Farewell Crescent City!

It struck me that while I have been happy both in New Orleans and Natchez in Mississippi to stand there and admire the broad Mississippi River, I hadn't actually ventured onto the thing, and so before we left New Orleans I got out there on Ol' Man River.

No, I didn't go on one of the two hard-working tourist riverboats for a ride, but this one did swoosh past quietly propelled by its paddle wheels, and it made a nice sight as it did so.

I went for a ride on this thing, the Algiers Ferry. It loyally does the short hop almost directly across the river and back numerous times every day, to Algiers Point. It's a car ferry as well as a passenger ferry, but passengers ride free of charge, while car owners pay a buck or two. Pam took this photo from our hotel room. I did the modern thing and texted her from the ferry "can you see me on the ferry" and so she went to mega-zoom for the shot. No, I can't see me either.

The ferry itself is a rusty, unloved, plain old workhorse, and so it's quite charming. It is very flat-bottomed and the river is very smooth, and apart from the bump at the wharf at either end of the journey you wouldn't know you were on water.

The Mississippi is a busy river port. You see scenes like this often enough, but most of the time the traffic consists of doughty little tugs pushing great strings of a half a dozen or so low, wide barges up and down river.

As well as sampling the water-borne public transport, I went on a few different rides on the local trolley cars, just to see a bit more of the real local community in action. This trolley car, however, is often packed with tourists heading down towards the Garden District, one of New Orleans' major drawcards for visitors.

The Garden District is a flash area of town with several blocks of large 19th-century mansions surrounded by very well-kept gardens. The theme for almost all the gardens here is 'foliage' – lots and lots of lush green foliage. And lots of foliage also means lots of clipping. There's plenty of work with shears and secateurs for gardeners on low wages in the Garden District.

The houses themselves are large and vary greatly in their architectural styles from one place to the next, but ornate lace ironwork is a highlight on many of them.

Another interesting part of the 'foliage' theme is that fewer than one in ten houses here had any lawn. You could walk a block or two at a time before you saw even a patch of lawn. Instead, they go for mass-planted, low-growing groundcovers like this to provide the lush green infill between the clipped green hedges.

Flowers (like this plumbago) are a relative rarity here, and the lack of them did make the district feel a bit too samey and drab for me. Walking around here felt like going to one of those trendy inner-city parties where everyone is wearing chic black. A bit too cool for me. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but as a garden lover I did find the Garden District less than inspiring as we walked around. It felt like a place inhabited by wealthy people who didn't like gardening, but employed gardeners to keep up appearances.

We weren't the only ones leaving the Crescent City, steaming off to our next destination. This is the cruise ship, the Oriana, leaving after a visit of just a few days. Another cruise ship would almost certainly be in port by the evening.

We've done a long haul on the road today, over 320 miles, and we're now in Montgomery, Alabama for a short stay. Montgomery was a centre of the civil rights movement's struggles in the 1950s and 60s, and we plan to find out more about that while here (apparently the Civil Rights Museum is very good). And, being country music fans, it's also the site of the Hank Williams Museum, so I am sure we'll have plenty to do while we're here. And there is all that comfort food on offer, too...

New Orleans was an incredible place to visit, we had a wonderful time there and would recommend a visit to the Crescent City to anyone. We felt safe there, ate well, heard great music everywhere we went, even out on the streets. All I can hope is that you have the same great string of perfect weather that we enjoyed!

Down in the Treme

I had never heard of the Treme district of New Orleans until that wonderful HBO Television series of the same name appeared earlier this year. If you don't know what I am talking about, ask your video store about it, or read more about it here. Having seen the first series of Treme before leaving on our trip, we were never going to miss out on visiting the area while in New Orleans, and it proved to be a day full of surprises.

This plaque at one end of Esplanade Avenue, near the 1-10 Interstate, summarises the history neatly, but it can't tell the story of how Treme was hit so hard by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and how the district has fought back since then. Watching the HBO TV series is a good way to get a basic feel for the people, the district and their struggle since then, but of course the real story is infinitely more complex.

Our first surprise was seeing the extent to which many buildings have been restored, repainted and revived. Some evidence of Treme's long roots into African-American music remain, such as the front of this (closed at the time) streetside theatre.

The big surprise though was the number of freshly renovated houses. In the streets where we wandered around, only about one in ten houses was boarded up with "no trespassers" signs prominent on the temporary cyclone wire fences. The rest were colourful, revived and looking great.

Treme is a smallish district about half a dozen streets wide by half a dozen streets long, and the houses range from these simple homes on the side streets through to flash looking mansions on the main street, Esplanade Avenue.

We stopped off at local legend breakfast/lunch soul food spot, Li'l Dizzy's on Esplanade, and as soon as the waitress heard my voice she got it right: "Hey, another Australian! Hi there, y'all." I'll save up the very yummy lunch for Tummy Time 7, but Li'l Dizzy's was a thriving, happy place bursting at the seams with (mostly African-American) customers.

When it comes to the choice of house colours around here, anything goes and it's a big part of the area's character.

Maybe repairing and rebuilding has made people extra house-proud, but some background research I did into Treme shows that the area is changing, with the strongly African-American character of the place being lessened by an influx of non-African-American residents attracted to the great location with lots of character, and the cheap, beaten-up houses. It seems that quite a few old Treme residents whose houses were ruined by Katrina simply cannot afford to return and renovate, and some are selling up just in order to survive.

Then, wandering back down to the French Quarter later in the afternoon, we passed a church in Treme with these striking plaques on the front wall. Pictured above is a list of "Murder Victims of 2007" and while it's not possible for you to read the details in this photo, the great majority – well over 90% – were shot. The rest were beaten or stabbed to death. There was a similar size plaque next to it for 2008 with the same grim story.

This hand-written plaque of 2011's murder victims in still being updated, as each new victim falls. There was no-one around to explain whether these were just residents of Treme, but we hope not. Maybe these are people in all of New Orleans. Even then that's frightening. We just don't know, but it's a powerful statement of the violent undercurrents in this society which by day seems pretty normal and ordinary to us. Obviously we don't go to the dangerous areas when the sun goes down, and that's probably when most of the violence occurs.

By the time we made it back down to the other end of the French Quarter, another sign of the foment beneath the surface of this city marched by. I am sure you have all been reading about the "Occupy Wall Street" protests in New York and other major US cities. Well, add New Orleans to the list.

This was a small, peaceful and noisy protest by about 500 people well organised by lead megaphones with chants such as "This is how democracy sounds". The local police stopped traffic, the protestors all marched by, then the tourists resumed shopping.

The protestors are absolutely right, though. The gap in wealth here, or perhaps I should say the extent of poverty in the USA, is something this country does need to deal with if it is to make peaceful progress in the next decade or two.

It's not just the beggars on the streets, it's the number of destitute towns seemingly without jobs or hope we have passed through, the number of utterly ramshackle, almost third-world standard houses on the edges of so many towns. For a wealthy country, there is far too much poverty here in the USA, far more than you'd ever see driving around Australia. It's their problem to deal with, not mine, but from the sidelines I can only cheer on the protestors and wish them success in changing politics here in America so fairness in the distribution of wealth becomes an issue once more. It'd probably save a lot of lives in the long run.

Tummy time USA (6)

Tummy Time 6 comes to you from New Orleans, one of the crossroads of American cuisine, where the flavours of the deep south blend in with Creole and Cajun influences which are tossed into a storm of extra spices fresh from the Caribbean Sea. Even though we're staying here for several days it's not enough to fully sample what's on offer in this town that's almost as famous for its food as its music, but we had a go.

Long before I set off on this trip I had made a list of American foods I had to try at least once (such as those tamales in New Mexico, and the ribs, and the barbecue, and the grits, and the boudin.... you get the picture). This dish, Jambalaya, was on that list and so I have tried it twice so far, and this was the best example of this classic spicy rice creation. It is its own dish entirely, but it's a second cousin of the popular Spanish paella in that there's rice, shellfish and spicy sausage in there, but the sauce is heavier and the result gluggier than most paellas I have tried back in Sydney. As you can see in the photo above, the vegetables on the side were perfectly cooked, turning it into a truly well-rounded meal. I had this at Pere Antoine in the French Quarter.

Another 'must-eat' on that list was a Po' Boy sandwich. I got the itch to try these from reading James Lee Burke's Cajun detective novels, where his hero Dave Robicheaux and his mate Clete Purcell always seemed to be chomping down on them for lunch. The original Po' Boy (made for poor boys without much money, so goes the legend) consisted of deep-fried oysters in this baguette (or sub) style bun. That was long ago, because Po' Boys can have any filling you like nowadays, and some I have seen are seriously overloaded with too many ingredients. This is a fried shrimp Po' Boy, which consists of light and juicy freshly fried shrimp (prawns) plus a light layer of coleslaw as well. That's it, very simple, very nice. The lemon on the side is not for decoration, it's for squeezing.

I had this Po' Boy at the most famous diner in New Orleans, Mother's on Poydras Street. Its walls are plastered with photos of famous patrons of the establishment, including several of their good ol' buddy George W Bush posing with all the staff. It's a super-popular place and I even had to queue outside before being allowed to join the queue inside to order. Patience is well rewarded here, though.

Also on the list of must-eats was fried green tomatoes. The venue for this nice appetiser was the Upperline Restaurant (from where those lovely people drove us home, which I mentioned in the previous blog posting). This dish is everywhere down here, almost always served this way with a 'shrimp remoulade' sauce on top. The thick green tomato slices were lightly battered then fried, and on their own they're a bit bland, so no wonder they always come with a sauce of some sort.

Here's the interior of the Upperline, and like so many restaurant and bar interiors through all areas we have visited so far in the US, the dominant decorating theme is 'clutter'. If there is a bit of spare wall space, stick something up there! At the Upperline it's original artworks everywhere, by a variety of artists.

Pam's appetiser consisted of spicy, deep-fried oysters (which the Upperline bills on its menu as "One of USA Today's Top New Dishes in the USA for 2007"). Pam's verdict was yum, but she couldn't quite describe the sauce, saying it was really lovely but a bit too complex to nail down what was in it. Tomato-based and nicely spicy is as close as she could get.

It doesn't look too photogenic but it was a treat. We both decided to order the duck, and for a moment, in the interests of wider Tummy Time coverage, one of us was going to try something else, but we both love duck and have barely seen it on the menu anywhere. Pam opted for the Ginger Peach sauce, and I went for the Garlic Port sauce. Neither of us loves sauces all that much, but the garlic sauce was super garlicky, which I don't like, and the peach sauce was very sweet. The duck itself was rubbed with spices, hence the 'blackened' look, the meat was juicy, very tender and not fatty at all (which is what the duck-haters always hate the most). The little pot of mash on the side was deliciously sweet sweet potato blended with chopped pecan nuts, and it was heavenly.

Our side dish was slow-cooked greens, which came to the table accompanied by a bottle of Cajun pickles. The greens were delicious but salty, as I suspect the greens were cooked with ham or bacon bones or something similar, which are high in salt.

Come dessert time and we went for the classics. I had this dish, bread pudding, one of the stand-by desserts offered in virtually all the restaurants and diners we have visited in Louisiana. Oddly enough, no two bread puddings have looked the same, but this one, a Honey Pecan Bread Pudding with Toffee Sauce is top of the list for flavour and light texture.

Pam chose pecan pie and she chose wisely. As bread puddings are ubiquitous on Louisiana menus, so too are pecan pies. We could have eaten 20 of each by now, but we are just so restrained!

Dinner time the next night wasn't all that thrilling, taking place at the Gumbo Shop in the French Quarter. I went for the Creole Combo, so I could try another Jambalaya (the blob in the centre) as well as the traditional Red Beans and Rice (on the right). Making up the numbers on the left was Shrimp Creole. This was blanded down tourist food with very mild spicing and little personality anywhere on the plate. I really should avoid combos at all times, shouldn't I?

Pam's main of blackened catfish suffered from the same disability. No spice, mild flavour, I don't know why they bother serving it this way. The good news was that, as usual, the catfish was juicy and flavoursome. This is probably the most common fish on the menu down this way, and it's a good eating fish.

The dish which saved the evening was Pam's humble side dish of corn cooked the Creole way, with a fair bit of spice, plus chopped capsicums (peppers) and onions.

Before we finish off Tummy Time 6 from New Orleans, let's go back 100 miles to New Iberia, for the Gumbo Festival which we attended just prior to coming to New Orleans. The theme this year was "Peace, Love and Make Gumbo" (I've got the T-shirt), and numerous stands made their own signs for the occasion.

An enormous crowd turned out for the festival, which lasts three whole days. This photo was taken on the morning of the third day, a Sunday, and there were four such 'streets' of stalls like this filled with people from all around the area. Streets around the venue are blocked off by police, and it's as if the whole town is here.

Sunday is devoted purely to a major Gumbo-making competition and while that yummy soup (and the buzz of the carnival) is what everyone is there for, there is so much else to see and enjoy as well, such as the delightful way so many stalls are decorated. This is the Cafe de Poulets, selling chicken gumbo.

They're serious about their hot sauces here, with dozens of different brands available, but the most famous of them all, Tabasco, was a big presence in more ways than one. If you want to buy a half-gallon flagon of hot sauce, sure! But they also were giving away teeny weeny little sampler bottles as well.

I tried all the gumbos on offer. How the system works here and at some other crowded open-air venues is that you go to a ticket stand and buy a sheet of tickets for food, and a sheet of tickets for drinks. This chicken gumbo cost three tickets. A seafood gumbo cost four. Pammy found a smoked turkey and quail gumbo, decorated with a little quail egg on top: that was four tickets. All the gumbos are served in these little polystyrene cups, and it wasn't unusual to see people wandering around balancing three of these cups in their hands as they looked for a spare table to sit down and enjoy the lot.

Two last notes, without photos, to finish off. Hash browns! How could a potato lover like me ignore them? Pam is of the opinion that there is something fundamentally strange about eating potatoes for breakfast. I'm not, and this morning I enjoyed the best hash browns of the trip so far, here at the Marriott in New Orleans. This was an irregularly shaped grated potato cake that was crispy brown on top, crispy brown underneath and softly mashed-potato-like in the centre. This is what I have always imagined hash browns to be, but as we travel this land I've discovered that any kind of breakfast potato dish, no matter how it's cooked, is called hash browns. So I have had them as little baked potatoes or pan-fried potato wedges a few times. However, the standard has been set at the Marriott and it'll be interesting to see if anyone can knock it off its perch as best hash browns ever. By the way, none have been those awful little rectangular, deep-fried bricks dished up in Australia and called hash browns. Perish the thought!

Secondly, a night to remember in the French Quarter. It may sound sacreligious while being here in New Awlins, but when we saw Cafe Giovanni offering Italian food, my brain just went to pasta. I had to have pasta, and anchovies, and olives, and olive oil, and so we dined there. The notice said "light musical entertainment" and so we thought "OK, that's a bonus".

Decorated like an upmarket bordello complete with heavy curtains in the doorway, it had a piano in the corner with a lady tickling the ivories. So far, so good. Just after the appetisers and wine arrived, she started to sing. Opera. She screeched but the crowd applauded enthusiastically.

Then a tenor appeared, walking amongst the diners singing "O Sole Mio". Not long after, to accompany our entrees, another songstress wandered amongst us singing that well-known Italian standard, Bali Hai from South Pacific. Each time the audience loved it. We were the only ones present not there for the singing.

The amusing thing about the Penne Puttanesca I ordered, which lacked in the salty, pungent olives, capers and anchovies I was dreaming of, was that they didn't offer grated parmesan on the side, as is usual in so many Italian restaurants. In this land where there's grated cheese added to virtually everything, including the salads (indeed Cafe Giovanni did have grated cheese on the bruschetta) there was no grated cheese on the side with the pasta, just a few yellow flecks of it discernible on top. Amazing.

To alleviate the threat of four tenors coming out to bellow at our desserts, we skipped the sweets, paid the bill, and left the opera lovers to enjoy their happy cultural evening. We'll never forget Cafe Giovanni!

That's it for Tummy Time 6. Next stop, Montgomery Alabama and all that southern fried chicken!

New Orleans notebook

Where do you begin with describing New Orleans? I know, just wander around, like we did, and so this posting is a bit of a wander around New Orleans.

Everywhere you go you see beads strung over trees, overhead wires, fences – anything at all it seems. And so we asked the lovely lady in a tourist info shop about the beads, and she said: "Honey, they're leftovers from the Mardi Gras. No-one ever pulls them down and so they kind of accumulate over the years. People just throw their beads in the air and they end up anywhere."

This tree on the trolley-bus line leading down to the Garden District was sagging with beady, Mardi Gras gaiety. You also see dorky tourists walking around town wearing strings of beads, even though it's not Mardi Gras time. I'm almost as bad, as I bought a Mardi Gras T-shirt yesterday with a big "Repent" message on it, but I'll save up wearing that one until I get back to the Southern Hemisphere's Sin City, where the message will no doubt be ignored.

Music is of course what New Orleans is famous for, and it really is everywhere. Down in the tourist district of the French Quarter, the police block off the majority of streets so the visitors can wander down the streets (the sidewalks are narrow), and every blocked-off street seems to have its own busker, or more often, its own busker band. This happy brass band, with a 10-year-old girl on drums, mum on clarinet, was typical. The buckets next to the soloist out front are of course for the tips for which they play.

Last night, thanks to our friends Dennis and Lorna's valuable tips on visiting New Orleans, we headed out to the Rock 'n' Bowl. Like the name says, this unusual but popular spot combines a ten-pin bowling alley with a music/dance venue, all under the one roof.

The bowling alleys are right next to the dance floor on the same level, so you can groove to the music while you watch the pins tumble. The music is so loud it easily drowns out that familiar rumble of the balls and the hollow clunking of falling pins.

Last night it was Horace Trahan and the Ossun Express doing the honours in a rocking Zydeco way, and the big crowd of enthusiastic dancers was there from the first bar of the first song. It's a fantastic venue and the atmosphere here was friendly, with all ages there having fun, from three years old to 93. That's a feature of all the dance places here: it's always all ages and everyone welcome.

Earlier that afternoon Pammy and I discovered that the famous French Quarter is much, much larger than we imagined. It stretches for a dozen blocks to the east and north from our hotel, which is right on its edge. Naturally enough all that walking and shopping took its toll, so we stopped for our first Mint Juleps of the holiday, and the bourbon content in this drink almost did us in! One is plenty...

There's a good police presence in the French Quarter (they even have a police station which sells NOPD T-shirts) but this Segway-mounted cop was the star. He was very happy to pose for a photo, and when I asked him how many officers were in the Segway section he said: "Just two, we're trying them out, but they're pretty cool." Agreed, but not sure where the prisoner goes.

One tourist guide I read suggested we "stay away from the French Quarter" and that's a mad idea. I'd totally agree about staying away from Bourbon Street (more on that in a moment) but the rest of the French Quarter is simply wonderful when it's at its best, and even when it's another tourist trap in the parts devoted to shopping for souvenirs it's still incredibly charming (and big).

As we passed beyond the shops the residential areas with their ornate ironwork and quirky decorations provided almost too many things to photograph and admire, and after a while you put down the cameras and take it all in. I could easily spend a whole day here and still find streets I hadn't been down.

This area is a classic of old-style higgildy piggeldy charm, with any possible combination of dwellings tossed together to form a streetscape.

Down the very far end of Bourbon Street, where it's mostly residential, there were lots of houses which looked like this. They were right on the sidewalk, with three or four steep steps quickly rising to the front door. And all the frontages were shuttered off from passers-by. However, as we walked up Bourbon Street in the afternoon, the appalling stench of vomit assaulted our nostrils (and not just for a few steps, as you often find in many city backstreets). This vomit-smell went on for a couple of blocks, intensifying as the endless bars appeared (already full of patrons at 3pm). It was obvious it wasn't going away, and so we escaped down a side street back into the relatively genteel, sweet-smelling charm of rows of souvenir shops selling the same crap. Bourbon Street was truly disgusting.

A far more salubrious part of town is the Garden District, which I will be doing a separate blog on tomorrow, but down in that leafy and beautiful part of town we spotted this classic example of another of New Orleans' "themes": the coming of Halloween and the locals' love of ghosts, ghouls and all things spooky. Everywhere you go, houses and gardens are being decorated for Halloween.

This door decoration is the only one like it we have seen, so it's probably hand-made, based on a theatre mask.

Skulls and skeletons aplenty, as well as lots of strands of gossamer spider webs over everything.

Turning one corner in the French Quarter and we literally were startled by the sight of these spooky greeters.

A visit to New Orleans wouldn't be complete without checking out their famous above-ground cemeteries. This is the Lafayette Number 1 Cemetery in the Garden District. Above-ground vaults and burial chambers are the norm here, as the water table in the district is very close to the surface, so digging six-feet-under just isn't an option. The Lafayette Cemetery is like its own mini suburb, with rows of vaults lined up like they were houses in a street.

Each vault houses far more than one body. This one, for example, had 27 names on the plaques, covering four generations.

And this poignant one was created as the final resting place of destitute orphan boys, and it was well decorated with fresh flowers and beads, so they are never forgotten.

This really is one of the most fascinating cities I have ever been to, and I have only been here a few days. You'd need to live here for years to even start to understand it, but let me finish with two final snippets.

First up, if you want to hear local New Orleans music played all day, you can listen to 90.7 FM, WWOZ, the radio station we have playing in our hotel room. They only play local musicians, and the content varies from Jazz through to funk and brass bands and anything else they think is cool. It really is a New Orleans soundtrack.

Secondly, we were told about WWOZ by the lovely people who drove us home from the Upperline Restaurant (which will feature in Tummy Time 6, coming to you soon on this blog). After we finished an enjoyable dinner at the Upperline, which is a few miles from our hotel, we asked the waiter to order us a taxi. The people on the table next to us (husband Grant and wife Margot and her elegant, elderly mother) said "cancel that taxi, we'll drive you back to your hotel; mum lives near there and so you're on our way".

And so they drove us home, giving us lots of tips on where to eat, what to see and even what radio station to listen to. And they were funny, and loved to talk, and were very warm and very interested in us and where we came from. Even though they had only driven us a few miles, by the time we said farewell it was as if we were seeing off old friends. They were so proud of New Orleans, and thrived on welcoming us here.

Coming up soon, gorgeous grand gardens of the Garden District, plus spicy creole food and lots more in Tummy Time 6. See you then, with beads on!