New Orleans - the good and the horrendous

Ian Martin put it (naturally) so well: "Jazz is just what capitalism plays when it's trying to be sophisticated. Ignore it. [But] how can you 'ignore' jazz? It's like someone else's sugar-coked toddler in the corner, showing off, shitting herself, dribbling everywhere, noisily demanding everyone's attention and approval. Hey, I am jazz! I have come to fill your holiday space with my wabbeda wabbeda tish tish ga-blap bap tiddly piddly drivelly meaningless squeaky shrieky pish pish drr-bap bollocks."

I've never been a jazz fan. Loathe the saxophone with a passion. Not keen on most brass instruments. Like music to have a discernable tune. So I was a bit apprehensive about coming to New Orleans. With good reason, it turned out: jazz is everywhere, from people organising their own private mini parades along the middle of the street complete with cop on motorbike and uniformed brass band, to live performances in every bar in town and all around the streets, night and day, to the musak in every lift. For people like me, it's a real burden - so it's just as well that the city has so much else to enjoy.

For a start, there's the pretty, pretty French/Greek/Victorian/Italian/Spanish/Georgian-flavoured architecture, with so much colour and decoration, whether grand or modest. One good way to enjoy it is to take an open-top bus tour of the city (of any city, actually: such an effective and effortless way to get a - literal - overview of a place). The Ho-Ho one in New Orleans includes free walking tours, so I followed Jamie on a 45-minute stroll around the treacherously broken pavements of the Garden District. 

John Goodman lives here, and Nick Cage and Sandra Bullock have houses that we saw too, but most of the interest is in the lovely Historic Register mansions in their neat gardens, and the random facts dropped into the commentary - Nola has 80 official parades a year and in the two busiest weeks of the Mardi Gras season there are twelve a day. No wonder there are shiny beads hanging from so many trees.

Another tour was a self-guided one of the Lafayette Cemetery #1, which reminded me of both Buenos Aires and Paris with its walled city of tombs overhung by trees (no below-ground burial with a water-table this high). Here I was seized upon by a prowling reflexologist, who had my sandal off in seconds to knead my clammy foot as he listed all the connected organs. Unexpected, but not unpleasant, and he was easily shaken off. [Only years later it has occurred to me that perhaps it was not my pleasure he was focused on *cough*]

I wandered the French Quarter tour by myself, and it was just delightful. That's the beauty of a grid system, of course, especially with an unchallenging 11 blocks to the mile; plus, totally flat. Let's not overlook the temperature, however, hovering around 33 degrees; or the humidity, in the upper 80s. There was sweat involved, certainly. But it was easy to explore, and there was lots to discover.

Like the Napoleon House, for instance: reputedly built as a refuge for the Emperor, whose small foot, sadly, never crossed its threshold. He's nevertheless a presence inside, however, his bust perched above the bar (of course it's a bar now) and portraits hung all over the walls (including a print of David's famous Crossing the Alps painting, an original of which *cough* I saw recently at Chateau Malmaison in Normandy).

Other Nola must-dos I knocked off included the French market and Café du Monde, where tired-looking waitresses hauled trays of café au lait and beignets to the crowded tables for fat tourists to scoff down to the last wet fingerful of scooped-up icing sugar (which lay in white drifts under the tables). 

At the Presbytère museum in Jackson Square I was fascinated and impressed by the Katrina exhibition, which pulled no punches - actually, it clearly expressed the city's resentment at FEMA's totally inadequate response to the disaster - and was very well presented, including lots of personal testimony and video.

And I ventured out at night to explore the live music at the bars in Frenchman's Street, hoping for variety but, on this night at least, finding just jazz, jazz and more jazz. Damn that Adolphe Sax!

Feeling responsible

Sometimes I wonder whether I've got this blog back to front. That it's not about going places and finding connections with it for ever after. That, actually, my going somewhere is the kiss of death for that place and it is automatically doomed to suffer some sort of disaster in fairly short order. Fires, floods, earthquakes, shootings, terrorist attacks - they've all happened in places I'd recently visited.

Louisiana's on my mind, of course: much of it under water right now, even more than normal for such a swampy place. Even though disastrous floods are pretty much a news staple these days, just the location changing, the footage of brown water right up to the eaves of houses makes pretty grim viewing. And by now everyone must have seen that amazing rescue from a sinking car of not only the woman driver, but her little dog as well. I see that Lafayette and New Iberia have been badly affected, the Vermilion River very far from living up to its name. I'm wondering about the beautiful plantation house I visited in New Iberia, Shadows-on-the-Teche, built right next to the bayou which even when I was there was running pretty high.

I've just been writing about Louisiana this week, about the loop I took through the state, by train from Houston down to Lafayette, and then on to New Orleans, and by bus up north through St Francisville and Alexandria and Shreveport back into Texas at Dallas. Water was a constant all the way: swamps, rivers, bayous, lakes. Recent rains meant I didn't see any alligators in the Atchafalaya Swamp because all their sunbathing banks were under water - I can only imagine now how high the water must be.

I read about a woman trapped in her house who battled for ages to break through the wall to escape, using just a screwdriver and a saw. Crumbs, having been to the Katrina exhibition at the Presbytere in New Orleans, even I know you need to keep an axe in the attic in Louisiana. If only to beat off the gators...

Super Bowl Monday

It was both a trip back in time today, and also into an alternate reality - one where I am interested in sport. Specifically, the weird world of NFL, where bulked-up real-life avatars with helmet heads run around on artificial grass in a strange sort of choreography, apparently avidly followed by millions.

The reason I was nominally one of them was an out-of-the-blue, but very welcome, invite from Brand USA to the launch of Louisiana's new 'Feed Your Soul' promotion. Regular😄readers will recall that, having been to New Orleans for IPW in 2016, after spending a few days exploring Lafayette beforehand, I am both very familiar with, and a huge fan of, Louisiana cuisine. Sadly, FISH restaurant on Auckland's waterfront couldn't come up with any really authentic dishes, but they did their best, and I tottered away after a delicious lunch very satisfied - and also clutching a gifted table flower arrangement which coincidentally matched the top I was wearing. I hadn't actually registered that gold, purple and green are the Mardi Gras colours, so that was fortuitous. Shame the receptionist who took this photo as I left was even less on the ball than me.

The Super Bowl game (taking place in the New Orleans Superdome, the Philadelphia Eagles v Kansas City Chiefs, for readers as vague about such things as I am) was live on a big screen above us as we - other travel writers and reporters, Brand USA reps, the Australian promotors Gate7, travel agents - sat and ate and chatted about all sorts of things, and occasionally glanced up to see what the score was. Apparently it was not an exciting game, the Chiefs falling well short of what was required to secure their three-peat and, according to the Americans in the room, the play overall was less than gripping. Can't say it was much of a disappointment to me. I preferred to remember my own time in the Superdome, for the IPW opening, when there was music of all sorts, ditto dance and food, and finally indoor fireworks.

What was lovely about today (which really was Monday because we're ahead on time here in NZ, as well as on much else) was being able to share stories and impressions of our various Louisiana experiences (including my terrifying self-drive from Lafayette to Avery Island and - thankfully still in one piece - back again); to envy the lucky writer soon to head off to take part in a Mardi Gras parade; and to get a taste of the Before Times, when events like this were regular, and often accompanied by similar invites to me. Sigh.

Laissez les bon temps rouler - encore une fois

Today New Zealand enters its fourth week of Level 4 lockdown, with 9 deaths recorded and a total of around 1400 Covid-19 cases, half of whom have recovered. Level 3 is looking likely - time to think about work again...

A couple of days ago, there was a first; and also quite likely to be a last - for some time, anyway. The Herald sent me a payment for a travel story I haven't even written yet. That's unheard of, in my experience, which previously has been: submit story/have it accepted/wait 𝓍 amount of time to see it published (record: three years)/submit invoice/wait another month for the pay round to process it/finally receive the money. Not exactly conducive to peace of mind/physical survival if I was relying on that as my sole income - especially considering the standard word rate has almost halved since I first started. As I always say, about travel writing: it is (or was) a great lifestyle, but no way to make a living. 

I don't entirely understand why this particular payment has happened. We all know, or should, that newspapers have always relied much more on advertising than selling copies to fund them (seen those early front pages entirely comprised of classified ads?) which is why they're on their last legs now. Facebook, Google* and Trade Me/Ebay etc have stolen all that income. And currently even the small businesses that today make up the majority of their advertising revenue have faded away during the lockdown, so hundreds of news media employees have lost their jobs, those that were spared are suffering pay cuts, and their overall future is very uncertain. All this, at a time when people want more real journalism than ever, and readership is soaring.

The travel section is heavily influenced each week by the ever-changing advertising content - the lead stories are selected to support full-page ads. The account manager is therefore presumably as important as the actual editor to the supplement's health. How it all works, I have no idea - but, presumably, this time the agency behind the planned Southern States issue was a lot more upfront with their funding than usual, and the Herald has kindly passed that on to those of us providing the bits that readers actually read, rather than turn the page on (I'm assuming that they're like me: literally blind to all advertising (ssshh, don't tell them)). Of course, all this was before the travel industry died, world-wide, and NZ locked its borders till who knows when.

So, what will my story, when the travel section revives, be about? Lafayette, Louisiana. I spent three days there en route to IPW in New Orleans in 2016 (this year's event has, of course, been cancelled) and have written about it only twice since. The first thing I remember about the stay is my overwhelming feeling of sheer relief at returning my hire car intact (both the car and me) after driving myself around on the wrong side of the road with no gps support (SO many u-turns!). Once I'm past that though, I remember lots of lovely things about the town. Pretty historic buildings, friendly people on the street, all sorts of new and delicious foods, such great dancing, a new appreciation for air conditioning (it was June), and far fewer alligators than expected.

I remember the olde-worlde charm of Coerte Voorhies with his waxed white moustache, and wonder now whether his son Kim is still happy with his choice of president ("He's crazy, but at least he's not a politician"). Is Terry still playing cheerful music with his Zydeco Bad Boys band at the Blue Moon Saloon, or is it locked down too? How about all those oldies I saw strutting their stuff so energetically at Randol's Restaurant and Dance Hall? Are they pining away in enforced isolation? Did the Old Tyme Grocery manage to sell their standard 2,000 grilled shrimp po'boys every Friday through Lent this year? Has Zachary the young fish-counter managed to hold out against all those fierce husband-hunting mothers with unmarried daughters? Only three days, but vivid. Thanks, Lafayette.

*UPDATE: And today Google announces its Journalism Emergency Relief Fund! Kind thought, somewhat undermined by their attitude to paying (ie not paying) their taxes anywhere.

T to Z - the end, finally (when else?)

For my final cheat, from the future (ie exactly four years later, on the day when I have taken my first sea swim of the summer) here is the end of the alphabet list, started so very long ago (but points, please, for being so conscientious/anal about completing it).

T for 30,000 feet: We went decimal here in NZ way back in 1968, but there’s no way aeroplane cruising height would ever sound right in metres. And there’s also no way anything to do with flying has ever been ordinary for me, even when I was zipping all over the place, sometimes with trips back-to-back; and even when I was cramped in economy, in the middle seat, with big men hogging the arm rests each side - though, obviously, turning left or, better still, entering over a higher air bridge, to be wafted to my own personal space was infinitely preferable. But wherever my seat was located, gazing out of the window down 30,000ft to countries so far below, or even just the sea, or clouds, was a miracle I never tired of.

U for Ushuaia: As in, “Where’s that? I’ve never heard of it”. It’s a big category now, of odd places I’ve been sent on famils; and if you add in the ones I’d only vaguely heard of, and others I knew of but had never thought of visiting - well, that’s my entire travel-writing career, right there. And that, of course, is/was the joy of it. Easter Island, Antarctica, Iceland, Cape Cod, Galapagos, Shanghai, Rwanda, Portugal, Tiwi Islands, North Vietnam, Jaipur, Skye… so many wonderful destinations I would never have thought of visiting, wafted there and shown around, connecting, everything done for me - fabulous. What luck. I am so grateful.

V for Vienna: As in, never got there, sigh. Nor Tuscany, Neuschwanstein, Switzerland, Spain, and many other obvious places that you’d just assume any decent travel writer would have gone to. Mea culpa. Well, not really mine, but there you go. But I did tick off 60 countries, which is at least a satisfyingly round number.

W for WiFi: How wonderful that this now-indispensable part of daily life did become available wherever I went, for free! In the early days, though, it was rare, and SO expensive, and limited, and slow and unreliable, and often only to be found in a hotel’s lobby. Talk about primitive! But now it’s everywhere, even on planes, so there’s no excuse not to be in touch, not to file work, not to be able to find out anything… Hm, may you get what you want, eh? Classic curse.

X for X-ray: It’s astonishing to be able remember flying before X-rays were an unavoidable part of the process of boarding an aeroplane - but it wasn’t really that long ago. Unibomber ring a bell, anyone? And then of course 9/11 brought in the body scanner. It’s a chore, certainly, queuing with the hand luggage, and always annoying when people ahead of you don’t know the drill, or just forget. But as for setting off the scanner, for me - never. In compensation, though, I’m always picked out for the bag explosives sniffer. It happened so often that I asked once, why? And, as suspected, the sniffer person admitted it’s because I look amenable/accommodating/meek and unlikely to give them a hard time. Hijackers, take note.

Y for Yum: Food. In my day-to-day life it’s mostly just a tiresome necessity, nothing more than fuel - but on my hosted visits to so many countries it was an immensely important part of each day’s itinerary. Of course I was served some weird stuff - huhu grubs, green ants, coconut crab, guinea pig - but also fabulously delicious dishes, beautifully cooked and presented, with carefully-selected wines, all consumed with good company at the end of a colourful day. “My mouth is watering now” is a frequently-repeated sentence I’ve used here, writing about yet another chef’s triumph.Or even just Dat Dog’s loaded fries, in New Orleans.

Z for Zealand, as in New: Though I have met a few people on my travels who have never heard of my country, it’s very much less the case these days. We take pride in punching above our weight, and the world is better off for us in many ways - electric fence, disposable syringe, jogging, the flat white and pavlova (shut up, Aussies) and much, much more, big and small. We have certainly been discovered now, and have more nationalities living here than just about anywhere else. There are still only about 5 million of us, though, in a country with an area bigger than the UK. So we have it all: big cities, little towns, lots of empty space for exploring, and just about every sort of scenery you could name (Outback excepted), unspoilt and SO beautiful. I’ve travelled a lot (proof? You’re reading it) and I am deeply sorry that all that seems to have been brought to an end, through no fault of my own - but if I have to be stuck anywhere? New Zealand/Aotearoa is the place to be.

States of flux

A week is a long time in politics, I believe, but it's no time at all on a blog, especially when there's a big trip looming and essential pre-travel tasks to be ticked off. Like throwing out a bunch of ancient lipsticks, tidying my shoes, knocking off a bit of pruning, that sort of thing. There have also been some industry events to attend: promoting the Southern Great Barrier Reef, tramping in Hawaii, the latest developments in New Caledonia. All possibilities, all promising, and all - this bit is important - offering drinks, canapes and the opportunity to do some schmoozing, gossiping and catching up with travel buddies. (I've also, I have to confess, been lured away from blogging by the siren call of Instagram, which also has the novelty factor at the moment.)

The States seem to be something of a trend with my colleagues at the moment - road trips particularly. RVing through Dakota and neighbouring states, for example; and a C&W/jazz tour from Nashville to New Orleans. I haven't been to any of those places but, having written all my various commissioned stories, I've been toying with some unused material from my tour of Washington state a couple of years ago. It's impossible, and undesirable, to cram everything on a trip into a single story; and given the smallish market for travel in NZ, it's inevitable that the suppliers of some of the elements of a busy famil will, after a while, write off that Kiwi free-loader as a bad job. And then, months - years - later, out of the blue they'll get a pdf or a link to a story that features their business and all will be well with the world again. That's how I like to look at it, anyway.

So, the lovely people at the Whale Museum on San Juan Island will finally get their due; and that very comfortable apartment in Friday Harbor with the great view over all the boats; and the boyishly enthusiastic directors of the quirky museums at Bellingham and Yakima Valley; and the nice man who attempted to teach me to fly-fish at the Canyon River Ranch on a sunny autumn afternoon... But not the people who took me on a walking ghost tour of Yakima, because that was just silly (though amazingly, it's still running) - ghosts, pft. You might just as well try to whip up interest in vampires or zombies. Oh, wait...

Doubtful about Tomas

More cyclones. This time Tomas is pummelling Fiji with even more force than Katrina in New Orleans: they were forecasting 250kmh winds. Having seen what around 180kmh gales did to Aitutaki, it's pretty chilling to think what could have happened to places like this village in the Yasawas, where the people live in simple huts right beside the beach.

We visited on a Captain Cook cruise, in a small ship that even so looked huge and other-worldly, gleaming white and modern in the bay, as out of place as the USS Enterprise. We were made very welcome everywhere we called in - Fijian people are so friendly - and a highlight of our week was, as elsewhere in the Pacific, going to a church service where the windows were open, the air was scented, chickens scratched around outside, and the unaccompanied singing was so loud and forceful that it sent shivers down your spine. We went to a school, too...

>>> ...Captivating though it was, the snorkelling was for me the supporting act of the cruise’s features: the best part was visiting the villages and seeing close-up how the Fijian people live. It's a laid-back life: temperatures of 30+ degrees don't encourage industriousness, and the main impression is one of languour. With a sea full of fish out the front, coconut palms fringing the beach and chickens scratching under the breadfruit trees in the village, it might seem that most needs are met without effort: but as our hospitality manager Trevor explained, a diet rich in starch and fat has serious health consequences that reduce the average life expectancy considerably. So it's a short life – but on the face of it a happy one, where the priority is on family and friends, and where it is not a twee homily that a stranger is a friend you haven’t met, but a fact. There can be few other places where visitors are made to feel so welcome.

This was most evident on our visit to the second village where the highlight was a concert put on by the children of the four-classroom school. A plain and unadorned building on the far side of a grassy playground where a single netball hoop stood in a circle of hard-packed dirt and a volleyball net drooped between its poles, the classrooms were straight out of the 1930s. Bare wooden walls were covered in scrawled pictures (this was a primary school – few children get the chance to take their education further) and battered desks with lift-up lids were stacked neatly to one side for the holidays. Piles of exercise books covered in brown paper awaited their owners and on the blackboard were education objectives in beautiful cursive writing. Although it was the holidays, a group of around twenty children from 5 to 12 years of age waited to entertain us with enthusiastic renditions of songs and nursery rhymes. It was odd to realise that ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ was as exotically unreal to these children as ‘Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross’.

Afterwards, my hand was seized by 5 year-old Lusi in a pink frock, who hauled me away on a tour of her school, of which she was as proud as any new entrant anywhere. Several of the passengers had brought gifts of stationery, to the delight of the teacher: "We never see pens," she gasped...

[Pub. Press 19/12/05]

All hail the travel agent

I hate this woman. Or, rather, I hate the TV ad that this actress appears in so much that I can't grab the remote fast enough to mute her whiny voice. What is even more alienating than that though, is what she's saying, which is dissing travel agents for being lazy, ignorant and incompetent, unable to access flight information that this clever woman can use WebJet to discover instantly.

I think travel agents are wonderful. To be able, as they do, to bring together so much disparate knowledge about places literally all over the world, from nuts and bolts to aspiration/inspiration, tailor it to the client, organise it all into a simple format, and then be there as back-up in case of unpredictable hiccups or even out-and-out disasters - well, that's so very admirable. I've worked with both high-end operations, like World Journeys, World Expeditions and Adventure World, as well as your literal high-street outlet like House of Travel, and have been impressed every time.

This year, for example, it was Marlene at Adventure World who put me in a place and at a time to experience the entire year's most unforgettable moment: standing just metres away from a wild elephant which was straddling the path between the restaurant and the bar at Royal Zambezi lodge in Zambia - a country I'd never even thought of visiting, until she slipped it into my South Africa itinerary.

Travel agents have in the recent past taken me effortlessly to Galapagos, Easter Island, Kakadu, Iguassu Falls, Machu Picchu: the travel so enjoyable because it was so stress-free. I knew I was in the hands of experts, and that everything would go smoothly. And it did.

Compare that with the trips I did this year that were DIY. They were only around NZ and to Tahiti and Hawaii, but the time and effort it took to piece them together, coupled with my perpetual mistrust in the value and workability of the final itinerary really did suck away a lot of the enjoyment of the trips. Instead of being proud of having done it all ourselves, I was suspicious of how much better - and, yes, more cheaply - it all might have been, if done with more inside knowledge and expertise.

So, out of this year's trips - horse-riding the Coromandel Peninsula, self-driving around New Zealand, ditto with exponentially higher stress levels in Louisiana, attending a conference in New Orleans, swanning through South Africa (and Zambia), sunning myself in Tahiti, swimming in Hawaii - it was the ones that were sorted by travel agents that were by far the most satisfying and the most fun. Suck on that, WebJet.

Er, wow.

Well, there you go. Connections. Popping up everywhere, but sometimes in disguise. To be honest, it can be confusing - like today. I was dutifully doing a piece for a Sunday paper's series ("World Famous in New Zealand" - it's a thing here, an in-joke but at the same time just a little bit serious) about the World of WearableArts Museum in Nelson, where I visited nearly two years ago now. It's commonly known as WOW and regular readers (that's just you, Queen) will remember that earlier this year I went down to Wellington for the annual WOW Awards Show.

Anyway, WOW the museum is in Nelson, combined with a classic car museum (seen my share of those this year, too) and it's pretty good. Though the show is dazzling, it's interesting to get up close to the costumes to see how they're made and to appreciate the finicking detail. So I went to visit their website to check something, and up pops WOW! Children's Museum in Lafayette. Wow! I naturally thought, how about that? I wonder if it's the same museum I went to on my last afternoon in that town as I wandered along Jefferson Blvd, mostly to cool off in the aircon because June in Louisiana is pretty oppressive (that's condensation on the outside of my hotel window, below). It was called the Discovery Science museum then, and was notable for its fossils and space exploration exhibition but mainly, as far as I was concerned, for its Golden Knee Spider, which had just moulted.

So I clicked on it, and turns out it's not Lafayette LA at all, but Lafayette CO, which I didn't know existed, but which is still a connection because only this afternoon I've been looking at Things to Do in Denver. I'm going there in May, you see, my third visit to the gigantic IPW tourism convention which I was in Lafayette LA en route to, for my second time, when it was held in New Orleans two years ago. So that's not quite a circle - more of a squiggle - but I still reckon the ends join up kind of satisfactorily.

Trained to expect the worst

Anyone who’s travelled with Amtrak knows that the schedule, while not quite a work of fiction, is more of a suggestion than a real timetable. So it was that I sat for over an hour in the railway station at Houston waiting for the Sunset service that runs from Los Angeles to New Orleans. It was, as old hands like me pretty much expected, delayed by having to cede precedence to freight trains (whose companies actually own the tracks, unlike Amtrak which just has access); an even older hand than me was just glad it wasn’t three hours late, like the last time she travelled.

Never mind. My first trip was only Houston to Lafayette, a journey of about 5 hours, leaving at around lunchtime. At first it’s a bit disappointing that there’s no wifi, but it doesn’t take long to get into the vibe: mining the depths of your music collection, gazing at the scenery, eavesdropping and people-watching – like the two old black men yarning away, one of them explaining in friendly tones that the other has “misconstrued” what he said; the lady sitting down in the lounge car and praying for a solid three minutes before starting on her lunch; the National Park service guys with their travelling exhibition of coyote, otter and beaver pelts, turtle shells and alligator skulls (Norbert was particularly chatty).

Time passed, as did the scenery: lots of trees, some farmland, much rice (who knew?), a huge and horrible refinery, rivers and swamps all muddy brown from recent rains and harbouring ‘gators – not that I saw any, though one man did. We stopped and waited, for freight trains, for the new crew to turn up at Beaumont, for more time to pass. The train hooted, classically and frequently. And eventually, and only an hour late, we got to Lafayette, a pretty little town of around 200,000 souls all told, which I will explore over the next couple of days. So y’all come back now, hear?

Hot, then warm

I'd like points for being brave today, please. With sweaty palms, breathing deeply, unaided by a satnav and with only a rudimentary map, I drove out of Lafayette along Highway 90 to Avery Island, my peace of mind not aided by signs reading 'Prison area. Do not pick up hitchhikers' and 'Hurricane Escape Route'; and billboards picturing grinning lawyers asking 'Car wreck? 18-wheeler wreck?' It was a tense 40 minutes of muttering "Keep right, keep right".

But I got there without incident and, crossing a bridge patrolled by turkey vultures, entered the neat grounds of the Tabasco factory. This is the only place in the world where Tabasco is made and bottled, so that (inevitably) long-lived bottle in your pantry came from this sprawling brick building. The Queen's a fan of the hot sauce - her By Appointment crest is beside the door, looking somewhat out of place. It's a self-guided tour from pepper plants in the greenhouse through the process to the end product, very informative, if a little repetitive. It's a simple recipe: chilli pulp, salt, three years in the barrel, add vinegar and there you have it: Tabasco sauce, "Defending the world against bland food". I was pleasantly surprised to discover in the inevitable gift shop - Tabasco dog collar, anyone? Umbrella? - that jalapeno-flavoured icecream is actually rather delicious. I had seconds of samples (not such a fan of the raspberry chipotle though).

The nearby Jungle Gardens are lush and neat - a bit too neat, since it was probably the grass-mowing team that scared away the resident alligators I was hoping to see. There were plenty of birds, though - herons and egrets - enjoying the nesting facilities provided for them by one of the McIlhenney family.

Not too far away in New Iberia is what Coerte on my swamp tour was adamant is the most authentic ante-bellum plantation house in the country: Shadows-on-the-Teche. Four generations of the Weeks family lived here, the remaining member dying the day after the estate was accepted by the Historic Buildings Trust. I say estate: it was once 138 acres, part of a much larger plantation; but now it's just the house and garden beside the sliding brown waters of the bayou, the land sold off, the town having grown around it.

Inside (no photos allowed, sadly) it's really attractive and full of beautiful antiques: I would love to have Mary's elegant bedroom and sunny study; maybe not the mahogany commode imported from France, though. These mansions were built so that you have to go outside to move between rooms and to use the stairs, giving each room doors to stand open for ventilation. The pillared porch is wide, the big live oak trees nearby are hung with Spanish moss, and it's easy to get a sense of the comfortably cultured life that was lived here. It was a salutary reminder, though, to find on Mary's tombstone in the garden (she was widowed early and ran the plantation efficiently for years before re-marrying) that she was described as the 'relict' of her first husband. Apparently it's the usual legal term of the day - doesn't excuse it, in my view.

Getting lost - a frequent occurrence during my self-navigated stay in the area - I found myself driving along an avenue in the town lined by what I overheard someone later describe, dismissively, as "big ol' mansions with wraparound porches". They were so lovely and stately, neat and colourful and well-maintained, that I was very taken with them. Then I crossed the railway tracks and everything instantly changed: on the other side, ratty little shacks, the paint peeling, small gardens overgrown by rampant weeds, battered cars parked outside, residents sprawled on the steps. It was the cliché come to life.

I was looking for the Conrad Rice Mill - simply because it was there, and I had the time - which, it turned out, was similarly tatty-looking. That's because it's a Historic Place too and exists in a 1912 time-warp. The corrugated iron factory, which five of us were shown over by a painfully slow-moving woman, is still in operation, the oldest in the US: dark and wooden with clunky-looking belt-driven machinery (the rice bags are sewn closed by hand) and in residence the ugliest and most hostile cat I've ever seen. Curiously, this antique place has been given a huge boost by the recent demand for gluten-free products, and in the Konrico shop next door you can buy rice-based pancake mix and other oddities. I wasn't a fan of the raspingly dry sample cracker I was given.

Back in Lafayette, the car to my huge relief returned intact to the hire place (was I right to be flattered that the petrol station cashier trusted me to fill the tank before paying, because my card wouldn't work in the pump zapper?) I had a late lunch at the Filling Station. This is a converted 1950s actual filling station, now filling stomachs, ha ha. It's really quite cute and novel, and I enjoyed my chicken-stuffed avocado. It was only when I emerged that I realised I recognised it from my night rambles around the town, confused by the dark and the curving streets and invariably getting lost.

That's what I liked about my stay in Lafayette. Yes, it's a pretty little place, with lots of interesting places to poke into, and people greet you on the street, which is nice. There's a lively music culture there and I ate very well - but just as pleasing was having the leisure simply to get familiar with it, so that it was reassuring to find myself on Pinhook Street again, or cruising along University Avenue with its magnificent oaks, or using the Cathedral as a reference point.

And then it was back to Amtrak's Sunset Limited, after waiting in the bus station (it was emptier) facing a bronze statue of Rosa Parks (someone leaves flowers on her lap every day, I was told). The train was late, of course, but it felt familiar now too, and the journey ended on a stroke of brilliance as we pulled into New Orleans with my phone playing Bob Dylan rasping 'Duquesne Whistle' as our own engine wailed long and mournfully in the warm darkness.