By Drew Sterwald. dsterwald@news-press.com
The Shell Factory & Nature Park, one of Southwest Florida’s best-known tourist attractions, blends the natural - and unnatural - wonders of our world in a way that keeps visitors coming back.

Its got carved coconut monkeys, thousand-dollar Cowrie shells, pickled sharks, and live critters ranging from Anacondas to zebras.What exactly, is this eighteen-acre attraction? A museum of mollusks? An ersatz zoo? A cathedral of kitsch? We think its better if you make up your own mind, so go see for yourself….And check off the first of Tropicalia’s top 12 things to do before you die. Passport stamp number one.

Cotton-candy colored toilet seats embedded with sea horses and shells are calling my name.
“Fancy Toilet Seat” brags the label on the $75.99 souvenir sold at The Shell Factory but manufactured in China.
Fancy indeed. Look at how the clear lucite magnifies the details in the thumb-sized seahorse.

As I weigh the possibility of painting my guest bathroom in teal or plum or Barbie pink to match one of these Fancy Toilet Seats, my brain teeter-totters between anthropological fascination and morbid fear.

Kitsch runs both ways, intersecting at this North Fort Myers landmark.
Bigger and better than ever now that Waltzing Waters has returned under the sexier moniker Liquid Fireworks, The Shell Factory & Nature Park is a rangy 26-acre complex that lures visitors with a campy yet compelling come-on: a rotating conch out on U.S. 41 almost as big as a Mini Cooper.

“World’s Largest Shell Factory” the peculiar portal boasts, as if shell factories were so commonplace as to necessitate such a hierarchy.
In fact, size is not what distinguishes The Shell Factory at all. It’s the odd juxtaposition of the natural and the unnatural that makes it one of the 12 Things to Do in Southwest Florida Before You Die.

On the lost highway of faded Florida roadside attractions, The Shell Factory still stops tourists in their tracks more than 60 years after it began as a family endeavor in Bonita Springs. Its siren symphony: cheap T-shirts, collectibles snatched from the sea and gobs of local color.

Although the grounds include side attractions like a wildlife showcase, a petting zoo, bumper boats and a restaurant known for its all-you-can-eat grouper specials and karaoke, the jewel in the commercial crown is The Shell Factory itself.

Indoors, the gift shop resembles an airplane hangar, long and high-ceilinged. A stuffed lion, ostrich and other creatures loom overhead - in cages, as if they still needed to be contained.
Take a left turn and you can shop hundreds of varieties of shells. Some you might find washed up on any local beach. Others originate from waters other than our own.

This is the serious side of The Shell Factory, which has more than 5 million shells in stock and a museum-quality specimen department. Ask about the Miraculous Turrid - careful how you say that - which inspired the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s spiraling design.

Take a right turn from the entrance and you’ll encounter row after row of shelves showcasing trivets made with shells, floral bouquets made from shells glued to poster board and crucifixion scenes made with shells.

Only a handful of gifts are still made by hand at The Shell Factory - night lights, Christmas ornaments and other trinkets.
Out-of-state visitors might be tempted to snag one souvenir sure to please a kid with a creepy sense of curiosity. But as the sign says, “Shark in the Bottle cannot be taken on airplanes.”

Down the aisle, Judy Sargent of Sarasota and Albany, N.Y., weighed two spiky blowfish like she was comparing tomatoes at a grocery store. The lucky recipient: her godson.

“Nine-year-old boys love this horrible stuff,” she said.
Last year, she bought him an alligator head, available at The Shell Factory in sizes ranging from about 4 inches to a foot and a half.
Asked if she’d spotted the blowfish lamp on the other side of the shop, she perked up, then glanced at her watch. Her husband was waiting in the bar at Capt’n Fishbones Seafood Grill across the parking lot from the gift shop.

Time moves slowly at The Shell Factory, like a swimmer wading against the tide. Hours slip by as shoppers wander the 60,000 square feet of retail space, encountering rooms of colorful art glass hand-blown on the premises and boutiques of Christmas decorations.

Past the game arcade, a trio of alligators lies motionless on a plank raft in a tank flanked by fake palm trees. Nearby, another somewhat rank tank holds crawling hermit crabs in colorful shells. “Please don’t pick up the hermit crabs,” a tattered handwritten sign begs.

The natural and the unnatural perch side by side at The Shell Factory.
Indoors, it’s stuffed animals and starfish stained magenta and tangerine.
Outdoors it’s the real thing at the Nature Park, also referred to as the Octagon Animal Showcase. Since it moved to the grounds in 1999, the exhibit has offered refuge for animals injured or retired from zoos and other attractions.

Cages holding a mountain lion, a pair of Bengal tigers and lions bear graphic warnings: signs showing a hand dripping blood and missing a few fingers.
We’re not in Disneyland anymore.

A black leopard sprawled on its side flutters its green eyes as it drifts into sleep - only to be roused again and again by an orange-and-blue macaw in a cage on the other side of the path. “Hello!!!!!!” the bird squawks. “Hello!!!!!!” it squawks again a moment later, like some infernal snooze alarm.

Down the dirt path, which smells of eau de feline (to put it delicately), a male lion wails mournfully while pacing his cage. Is he lonely for company?

Visitors surged after the recent disappearance and recovery of a 90-year-old crocodile named Grandpa, according to a caretaker. But on a recent weekday afternoon, only cold-blooded creatures lurked in the Serpentarium.

By 7 p.m., when the first Liquid Fireworks show of the day begins, a few dozen people have settled in the stands to watch.
For the next half-hour they will sit quiet as clams as they watch colored fountains soar and spray in a pond to the glam rock of late Queen and the glossy pop of recent Celine Dion.

When Celine reaches for that high note while singing “I Drove All Niiiiiiiiiiiiight,” the middle fountain in a chorus line of 1,000 water nozzles kicks for the stars.
Despite the spectacle of liquid, art deco designs rising before them like so many tie-dyed Chrysler Buildings, not a soul even claps at the end.

Still, Connie Massey, of Denver, says it’s better than the Bellagio, the Las Vegas Strip resort where a similar water ballet appears nightly - sans colored lights.
“The lights make a huge difference,” Massey says.
She and her friends suggest pairing the Liquid Fireworks with a little liquid firewater beforehand to enhance the experience.

“Back in the ’60s when I was smoking pot it would have been more enjoyable,” quips Ken Barnett of Fort Myers.
The crowd at the 8 p.m. show doesn’t seem to need any extra license to let loose. They ooh and ahh as if it’s the Fourth of July. They applaud each section of the show - dance hits from the ’70s and ’80s, Elvis classics and the novelty songs of Leroy Anderson (”The Typewriter”), whose music begs for dancing streams of jewel-toned water.
With the first synthesized strains of “Flashdance,” tourist Iurie Latis raises his camcorder to his face.

A few rows in front of him, a white-haired man bobs his head back and forth to Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family.”
By the time Elvis finishes his closing number, Latis has half an hour of splashy splendor on tape. He’ll take it back to show friends at home in Moldova, a small European country bordering Romania and Ukraine.
“It’s very good,” he says. “It’s special - the whole place.”
There’s nothing like it in Moldova.