[QUOTE=ianzin]
The experience in LA was very different, but possibly even more disappointing for some. I went on a ‘swamp’ tour. It lasted two hours. The guide was great: highly informative, entertaining, and very illuminating when responding to questions. The scenery was genuinely spectacular in places, particularly the rather eerie ‘other world’ look and feel of those parts where the surface of the water is entirely covered in green algae and micro-vegetation, as if the water were solid green paint. I thoroughly enjoyed it and we did get close-up views of some wildlife, but we didn’t see a single 'gator. This wasn’t so disappointing to me personally. I’ve been to places like Malaysia where you can visit toursity croc and gator farms and get as close as your sanity allows to hundreds of the beasts, and what’s more they’re far bigger and nastier looking than anything you’re likely to see in FL or LA. But some others on the tour expressed their annoyance and frustration that we didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of a single gator.
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I wonder if we went to the same tour company. My wife and I went to college in New Orleans and I had been on swamp tours before that were great. The guides would dangle a whole chicken on a pole over the water and fully grown gators would leap out of the water in very impressive ways. We also got marshmallows to throw to them.
However, we traveled back last November and took our daughters on a swamp tour. We only saw one juvenile gator but the guide/owner was so knowledable that we loved it anyway. He took us to see whole building moved into the swamp from Katrina and lots of other wildlife. I figured that the scarcity of the gators was just because it was November.