It's for no ordinary reason that New Orleans is among the most visited places on earth. It has a history. A mystifying geography. And a culture that forces you into identifying with strong human emotions of pain and pleasure, jubilation and desperation, ecstasy and wonder.
The magical charm of its voodoos, ghosts, and haunted houses coupled with the social whirls of Mardi Gras, the highest pitch and frenzy of tarantella, its spirit permeating the city throughout the year, adds spice to life.
Excited at an offer of a free trip to New Orleans we were waiting for our coach to arrive at the Holiday Inn at Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana. Our escort, John Zins was educating us on the inevitable city, in the warm sunshine rendered almost useless because the chilly breeze made us cling on to our jackets wrapping them a little more tightly around our bodies.
The highway to New Orleans floated through swamps and marshland that turned into vast lakes at places. We made our 90-mile-long journey over long bridges. The longest stretching 24 miles over Lake Pontchartrain. Early March had denuded all the tropical trees of their foliage.
New Orleans is about 200 miles off the Mississippi mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. The river with its mud-banks flows 10-15 feet above sea level. The city stands on a levee and they dig 70 feet deep foundations to erect high-rise buildings here because of a high water table. The first skyscrapers, built in the city in 1795-1811, were three-stories tall.
Long barges floating on the Mississippi packed with merchandise stand testimony to the city’s trading past. Plantations on either bank of the river were once managed like huge commercial fiefdoms owned by rich landlords who traded in indigo, cotton-ginning, tobacco, rice and employed slaves in their hundreds. The cemeteries in the city are built above the ground where the dead are buried in stacks not inside, but above the earth. Legend has it that a farmer while dying beseeched his children not to bury him underground since he had spent all his life in misery, in the marsh, mud and muck. And that he was going, he wanted some respite from the waters in his death. Since then, folklore has it, the cemeteries have always been built above the ground. New Orleans has a mystifying and awe-inspiring interest in its voodoo and haunted houses. The place has historically been associated with disease and epidemics, which the early settlers from France and Spain suffered along with the Acadians or the Cajuns – the locals. Once upon a time the city was dominated by French architecture, which later gave way to Spanish; the latter rulers ensured a systematic approach to preserving architectural impressions in keeping with the city’s history.
We first stopped at the zoo on the banks of the Mississippi, a simulated swamp with fountains and carvings as cuspy as soft tendrils. A colony of flamingos were a major attraction. An 8-feet high statue of the sitting Buddha took us by surprise in the middle of the park.
Crossing a railway track through the lush green terrain, we reached the banks of Mississippi from where we were to join a cruise to the French quarters, sailing through the Crescent Crown in a Horseshoe route. Piercing cold breeze brought black and threatening clouds from nowhere and soon it started raining. Picnickers rushed to a shelter, their beer cans literally blown off their hands by the wind. Umbrellas turned inside out and challenged their users in a chase of sorts completely drenching them in the piercing rain. Families out on a holiday packed their children and pets into waiting cars and caravans, even as half-a-dozen among us, braved the weather, clutching a pillar for support.
This article was published in The Economic Times on 27th March, 2003.
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