Far above an azure ocean, the white fleck of the space shuttle Godspeeds heavenwards, atop a biblical pillar of flame. Behind it hangs a contrail half the length of the state of Florida.

Only shorter is the bonnet of my borrowed Lincoln Town Car arrowing out ahead of me.

In my mouth sits a Macanudo Montego y Cia Dominican cigar, while on the sound system Night Ranger's Sister Christian bellows above the background burble of the Lincoln's V8, "Motoring, what's your price for flight..."

It's a moment to be savoured. It's also an appalling collection of cliches as cheesy as one of those old cigarette adverts they used to screen in cinemas. But I couldn't care less.

Nor would you if you were having a good contender for The Best Day Of Your Life, armed with a land yacht of a car, a fistful of dollars, and the carpe diem of it all crackling around you like a downed powerline.

Show over, I con the Lincoln leviathan around and, with the dashboard digital compass reading almost true south, float back to Miami or Greater Miami and The Beaches, as the city and its surrounds are known in officialese.

I've been in the place for only four days or so, staying not quite in Miami but with family in Boca Raton, about 45 minutes north. Yet already I have a reasonable idea of how to find my way around, and an even better one as to what areas are worth spending time in.

This is less to do with the presence of satellite navigation, and more with the fact that Miami is a deeply first world city, so everything is logically signposted. Even driving on the right-hand side of the road in a vast barge is easily mastered.

As for discovering the hot spots, I had cheated a bit. About a week before arriving I had fired off an e-mail to the local tourist outfit, the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. Within hours one of their senior PRs had called me in Durban, and couriered off literature for my Miami tour.

So it was that the morning after arriving I motored into downtown Miami (with the same enviable efficiency, the Lincoln, on loan from the company's press fleet, had been waiting at my Boca Raton address).

Within an hour it was clear that, first, this was not going to be my only visit to the place. Second, that encapsulating Miami in a few pithy pages of text and pictures was going to be difficult indeed.

Although not impossibly huge by megatropolis standards - even if its name is derived from the Tequesta Indian word mayaime, meaning very large - it's still staggeringly, marvellously diverse, even to a Durbanite reared in what's a tri-cultural city.

Almost half the population of around 2.5 million plus is Hispanic, which is not surprising with Cuba and the rest of Latin America just a short distance across the water, while the rest are white and black, or whatever the terminology is. The result is a microcosm of communities that seem less to foster racial angst and more to lend the place a gloriously cosmopolitan edge.

Of course, there's always a bit of muttering about drug-crime. But if the streets of Miami do occasionally echo to the rat-a-tat of Mac Ingram submachinegun fire, I never once felt intimidated, even driving around some dodgy areas.

On that introductory whirl around the city with my PR friend, Ginny, I only felt the same sort of pop-eyed euphoria I'd last experienced when visiting Paris in my late teens.

Indeed, from the clean chrome-and-glass areas of downtown through to the hugely upmarket Coral Gables, and the more ethnic Little Havana and Little Haiti, Miami is a travel-marketer's fantasy. Mine too.

You see, while I love my hometown of Durban - or at least try to - it's rapidly becoming a crime-racked, scrofulous hole, with the exception of a few glitzy, oasis-like developments.

And in some ways Miami is similar with its torpid climate - the average temperature is 24°C - heady mix of cultures and exotic edge. But it's also immeasurably safer and cleaner.

Wonderful as it was having an escort, I prefer travelling solo, and so, having watched the shuttle scythe out of sight, I swung the Town Car around and made for Miami Beach.

Now the "beach" is an island almost 10km long and just under two or so wide, and only a few hundred metres from the mainland, to which it's connected via a few causeways.

Biggest drawcard is South Beach, or SoBe, and particularly its Art Deco district.

Eating in Miami is not for the indecisive. All the standard cuisines, Mexican, Chinese, French and Italian, are well represented. But even more alluring are those with a Floridian flavour, comprising foods from the Deep South, Cuba, of course, and the ocean.

The last are best, particularly the stone crab claws (the rest of the creature is thrown back into the water, where the missing pincer regenerates). Prices aren't as alarming as you might expect, and it's easy to lunch adequately for less than $10 (about R70).

But if you have more than a few days in hand head out of the city.

Northwards, the rest of the Sunshine State awaits, from hyper-wealthy Palm Springs to Walt Disney World and the Kennedy Space Centre.

Best of all though are the Keys. Like a jade necklace, they stretch 200km from mainland Florida south into the tropics.

Remarkably, it's possible to drive from the mainland to Key West, the southernmost key, along Ocean Highway-Route 1, which cuts down the length of the chain.

I never quite made it to Key West. I did, however, visit Marathon, a key halfway there, one afternoon when my brother-in-law (a pilot) and I rented a Beechcraft Baron.

We stayed only 45 minutes, knocking back fresh oysters and mineral water at an open waterside bar.

But it was a popstar friend (really!) of all people who, on hearing my eulogies to Miami when I got back to South Africa, best summed up the place, saying, "It's a bit like Durban in a parallel universe, isn't it?"

• For more information, visit www.miamiandbeaches.com