When it comes to serious travel-including the kind of adventurous tourism sometimes written about in these pages-you can count me out. Find me the Star Trek Travel Agency and just beam me up, out and away.
In the Big Easy, which is just the way I like it, my idea of an excursion is hopping a ride to Tipitina`s nightclub for an evening of blues or rock-the adventure comes at about 1 a.m., among the warehouses, when trying to hail a cab for the ride back.
And the only suspense I want to experience in New Orleans should come in figuring out how to avoid a flareup of gout after putting down a platter of oysters and grilled shrimp.
Last month I went where any bold wanderer would go first: the brochure rack at the concierge`s desk at my hotel. There among the assorted bus tours, guided garden walks and museum alerts was my next journey.
Having grown up in the Midwest and being a big fan of Walt Kelly`s
”Pogo” strip I decided that I would brave the elements and sign up for that afternoon`s four-hour swamp tour.
This tour is not to be confused with the extensive multi-day trip through the state`s vast Cajun country that Tribune writer Bob Cross documented in December.
All this one would take would be $35 (cash only) and a call from the concierge to the folks at Louisiana Swamp Tours in Crown Point, La., and a van would be dispatched to pick up our brave contingent for the 45-minute drive into the swamps, forest and waterways of the Sportsman`s Paradise state. That`s it: 45 minutes, barring traffic, there and back, and more than two hours on the boat-and you can bring along refreshments.
At 12:30 p.m. sharp, George Turner-an affable cotton-topped part-time comedian and guide-showed up at the Marriott on Canal Street to pick up his charges. The afternoon was a bit crisp and only intermittently sunny, a pleasure for winter-bound Yankees but hardly shirt-sleeve weather for locals, and we were advised not to expect to see the chicken-chomping alligators featured in the colorful brochure. Unlike tourists, these and other swamp dwellers hibernate for the winter.
Guide`s bayou schtick
We would not be deterred, however, and George filled the 23-mile trip to Crown Point reciting well-rehearsed historical factoids and jokes, and pointing out geographical highlights. Like most other large metropolitan areas, New Orleans is a vast sprawl, pushing hard against the levees built to keep the swamps out of the below-sea-level city.
Litter and discordant billboards competed with the scenery-seasonally brown wetlands and denuded forests, mostly-for the attention of the passengers, all of whom would have been ecstatic to discover a 12-foot bull alligator walking across the median strip.
Soon enough, we pulled off Louisiana Highway 45 at Crown Point, into Jean Lafitte National Park, prompting George to relate the story of how the old pirate teamed with Old Hickory to send the bloody Brits packing back in 1812. He also mentioned that we soon would visit an area known as Treasure Island, where Lafitte`s crew was known to hide-and lose-its plunder.
The road to the tour headquarters paralleled Bayou Barataria and the Intracoastal Waterway, a vast stream that allows ships and barges to move from New York to Florida to Mexico-if they care to-pretty much out of harm`s way.
Arriving early, we had time to sit on the bank of the Intracoastal, pet the baby nutria at the dock or wander over to the trailer that housed the C&D Snack Shop for a bowl of jambalaya or Cajun sausage. The chief cook and bottle washer, Doris Dardar, invited us to sign her guest book-the Jan. 23 page already had entries from France, England, New Zealand, Italy, Minnesota, Georgia and Texas-and explained how she opened the restaurant a couple of months after Louisiana Swamp Tours started three years ago.
The swamp-tour industry in the state started 12 years ago-about the same time the local oil and fishing interests started feeling a major economic pinch-with legendary snake hunter ”Alligator Annie” Miller launching the first business from her home base in the Terrebonne Swamp, west of Houma.
There now are a dozen or so such tours in south Louisiana, about a half-dozen of which are within an hour`s drive from New Orleans ur guide, Capt. Terry Verrette, who was in camouflage gear and itching to be off on his busman`s holiday fishing trip in the bayous. The former oil worker took the time to describe how the village had grown from an isolated fishing and hunting center to a place where folks from around the world are drawn for a brief taste of Acadiana.
Verrette said the swamp, like Northern locales, had four distinct seasons with different environmental conditions, animals and plants evident during each. Dardar then pulled out a `gator tail, ready for cooking and possibly caught by the captain, just to demonstrate how the relationship of man and nature is experienced daily in an area so close to the mostly pre-packaged big city.
And it was easy to feel as if we were a thousand miles from the French Quarter, as we pulled from the dock and headed into Bayou Barataria from the Intracoastal.
Lure of the swamp
This day, our genial captain was Milton Walker, also attired in camouflage gear. He quickly pointed out the immediate points of interest-which included ancient Cemetery Mound, on which it is reported that Hank Williams Sr. penned ”Jambalaya” and ”I`m So Lonesome I Could Cry”-and offered a seminar on the passing ships and on local fishing, shrimping and crabbing techniques.
Before too long, however, the captain was summoned back to the dock to pick up some other, late-arriving Inadvertent Tourists.
The cruise into the Treasure Island area and the nearby network of swamps then took about another 20 minutes, during which a passie house, with no heat, running water or electricity, sitting directly below a huge high-tension wire platform.
Walker kept up an informative commentary, while also using his sharp hunter`s eye to find critters we might otherwise have missed. There were a few magnificent great blue herons-in flight and at leisure-crowned-neck egrets, playful kingfishers and eerie turkey vultures, all sharing a home among the bountiful vegetation and the occasional oil and gas rigs.
Gators surface
Against all odds, and only because it was momentarily sunny, Walker spotted a 5-foot-long alligator replenishing its ”solar batteries” on the water`s edge. Normally, the reptile would be buried deep in the mud below water, but something told it to surface and provide a thrill for us tourists- and it posed for a good 10 minutes, during which we learned a lot about alligators, snakes and other swamp-dwellers.
Later, Walker spotted the snout of another `gator poking up through a suffocating tangle of hibiscus and duckweed, not far from a feeding heron and egret.
Deeper into the swamp, Walker asked us if we knew what the loneliest body of water in the world was called. The answer: Bayou Self, which we were just about to navigate through.
The narrow sliver of slow-moving brown water was draped by a canopy of gently waving Spanish moss, hanging from the branches of expansive old trees. The effect was hypnotic and the view, looking ahead from the boat, almost indescribably beautiful.
As we slowly moved along, Walker cautioned us to grab the moss only if we were sure a snake wasn`t resting in the branch above it. This was said as a pronounced warning, as opposed to the kind of witty banter he`d been employing throughout the tour.
Stopping in a cypress grove, the captain further explained the ecology of the swamp and the threats to it; described the lease- and hunting-rights agreements of local residents; and provided a graphic explanation of how one goes about nabbing an alligator for its skin and meat.
Too soon thereafter, we snuck out another bayou and headed back down the busy Intracoastal toward the dock, where handshakes and photo opportunities were exchanged.
The Italian boys hopped back in the cab for the ride back to the French Quarter, the driver holding a bough of spicy bay leaves snatched from a bountiful laurel tree in the swamp. The rest of us found George Turner`s van and headed back to the city.
George popped into his tape deck a cassette by ”Cajun ambassador”
Felician Cocodrie, a comedian he must have listened to hundreds of times. We all giggled at the adventures of the comic`s various characters and ethnic stereotypes, and especially the patois and vocal mannerisms employed to tell the stories.
But when the tale of the ”world`s loneliest body of water: Bayou Self”
came through the speakers, we passengers looked at each other with a smile and thought back to our captain and his geography lesson, dispensed on a postcard- perfect bayou, within a hop-skip-and-jump from the poor souls we left behind.
