook a alligator).
Needless to say this topic scared mom half to death and as leaned forward to whisper that the pythons were coming to eat her, she let out a loud extremely humiliating scream.
He also told us the story of the only injury that they had in the park, that went like this:
A Brazilian family had been biking along the trail when thier boy was flung off his bike into the river- where an alligator lay waiting. The alligator dragged the boy under and would have drowned him if the mother hadn't taken a pair of binoculars she had on hand and bashed the alligator over the head until he let her son go. A helicopter picked the pair up, and though they were both gravely injured, they both survived.
Our guide even joked about the encounter, saying that the "Beware of Alligators" sign posted throughout the trail were inaccurate, and should be changed to read, "Beware of Brazilian Mothers!"
Just as our tour was coming to an end we passed one last magnificent sight- what seemed to be all the birds in the Everglades all nested in one place, in the trees that lines the road we rode on.
Finally, we arrived at the parking lot and, after a bathroom break, continued on our way to Fort Meyers.
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