Gator Update (Vacation Planning Edition)

I’ve gone to wrestle an alligator - Times Online

When director Guy Hamilton was shooting Live and Let Die, Bond’s coolest or cheesiest ever outing, depending on your viewpoint, he was so tickled by the now legendary running-over-alligators stunt that he decided to name the film’s baddie after one Mr Kananga – the man who owned the alligator farm where the sequence was shot.

It’s a cracking sequence. Stranded on an island the size of an Ikea flatpack and hemmed in by large, unfriendly reptiles, Roger Moore’s Bond dodges death in the way that only 007 can – by running across the gators’ backs. And believe it or not, if you’re brave enough, or daft enough, you can try it yourself.

Outside of zoos and the tropical lairs of international villains, there are only two countries on the planet where alligators hang out: China and America. Chinese alligators are mostly on the small side, so to grapple with a living, breathing 300lb reptile America is the place. And oddly, perhaps the best spot for gator wrestling in the US is in Colorado, where there’s an alligator farm with waters that are kept warm year round by a geothermal spring.

Pay $100 (£49) to the man at the gate at Colorado Gators, near Alamosa, and he’ll let you into a pen (read: “swamp”) with dozens of the things. Gator-wrestling classes are a nifty little side business to a working fish farm: the alligators were brought in as waste disposal units for dead fish, and because members of the public kept sneaking in to gaze at them, the owners thought they’d make some money out of their toothy tenants.

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