The well-fed Persian cat licked his left paw, then licked his right paw, paused and lazily stared out towards the waning sun. As only cats can do, he patiently ignored the nearby humans who studied him through the viewfinders of a hundred cameras.

"Jump, my kitty. Jump," pleaded his master. The crowd on the town pier grew restless - would they miss a spectacular Key West sunset because of a fickle feline? The Persian, sensing a lost audience, coiled back on his haunches and meowed a "ready" to his nervous human.

Three very small hoops, already dripping in gasoline, were quickly set ablaze. The videos whirred. The cameras flashed. The cat sprung up off his perch and dove through the first, second and then the final burning ring. The crowd went wild - another perfect Key West moment. The Persian cat, now nibbling on a kitty treat, couldn't agree more.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am passing the hat to buy cat food for the star," yelled the cat tamer. "But, if you didn't like our show, just write down your complaints on a ten dollar bill and drop it in this fedora!"

Coins and bills were tossed into a bulging hat. The crowd quickly turned its collective back on the death defying cat, along with two nearby jugglers, a unicycling poet and a fancily dressed man who sang, played guitar, banged a drum and danced [à la Riverdance], all at the same time. No time for encores, the big show was about to begin.

The Sunset Celebration is a nightly ritual that is conducted, weather permitting, in Key West and up and down the 125-mile length of the ribbon thin Florida Keys. It is a party where the locals and vacationers alike, gather to rate the quality of the sunset.

This evening the multitude standing at the very tip of Florida witnessed a perfect ten - an explosion of rust red splashing into deep blue followed by the rarely seen Green Flash. (As the sun sinks under the horizon a small fragment of the sun suddenly turns vivid emerald-green. The Green Flash lasts only a second and needs a trained eye to spot.)

As night falls and the moon rises, the throng leaves the Mallory Square Pier. Everyone is headed into Old Town and the Historic Seaport District to experience a bustling nightlife that belies the fact that there are only 25,000 Conches (the name given to permanent residents) living at the southern tip of the USA.

Intimate candlelit restaurants. Smokey bars. Bustling sidewalk cafes. The lure of the Keys throws a wide net. Gays. Lesbians. Singles. Families. Writers. Singers. Artists. Everyone is looking to chill out.... together.

Ernest Hemingway lived, wrote and drank here for 30 years. Almost every establishment in town (even those opened long after his death) claims that he wrote Old Man and the Sea at their bar.

The two most famous Hemingway authenticated haunts are Sloppy Joes and Captain Tony's Saloon. Papa Hemingway was known to buy black-market Scotch from Sloppy Joes in the early 30s. Hemingway and Sloppy Joe have passed on, Hemingway's house is now a National museum and the bar - which has since moved but still serves drinks - is a living shrine to the writer.

Captain Tony's Saloon was once owned and operated by a fishing friend of Hemingway. Its claim to fame is that it is located in the building where the original Sloppy Joe's once was. The walls are covered in a weird collage of pictures of Hemingway and men's and ladies' um.... underwear (none of which were ever worn by Papa Ernest).

The what-the-heck ambiance of the Keys continues to draw literary types, musicians and entertainers. Looking for the lunchbar where singer Jim Buffet was inspired to write a song called "Cheese Burger in Paradise"? Have a burger, a conch fritter and a beer at the Dennis Pharmacy and while you are waiting the pharmacist can fill any prescriptions you might need!

Of course if you want to hear Buffet sing the song himself, stop by the Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville Café on Duvall Street. Even during lunch and dinner there is live music at the cafe. It is as rare as seeing the Green Flash but on occasion the Parrot Head himself will perform a song or three for his customers.

Cat tamers? Bar tending singers? Giving standing O's to the setting sun? Life in the Florida Keys comes with more than just a touch of strange, but offers a warm refuge from life in the fast lane.

The Keys are a chain of some 160 islands that begin just south of Miami. The Keys' five regions - Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon, Big Pine Key and Key West - are connected by 43 bridges that span sections of both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

There are small passenger airports in Marathon and Key West and a high-speed ferry links the islands with Naples and Fort Myers. However most people reach the Keys by driving south from Miami along Highway US 1, Motorists and bicyclists will notice small green mile markers located each mile along the highway,

These signs - placed one mile apart -- begin with number 126 (Mile Marker 126) just south of Florida City and count backward to the zero marker at land's end in Key West. Ask anyone for directions and they will quote mile markers -- they are the favored way to pinpoint locations.

Movie aficionados visiting the Keys will want to make their first stop at the Holiday Inn in Key Largo (mm100) and experience a bit of Hollywood magic aboard the genuine steamship African Queen. This is the actual steamer that was used in the 1951 Humphrey Bogart classic film of the same name.

The African Queen was filmed on location in Africa (the boat was brought over to Florida long after the film was released), however Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were in Key Largo in 1947 making another classic movie, Key Largo. A few miles up the highway from the African Queen stands the Caribbean Club (MM104), a bar which was featured extensively in that hit film,

The long list of movies that have filmed sequences in, around, over and under the Keys include: PT-109, The Deep, True Lives and James Bond's Licence to Kill,

Some of the underwater scenes for the 18th Bond movie were film underwater near the John Pennekamp Coral Reef Park. America's first subsurface preserve is headquartered on the island of Key Largo (MM 102),

The famed 100 square mile underwater park is part of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The Park protects the northern reaches of North America's only coral reef - the eastern seaboard of the Keys.

Scuba divers, snorkelers and swimmers have made Pennekamp the Number One underwater attraction in the world! Inside the park there are dive boats, snorkel trips and glass bottom tours which yearly take over one million visitors out to the coral reef to see first hand the life-blood of the Keys. Colourful corals, hundreds of thousands of schooling fish, friendly dolphin and lumbering green turtles are all part of the daily parade.

The most photographed underwater attraction in the Park is Christ of the Abyss - a nine-foot tall bronze statue of Jesus. His feet stand in the sand 20 feet down and His outstretched hands almost touch the snorkelers swimming overhead.

The 4000-pound bronze statue is one of three designed and cast by Italian sculptor Guido Galletti. It was donated by an Italian dive equipment manufacturer to the Underwater Society of America in 1962 and installed in the park in 1966.

Nowadays the statue is usually covered in a living blanket of fish. Barracudas, stingrays and hungry yellow tail snappers are in constant motion around the statue looking for handouts from waterborne tourists.

Diving is not confined to the Park. The tell tale red and white dive flag is flown at hundreds of dive shops that line the highway from Key Largo to Key West.

Where is the best diving? Well, there is an old saying in the Upper Keys that describe it best: "the unaimed arrow always finds the target". In other words on the eastern seaboard there is excellent diving from Mile 1 to 126.

Of course, being the Keys, some dive experiences come with a twist! Near Pennekamp Park is a cozy lodge for people who just can't get enough of the ocean bottom.

When guests visit Jules' Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida, they discover that the name is no marketing gimmick. Just to enter the Lodge, guests must actually scuba dive 21 feet beneath the surface of the sea because this two-room hotel is completely underwater.

Mother Nature provides all the entertainment at Jules. Each room has a large window looking out onto the coral reef. Over the course of 24 hours guests can expect to see most of the 55 varieties of delicate corals and almost 500 different species of fish, eels, turtles and dolphins that are known to frequent the underwater world of Pennekamp.

A healthy reef does more than keep scuba divers visiting the Keys; it provides a habitat for game fish. Islamorada is home to a fleet of "six-packs", fast, comfortable boats built to take six anglers out into the ocean to hunt marlin. Almost every week somewhere in the Keys a catch- and-release-fishing tournament is staged - species that are hunted range from swordfish to shark.

Driving the thin ribbon of highway from Key Largo to Key West, there is a marked difference in the view out of the left and right windows. The dive boats and blue water fishing charters moor on the east side where they can quickly get out to the deep waters of the Atlantic.

Looking out the passenger side towards the Gulf offers a much different vista. There are no coral reefs here. Olive-green mangrove swamps, uninhabited islands and meandering canals make up the sub-tropical paradise known as the back-country,

A different breed of visitor travels the backcountry. Binocular toting bird watchers, always mindful of hungry alligators, prowl through the underbrush of the back-country looking to spot Roseate spoonbills, lumbering pelicans, wading herons and majestic ospreys.

Birders, paddlers and beachbums rub shoulders in the campground at the Bahia Honda State Park. The Park has one of the top 10 beaches in the U.S. and is also an excellent place to photograph water birds.

Further south, at the National Key Deer Refuge and Watson Nature Trail (MM 30.5), kayakers and canoeists take to the back-country to look for the rare Key Deer. The miniature deer is no bigger than a Husky and is adept at slipping unnoticed through the underbrush.

The people of the Keys are very protective of the deer, in part because of the tenuous toehold that both animal and man have upon the land. You can see signs of past conflicts where nature has taken on civilization and won! The remnants of a Railroad that once linked Miami to Key West, can still be seen in the waters offshore.

Nowadays the bridges of Highway US 1 can withstand both strong winds and high waves. They have also been built extra wide to accommodate lawn chairs, barbecues and bait buckets!

When the conditions are right - blue skies and a cooling offshore breeze - many of the concrete structures that link the islands look more like piers than bridges. It is legal to fish off many of the bridges, and there is no better way to meet the locals than by spending an afternoon casting into the water below. Those in the know grab a good spot at dawn's early light and stay until the late afternoon.

Wonder when the sun is going to set and it is time to go home? Just watch for the Conches to pack up their fishing gear, jump into their cars and head back into town to watch that darn cat jump through the flaming hoops again!