Nawlins

“So, we’ve booked a week in Texas” I said, “what shall we do?”

“Let’s go to New Orleans” he said.

“That’s not in Texas” I said.

“I know” he replied.

As mentioned in my previous blog, the destination of Austin, Texas was determined by Avios Reward flight availability. British Airways fly to New Orleans too but that was not available so we had to do it the roundabout way. The day after we arrived in Austin we were back at the airport where Southwest Airlines, the Ryanair of America only much, much better, whisked us off to the Big Easy, just over an hour back the way we had come the previous day. It was Nicholas’s idea. I was more than willing to stay in Texas for the week but he was determined and so it was we found ourselves at the very pleasant Hotel Le Marais in the heart of the French Quarter. We had two and a half days to discover the place. This commenced at a local restaurant called the Acme Oyster House but not before we had popped into a shop that sold over a hundred different hot sauces, all available to try. Some of these were really quite incendiary but they were not enough for Nicholas. He asked the rather bored lady behind the counter which of the sauces was the hottest. She pointed to one called “Satan’s Blood’ and waved a bit of paper in front of his face for him to sign. Apparently it was some sort of waiver to prevent anyone from suing the shop in cases of oesophageal scarring. Carefully inserting the pointy bit of a tortilla chip into the red liquid, he collected the merest smidgeon and popped it in his mouth. Almost immediately he bent double in pain and emitted a string of obscenities that were something of an eye opener to his dad. What a sissy I thought, it can’t be that bad and I signed the waiver. I have to say here that my smidgeon was slightly bigger than his smidgeon which is why I immediately starter breathing dragon like flames from deep within my throat. The pain spread to my eyes which stirred my tear ducts into action, to my mucus membrane which went into overdrive and I’m sure the wax in my ears started to boil. By this time Nicholas had regained enough sense to buy a bottle of water in an attempt to douse the flames. A good idea I thought so I invested a couple of dollars in my own. Relief was immediate but temporary. It took at least half an hour for the 800,000 Scoville Unit heat to finally get to a comfortable level.

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By this time we were at the Acme Oyster Bar. This was a hugely popular place which we passed several times later where people were queueing down the street to get in. We were squeezed in straight away by virtue of the fact it was half past three in the afternoon. There a rude waiter who presented us a menu full of New Orleans specialities. These seemed to consist entirely of shrimp and oysters, neither of which do anything for me but there was one dish that took my fancy, red beans and rice. This is probably the equivalent of beans on toast in that neck of the woods and despite looking as though someone had been sick on the plate was quite nice. Nicholas meanwhile had persuaded Mister Grumpy to bring him an oyster to try before his main dish of grilled shrimp. Pouring the aquatic vagina lookalike down his gullet, he pulled a face not too dissimilar to the one he had made after trying the Satan’s Blood sauce, though there was less steam involved. Unlike the hot sauce I was in no way tempted to try one myself. The grilled shrimp cheered him up though and after leaving just a modest tip for Mister Grumpy we left and spent the rest of the day wandering round the French Quarter. 

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The French Quarter is New Orleans’ heart. It is a grid of narrow streets with low rise buildings that contain hotels, bars, restaurants, shops, dubious looking clubs and a surprisingly large number of personal dwellings. Most of the buildings are traditional with balconies on the front and everything you may have seen about New Orleans is confirmed. One street in particular was the party hub. Bourbon St is a cacophony of neon and noise and as far as I was concerned, rather ghastly. This was a shame as the rest of the French Quarter was very pleasant. You were never very far from live music, especially when the sun went down when a jazz band would appear on one corner, a blues guitarist on the next. If not on the street you could hear it coming from within the bars and this on a Wednesday evening in November. There was much more of it by the time we left two days later just as the weekend was getting underway. 

The following day we embarked on a tour that took us out of the city, along the banks of the Mississippi to a preserved plantation, of which there are several to choose from. The journey out there was interesting. For a start the bus was late thanks to many of the French Quarter’s streets being dug up. Once clear of the city we followed a highway built on an endless bridge over swampland before arriving at the Oak Alley Plantation. Back in the 1830s a well to do French speaking Cajun couple established a sugar plantation next to the Mississippi. This required funds which they raised by mortgaging their possessions. Most of those possessions were slaves. A rather grand house was built for the family whilst the slaves were housed in shacks near the fields where they worked. The house still remains and we got a tour round it. Very nice it was too with grand columns announcing to the world that this was a family of some importance. It was a short lived dynasty, however, and following the death of the husband, the wife struggled on with not much success and the plantation was passed on through numerous different hands. In the meantime slavery had ended in the USA but with nowhere else to go, most remained where they were as paid labour. Paid in tokens, that is, of no value anywhere but on the plantation itself. Early in the twentieth century the plantation closed and the house was sold to a couple as a retirement home. In the seventies it passed on to a trust who restored the house to its former glory and run it as a tourist attraction. The slave quarters were long since gone but replicas had been built to show the stark contrast in the lives of the owners and the owned. It was a very interesting place to visit. I can’t say there were many laughs though.

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On returning to the bus the driver decided to take our money which was $64 less than we thought. I didn’t want to make a scene though so kept quiet. The second part of the tour involved a drive to a place on the outskirts of the city where we were deposited in the care of a swamp tour company. Eventually we were plonked on a boat driven by an old bear of a man with a gammy leg, not that he needed it once he was at the tiller. This was a pleasant trip on which we viewed alligators, turtles, herons, water rats, kestrels and above all else, swamp. There’s tons of it out there. The guide claimed to be a direct descendent of the Cajun settlers who arrived in the area in the mid-eighteenth century after being booted out of the Maritime region of what is now Canada by the British. They weren’t wanted in the other colonies and finally settled in the swamps of Louisiana. They, along with the creole culture of the African slaves give the region its rather unique ‘French but not really French’ feel. Whether or not he was a thoroughbred Cajun, he could certainly spin a good yarn even if his accent and the noise of the outboard motor made it hard to hear at times. 

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Back at the hotel the tour company had realised their error and demanded the extra $64. Fearing being taken back to the swamped and dumped there I paid up. Cajun and Creole cuisine dominate the restaurants in New Orleans and once we were back there it was a fairly hard task to find one that wasn’t. We discovered a faux-posh steak restaurant and went there for really rather large pieces of cow.  Say what you like about the Americans, they do a good steak even if they are pretending to be French at the time. Our last day in the city involved us taking a tram just for the hell of it. Well, not really the hell of it, I like trams and New Orleans’ tramway system is something of a gem. The St Charles Ave line has been in continuous use since the 1830s, the odd hurricane disruption aside, the horse drawn cars giving way to electricity in the 1890s. It was this that we, or should I say ‘I’, decided to ride on. Tram Philistine Nicholas just had to grin and bear it. It took us through the warehouse district into a well to do suburb along a wide avenue where the central reservation was shared by the trams and joggers alike. Large houses lined the streets along with the odd university. The trams, or streetcars if you are American, on the St Charles Ave line were built in 1923 and complete with wooden slatted seats where the backrests can be moved depending on the direction of travel. The other lines, which were restored in the early 2000s after a forty year absence, use replica trams. 

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With my tram fetish satisfied, we set off to find the Mississippi as one should in New Orleans. It wasn’t far away and we walked along its bank to hear the Steamboat Natchez tooting its horn. A cruise on that might be nice for a couple of hours we though as we walked up to the ticket office only to see the gangplank raised. With that boat sailed we decided that the best way to get a cruise on the mighty Mississippi was to take the Canal St Ferry and at two dollars each way it was somewhat cheaper than the Natchez. Shorter too as the crossing takes five minutes at the most on a rather spartan ferry but at least we can say that we have cruised on the Mississippi. Our last supper in this city saw Nicholas try oysters again. This time though they were grilled and flavoured with garlic and other stuff which went some way to disguising the fact he was eating something akin to snot. I didn’t try one, preferring cajun chicken which was almost exactly unlike the cajun chicken you get over here. With that we headed back to New Orleans’ rather shabby airport – there is a new terminal opening next year – and our flight back to Austin.

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It turned out to be a good call by Nicholas for us to go to New Orleans. We fit plenty in our two and a half days there and there is almost certainly a lot more to it than what we saw. It has a deserved reputation as a party town but it also has an interesting history. Whilst it is resolutely Anglophone American (don’t even think about saying ‘Orleans’ the French way), it still plays on its Francophone Cajun and Creole past which manifests itself in street names, food, music (Creole, not Cajun, since when have the French been any good at music?) and trashy culture such as necromancy and voodoo. We didn’t do a cemetery tour but they are a big thing there and you don’t have to go far in the French Quarter to find a voodoo shop full of goat skulls or dolls to stick pins in. Would I go back? Yes, maybe as part of an itinerary that took in a few southern states. It is an interesting place and after all, there’s trams to ride there.