New Orleans

I have been a bit slow with the blog lately but that is because I have slowed down the pace of my trip, to conserve funds and to spend some time just hanging out with people.

I have been in New Orleans for a week and it is rather a difficult city to describe because it is full of contradictions. Parts of the city are beautiful with very strong French and Spanish influences in the architecture. There are sections where old money just oozes through pavements and it all runs at a slow, laid back and often seedy and drunken pace. The history of the area is lush and fascinating and the food is divine - although not very good for the waistline.

But then you step out of the old town built on the high ground and the whole area is one of the saddest examples of humanity I have ever come across. It has been 5 years since Katrina but the whole place still looks like a war zone. Almost all of the New Orleanians I have met spend their days talking up their fabulous city (as much to convince themselves as anyone else) and their nights behaving debaucherously and bemoaning the lack of government funding to rebuild the city (perhaps justifyibly so). There are some rebuilding projects but obviously not nearly enough. Rather stupidly, as far as I can see, the levee that collapsed and caused most of the major damage has been rebuilt to exactly the same strength (or lack there of) as before the hurricane. It is a skinny concrete wall holding back a very big canal. I also did a little research and the estimated damage cost from the storm and flooding was around $100 billion - Yes that is a large sum of money - but bear in mind the USA military budget for 2009 alone was between $800 billion and $1 trillion. Priorities?

Anyway that's enough of Morwenna' s State of the Union proselytism. I spent much of my week wandering the streets of the French Quarter and enjoying the various street performances and bands that are everywhere. I have also been enjoying creole cuisine especially gumbo - mostly because it has a cool name - and lots of fried chicken, fried shrimp and fried green tomatoes.

I spent a day wandering the cemeteries. The tombs are all above ground as the water table is so close to the surface and as creepy as it sounds, the cemeteries are one of the most scenic things in the city.

I checked out some of the swamp land, which is vast and bleak at this time of year. It is supposedly inhabited by gators but I didn't see any. I visited Lake Pontchartrain, the 2nd largest saltwater lake in the USA (60km by 40km) and travelled along the Mighty Mississippi for a little way. One thing you can say for New Orleans, it is not short of water frontage.

I visited a couple of plantations along the Mississippi. There seems to have been rather a lot of animosity between the Europeans and the Americans which was highlighted by tours of two different plantations. The French plantation was very much a place of business and the tour informative and obviously well researched so that the darker side of the plantation lifestye (slavery among other things) was not swept under the carpet. The American plantation, however, seems to have been as much a show of wealth as anything else. This tour was conducted by a hoop-skirted lady with a fake accent and was like a walk through the set of Gone With the Wind - very romanticised and surreal. The people who actually did the real work were not even mentioned.

I am now looking forward to an overnight Greyhound ride to Atlanta, Georgia as my tour of the south continues.