New Orleans: See You Later, Alligator

USA - New Orleans, Louisiana

New Orleans: there is no place like it. Not in America. Not on the planet. Tennessee Williams set his stage play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ in this city, and drew constant attention to the ethnic history of the region, a story of French, Spanish and British control and American expansion, of post-war immigration, of Bauhaus, Caribbean, Latin American and European architecture, language, culture and energy, combining together at the Mississippi’s end. Williams was right. This is a city of the world, cut off from the rest of mainland America by a series of rivers, canals, lakes, levees, marshes and swamps, and allowed to grow and ferment into the vibrant, verdant New Orleans of the twenty-first century. Crucially, despite the melting-pot of nations and influences, there remains a fierce local identity, crystallised in the aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Katrina, but subsisting already before then.

We arrived from the temperate climes of Birmingham, Alabama, to a warm, sultry evening in the French Quarter. Palm trees lined the avenues, crickets bleated their nocturnal notes, and the air was thick with noise and music and excitement and a million scents, from cypress and slow cooking meat, to the musky Mississippi river and alcohol. Boutique hotels and independent art galleries lined the narrow, cobbled streets, where colourful houses with beautiful shutters and pot plants stood side by side with bustling bars and Catholic churches. Feeling like we were in a European market town, but with the Stars and Stripes waving merrily, Dean and I agreed within just a few moments of arriving that New Orleans was our kind of town. Perhaps it was the European-esque mood of the city, the meanderings of people down pedestrianised streets and the warm breeze rushing in from the Gulf of Mexico, that helped us speed through the usual process of familiarisation, but on that first Saturday night in the heart of the French Quarter, down Bourbon and Chartres Streets, we both felt a million miles from the modern America we had thusfar encountered. With little energy, however, after a long drive from Alabama, and a strong desire to soak up this wonderful place afresh in the morning, we settled on a quick meal and drink before returning to our bed & breakfast joint on Esplanade Avenue, which itself was inside a beautiful colonial style building, family run with a genuine sense of care and attention.

Sunday, then, was a busy day, and our cameras were out in force, snapping away at every enviable vista inside the French Quarter. It is hard to explain it in words, or do it justice in pictures, but the French Quarter looks, sounds and smells amazing. People mooch around at a pleasant pace, taking in the incredible architecture and scenery, noting the French road names and Spanish villas, enjoying the live music on every street corner, or just sitting on the roadside reading or smoking, or lying in the sun in the exquisite gardens by St. Louis Cathedral. Dean and I gulped it all in, almost overwhelmed by it all. Never before have so many photos of so many buildings been taken by so few. In New Orleans, it is possible to experience the city without even going into any of the fabulous buildings. It is enough just to criss-cross through the grid of the Quarter and observe what is happening. Particularly appealing to us was the cuisine. A blend of Creole soul food, Southern slow-cooking, and French seafood delicacies, the menus in New Orleans eating establishments feature bizarre concoctions that somehow seem to work, alongside the usual staples of American dining. A number of options are synonymous with the region, however, and Dean and I were keen to sample them. They include jambalaya, which is a rice dish served with vegetables and chicken pieces, alongside shrimp and sausage, mixed together in a hot sauce and left to brew for as long as possible. Another favourite is catfish po’boys, a sort of sandwich-cum-burger that includes fried catfish in batter as its central feature, while a variation on this theme is the mufaletta, where a variety of cured meats are piled high between bread that also has olives and melted French cheese on top. Finally, New Orleans is probably the best place in the world to eat alligator. You may recoil at thought of eating the meat of a dinosaur-era reptile, but if you get the opportunity to sample some gator, do not hesitate: eat it with reckless abandon. Alligator tastes good. Particularly as a filler for sausages.

Buoyed on by the incredible weather, we ambled the streets like the good tourists we are, stopping only a few times to rest our weary legs. One area of great beauty, with places to relax, can be found in the main gardens outside the front of St. Louis cathedral, and just behind the streetcar track that sits next to the Mississippi delta upon which New Orleans developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. St. Louis Cathedral is the oldest cathedral in the United States and, while it may not compare to some of the great (and older) European versions across Spain, France and Italy, is still worth viewing from inside as well as its obviously impressive exterior. Interestingly, a British flags hangs proudly inside the main lobby. New Orleans is keen to preserve its mixed heritage, and so places the iconography of its history in central and prominent positions. As a result, while the American flag is obviously visible, at every turn there is a French, Spanish or British flag waving merrily in the humid breeze. It added to the cosmopolitan feel of the city. It may be called the French Quarter, and obviously France has influenced New Orleans more than any other outside source (bearing in mind that France owned the whole state of Louisiana until the mid-nineteenth century), but in reality it could have been justifiably named the ‘European Quarter’. After all, many of the buildings are in a Spanish classical style after a fire in the late eighteenth century tore down many of the original French dwellings. Later, when the French seized the territory back (before America purchased it from them and then fought off the British who patrolled the Gulf of Mexico beyond), it was too heavily populated to recreate a Parisian cityscape, leaving New Orleans with the odd but welcoming distinction of enjoying British civic organisation, French cuisine and language, and Spanish architecture, all in the wonderful American state of Louisiana.

Back in the cathedral gardens, Dean and I marvelled at our good fortune, escaping any major tropical storms and waltzing through the town in eighty degrees of warm, cloud-less sunshine. Palm trees and hot air just a few weeks before Christmas in London is certainly an alienating, but liberating, experience. At the tip of the gardens, by the steps to the cathedral, dozens of artists, musicians and palm-readers set up stall and wait for passing trade. It was like Covent Garden, only warmer, with palm trees. The quality of the street music was a joy to behold, particularly from the trumpet and saxophone players, who have helped give New Orleans music its distinctive jazzy, soulful tone. This is the city of Louis Armstrong, after all, and his legacy remains in the skilful and talented musicians who now line the roads of the French Quarter, playing for the love of the music and the odd tip from tourists, rather than any loftier ambition. It is music from the heart and the soul, like so much of the folkloric South of America.

The next morning, after another enjoyable meal sampling the local cuisine and some French wine (rather than our usual drinks so far on our trip of beer or vodka mixers), Dean and I woke up a little early for our liking. Somewhat surprised at our total inability to function properly at half past seven in the morning, despite both beginning jobs early next year, we immediately sought out the caffeine boost that would get us up and running. A busy and exciting day was in store, and this was no time to be sleepy. Coffee obtained, we waited outside our hotel in seventy-five degrees (at eight in the morning) of heat for a coach to pick us up. We were off on a tour of the Plantation and Swamp land that lies outside New Orleans itself, an excursion that would include riding on an air-boat, the sort of famed water vehicle from ‘The Waterboy’, Indiana Jones films, and the memorable Martin Sheen cameo in ‘Hot Shots Part Deux’, where a fan-assisted motor helps the craft glide over the water and marshes of the Mississippi delta at impressive, and occasionally scary, speeds.

Our first stop was the plantation, knows as Laura Plantation after the first owner of the land, who helped farm and produce sugar cane and turned the plantation into a family business in the early nineteenth centuries. Plantations are important aspects of America’s economic and social development during the pioneering years, helping to manufacture and export goods across all the states and beyond, while engineering new techniques in building and farming. They also played a significant social role in the history of America. Slaves were bought and sold by plantation owners, herded around like cattle to work the land, often in abysmal conditions compared to the wealth and affluence of the owners and their large Creole mansions. Our photos will no doubt demonstrate this, but only by visiting a plantation can you gain a sense of the great hardship that slaves endured, and the inspiring job they did. Even after the abolition of slavery at the end of the American Civil War, former slaves were forced into employment contracts that essentially formalised the conditions of slavery into contractual form, thus maintaining the resentment between white land-owners and slave descendents for decades to come. It is easy, as you walk around the grounds of a plantation such as Laura, to enjoy the beautiful scenery, the lush grass and colourful flowers, the ancient oak trees and swopping butterflies, but a darker history also unfolded here. Nevertheless, the plantation we visited still functions as a cane producer today, and the tour guides were helpful in pointing out, with full disclosure, just what life was like for both the owners and the slaves during the plantation era’s heyday. The story of the owners of Laura Plantation is particularly illuminating, and potentially has the making of a major motion picture, with its controversial family dynamics and internal politics, of strong female leaders picking their successors ad hoc, of a sense of familial duty passed down through many generations without necessarily following the primogeniture of English land owning. At Laura Plantation, now as then, the family was the business and the business was the family.

The opportunity to explore inside the main plantation house, where the owning family would live and work together, was interesting not only in terms of learning about the history of the plantation, but also how the family made great strides in practical areas, from having the kitchen in an out-building away from the main house to prevent fires, to lifting the house onto brick stilts in order to prevent flooding during hurricane season. The lessons they learnt were repeated all over the region and into New Orleans itself.

After a quick lunch, we moved on to the swampland to begin our airboat tour. This proved to be one of the highlights of our entire trip to America. Our guide was an entertaining and energetic host, we were joined by some Canadian siblings, and were in the mood to have fun and learn at the same time. What a lesson was in store! We covered everything from the biology and ecology of alligators, to the civic failures behind the Katrina disaster, with information on the water type (salt, fresh and brackish), the vegetation, the other animals of the region, and the colloquial history of the swamps thrown in for good measure. Particularly illuminating was our guide’s description of the events of Katrina, and the role the government is now playing in protecting this area of incredible natural beauty, not just for people like Dean and I to enjoy, but predominantly for an altogether more serious reason. The swamps and marshes, we learned, essentially act as speed bumps when there is a hurricane, slowing down the onrushing water from the various sources around New Orleans, including the Gulf of Mexico itself, the Mississippi river, and the numerous other brackish lakes. As oil companies have chopped away at the swamps, however, many of these so-called speed bumps have been reduced in size. Our guide felt it was no surprise that the levees were breached in the aftermath of Katrina: there was nothing to stop the flood, nothing to slow down its treacherous advance. A lack of understanding of this basic ecological point, and a desire of successive governments to profit from oil, caused this malaise in responsible organisation, yet the irony exists in the fact that Louisiana exports and imports much of America’s oil, and needs the swamps to remain healthy in order for this to continue. Now, therefore, state and federal agencies are taking better care to preserve the region. It is a double bonus for us, as the swamps are truly magnificent spectacles to behold, as well as providing all-important cover to the towns and cities of Louisiana should another category five hurricane strike the locality.

Like the French Quarter, the swampland is unspeakably beautiful, rich in colour and texture and bending, varying lights and shadows, full of narrow lanes of shallow water, where vegetation and evergreen willow trees hang over the waterways, and then larger stretches surrounded by bigger shrubbery and trees (now sadly damaged post-Katrina) that allowed the air-boat to run at full throttle, aquaplaning between each stunning point of interest. We will both remember the thrill and sheer exhilaration of being buffeted around on the air-boat at top speed, with the high sun’s light bouncing off cool blue water and the refreshing wind in our hair and across our faces. Later, during one of our stop points on the excursion, our host presented (in a hilariously dramatic fashion and much to the sheer terror of the Canadian sisters) a baby alligator to observe and even hold. I was amazed at how cold she was, despite being obviously cold-blooded. Trying not to get my face too close, we posed for photos and tried not to think about how tasty alligator sausages are. It was an added bonus to an already exciting trip out of town.

That night Dean and I returned to New Orleans for our last night in the city, after a well-earned rest by the pool at our hotel. Walking around the Quarter for a final time, I was struck by how impressively upbeat and proud the residents were, despite the ravages of Katrina and the initial feeling of isolation after it. Shame on those politicians back in 2005: New Orleans is one of the world’s most unique cities, a place unlikely any other in America, and adds to the integrity of Louisiana as a jewel in the American crown. Our love affair with Louisiana was about to continue in Baton Rouge, just an hour or so from New Orleans up the Mississippi river. Famed for its sunsets, we set off in the Jeep Patriot for the next stage in our adventure. As we drove, I could not help but think of Blanche Dubois, the central character in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, who constantly reminds us of her upbringing in Baton Rouge. Later, as the emotions of New Orleans life take their heady toll, she exclaims: “Sometimes there is God so quickly!” Natural beauty, friendly people, stunning weather: divine inspiration in the state of Louisiana is alive and well.