See you later alligator, hopefully
How hard is it to spot an alligator in what’s meant to be their home? Almost impossible, finds Pamela Wade.
If it hadn’t been for Norbert, I wouldn’t have known to look for the alligators. He said they lurk under the trees where the roseate spoonbills nest, waiting for clumsy fledglings to fall into the swamp. The colony was right by the railway track, so I pressed up to the viewing car windows, eager to see some gator action. There was none. It was to become a theme.
I was on a loop through Louisiana, the first leg by train from Houston, over the border in Texas. Norbert got on board at Beaumont, part of Amtrak’s Trails and Rails service, clutching beaver and muskrat pelts, a plastic snake.
Eager to share his knowledge as a park ranger, he narrated the rest of the trip to Lafayette, pointing out rice fields, oil refineries, the crossed pistols motif on some bridge railings, a nod to the real-life pirates of the Caribbean of a century ago who also prowled the rivers.
Leaving Norbert behind, I got off in Lafayette, a pretty, historic university town. Kelly, who picked me up, cut through the university campus to show me the cypress-ringed swamp where alligators live.
Occasionally they escape and add some excitement to the students’ studies: posted under the library’s Facebook photo of the latest lassoed beast was the comment ‘‘Y’all need to build a higher wall before someone gets ate’’. It was dark. I didn’t see them.
Lafayette is New Orleans-lite: all the good stuff, without the big-city grunge. Food and music rule, and at Randol’s Restaurant and Dance Hall they overlapped. I ate deep-fried crab cakes in hot sauce and watched grey-headed dancers swirling and dipping to the music of a Cajun band.
Cajun music is lively and toe-tapping; Cajun food is where that energy comes from. Fish or meat in richly sauced one-dish recipes are classic, and on Marie’s cheerful Cajun Food Tour we tasted a menuful. Last before the sweet, buttery bread pudding at Poor Boy’s Riverside Inn were the sticky Swamp Legs at the Bon Temps Grill. We all dived in and, while the others ate their first alligator, the bones proved that mine was duck.
Nearby is the Atchafalaya Swamp, the largest in the US, and I took a tour with Coerte and his son in their boat. Huge expanses of glossy water reflected cypress stumps twiggy with the nests of ospreys.
Pink spoonbills and white wood storks flew low over floating islands of purple hyacinths as Coerte told swamp stories. Earlier, rains had flooded the gators’ sunbathing banks and they skulked, invisible in the dark water. Resigned, I reboarded the train for New Orleans.
The Crescent City is tacky and beautiful, ramshackle and elegant, rough and cultured, and fascinating. From rowdy Bourbon St to the respectful solemnity of the National World War II Museum, from white marble cities of vaulted tombs to the brightly painted shotgun houses of the Faubourg Marigny, from shrimp po’boys to beignets served under drifts of icing sugar, I was enchanted.
It’s full-on, though, so it was more as a country breather rather than a last chance at spotting alligators that I took a half-day tour to the nearby Jean Lafitte National Park. But Captain Jerry hadn’t even cast off for our cruise through the bayous before I saw my first, real alligator, heading straight for our flat-bottomed boat. After so many disappointments, I wasn’t going to complain that it was scarcely more than a metre long.
And, it turned out, the first of many, all illegally trained by sneaky offerings of marshmallows to arrow out of the reeds towards the boat. As we glided along the winding waterways past creepy swamp shacks, Spanish moss dangling from the trees, they swam effortlessly alongside, cold eyes regarding us, scaly tails flicking back and forth. One old bruiser even nuzzled the boat with his blunt snout.
Jerry got us closer still. First he produced a huge skull to hand around. And then he spirited out of a cupboard an actual living gator. Of course it was a baby, soft-skinned and perfect, jaws taped shut, a selfie prop thankfully, almost big enough to be released back into the tannin-stained waters where it belonged.
Alligator obsession satisfied, I continued my Louisiana loop by crossing the extraordinary Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, all 38 kilometres of it. The longest continuous bridge in the world, it barrels in a dead straight line north from New Orleans deep into plantation country.
Though their estates have shrunk, leafy avenues of live oaks still lead to beautiful antebellum mansions. Inside each is a wealth, literally, of imported antiques, crystal chandeliers and luxuries, and, at The Myrtles, a suite upholstered in minute petit point embroidery. Here Miss Connie, resplendent in gown and shawl, painted a vivid picture of balls in the living room, doors open to the warm night.
The information was more practical at Frogmore, a still-functioning cotton plantation. Riverboats, boll weevils, share-cropping, Civil War and slavery are all part of the estate’s past, embedded in its original buildings and machinery.
Louisiana’s history isn’t all grim: Monroe’s Biedenharn Museum celebrates the first Coca-Cola bottling enterprise, the company’s profits transmuted into a stylishly beautiful house with the unexpected feature of an extensive bible collection. Nowhere does history like Poverty Point, however. A World Heritage site, it traces human occupation back more than 11 centuries. Archaeologists are still finding artefacts from a civilisation of hunter-gatherers who erected extensive earthworks up to 21 metres high. They knew what they were doing when it came to hunting, too. They ate alligators.