New Orleans

The Big Easy! As we drove south, down the interstate, raised above the swamps, passing various swamp-side homes, we were all very excited to be in Louisiana, on the way to the very unique French Quarter in New Orleans for four nights.

After settling into our hotel rooms, sleeping separately for the first time since we started road tripping together, we headed straight to Bourbon St for food and drinks. Last year, Cherie and I had our first cajun and creole meals at Oceana Grill on Conti St, so we decided James and Shaun should do the same.

My meal was catfish la fouche, which was a blackened fish served over jambalaya with some crawfish tails thrown on top. It was amazing. I'd had jambalaya before, but never blackened fish. Well, it turns out I ate blackened fish a lot more throughout the trip afterwards.

The fish was soft and buttery, yet covered in a crusty, charcoaled layer of whatever magical mix earns it its blackened name. The jambalaya was spiced just perfectly for my tastes; mild enough to not take away from the rest of the meal, but hot enough to let you know it's still got a kick.

Cherie ate crab cakes, some of the best she'd ever had. James ordered blackened duck, which he would talk about for the next week, and Shaun decided on the Taste of New Orleans, which has a bit of everything.

All of this was washed down with a few good beers and New Orleans' own Hurricane cocktails. It was a great start to New Orleans.

That night we visited a handful of bars and caught up with my brother, Aaron, and our friend, Erik, again.

I'm not sure how to describe Bourbon St. Every second establishment is a strip club, with very scantily clad women outside trying to draw you in, promising all kinds of bullshit you'll probably never get. Every other establishment is a bar or fast food joint, often selling po boys, burgers and hot dogs.

Everywhere you look, there are party goers with plastic yard glasses (yes I realise how impossible that is) filled with frozen cocktails walking in and out of bars. Each bar has a live band playing funk music, or funk versions of non-funk songs. Some songs are originals, but many are covers. Some bands throw in a few minutes of improv in the middle, and some don't. There really is some funk for everyone.

In the earlier hours of the night, while the sun is still setting, there are employees outside each bar trying to lure you in. Often bars try to lure you in with offers of 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 or sometimes even 4-for-1 drinks.

Later in the night the people make their own fun in the street. While standing on the balcony of one bar, down on the street we could see two guys had brought a piece of cord with flowers woven from end to end for people to limbo with. This bit of fun was occasionally interrupted by Christian protesters walking down the street with a giant cross. I'm sure we're all going to hell. If Cherie hadn't been there to stop me, I had a pretty good shot of hooking some bead necklaces over the tall, wooden cross.

The only negative thing about Bourbon St is the smell. Every night at around 4am, after the last of the nighthounds have been ushered off the street by a stampede of police officers, the big clean up of spilled alcohol, dropped food, piss and vomit begins. And it leaves a foul stench the next morning, which doesn't always disappear before the next night begins. But it only passes in small quaffs, so it's not as though the smell is constantly in your thoughts while you enjoy your night.

At the end of Bourbon St there is a small burger joint, Clover Grill, with some of the best burgers you will find in the area. Over the four nights we were in New Orleans, I had my fair share of burgers with bacon and chili stuffed inside. The burgers can also be served alongside tater tots, or one of my personal favorite inventions, chili cheese tater tots. It quickly became our favorite way to cap off a good night's drinking, having started from one end of Bourbon St and making our way to the other.

The bar we probably had the best time in was The Swamp. It was suggested to us by our airboat tour guide, which I'll talk about further down. We weren't sure if we'd been lied to as the bar was completely empty when we walked in, although it was still early in the evening.

However we quickly made friends with the DJ, whose name I never picked up, and the MC, Bobby. The DJ was awesome enough to play whatever we suggested, and Bobby was helpful enough to give us suggestions of bars in cities we still had to visit after New Orleans.

They had also mentioned that there was another Australian group who were just in the bar before we arrived. I didn't believe them at first, but then they walked back in; Vicki and Sam from Perth. They were with a DJ from Baton Rouge, whose nickname was Jager (yes, after the drink), and his girlfriend, or very close female friend, Chelsea, who was Australian.

This was pretty much the point where the night got messy.

The tube shot girls were feeding us plenty of booze, as were the 3-for-1 beers, the DJ was satiating our hunger for music we hadn't heard since being back home, and meeting other Australian's got us excited to have a big, long night. And we did.

At some point a few of us, including yours truly, rode a mechanical bull, which was just sitting just out the back of The Swamp.

The rest of the time at that bar was a bit of a blur, but we did move onto The Cats Meow for some karaoke, where James was praised for his performance of Under the Bridge by RHCP, and then back to Clover Grill for more buttery, tasty burgers before heading back to the hotel to sleep.

Aaron had suggested to me that we visit Frenchmen St, just outside the French Quarter, for a similar, but more relaxed version of Bourbon St.

The first thing we heard was a full brass band playing some jazz in on a corner. In the middle of the intersection a crowd had formed and a handful of people were dancing to the music. The music played almost the entire time we were on Frenchmen St.

We ate at The Praline Connection. Our meals were fairly typical creole and southern dishes; cornbread, Shaun had the jambalaya, I had the etouffee and Cherie and James shared a sample platter with a bit of everything. The quality was definitely above what we had experienced so far though.

We all enjoyed our meals with a couple of bottles of Abita's Turbo Dog and Purple Haze beers. Turbo Dog ended up being my favorite for the area and Cherie was happy to finally find Purple Haze in a restaurant.

Afterwards we wandered around Frenchmen Market, a small arts and crafts market. The market featured everything from jewelry to paintings to household ornaments, all handmade. The market was lit up overhead by lines of hundreds of fairy lights and some soft music played in the background. In the middle were a couple of white couches, lit up to make them glow.

We spent most of the night at Cafe Negril, just across from the market, listening to a live band play mostly their own music, with a couple of covers thrown in. Because we liked the band so much, I bought their latest album for some road trip listening.

We didn't just go to bars and restaurants though. We did an air boat tour one afternoon, which undoubtedly ended up being one of the highlights of the trip for everyone.

We ordered our tickets via phone call and went to pick them up just off Decatur St, a good 5 minute walk from Bourbon St. Well, somebody somewhere stuffed up because they thought we were on the 12pm tour, which was a little impossible since we called at 11am and the bus pickup would've been at 10:30am. But after a little screwing around, we got our tickets, jumped on a shuttle bus and travelled about 30 minutes out of New Orleans to a place called Jean Lafitte, a place very likely to see floods judging by the fact that almost every house and trailer is raised 10 feet above ground.

These air boats travel up around 90mph, and just before we got onto the boat, it started to rain. Well, when you're travelling at high speeds, even a light rain has a bit of a bite to it, but this was a little more than a light rain, although not quite torrential rain. But there we were, 5 minutes into the tour and already soaking wet. I'm just glad I had sunglasses on, so I could enjoy the view! About 10 minutes later the sun was back out and it got hot again.

Our tour guide was fantastic. He was a mix of about 5 different cultural backgrounds, which he told us is quite common for the local creole folk. He called out often to alligators in a French-Creole dialect, and was succesful on a few occasions. We were pretty lucky to see a very large alligator, the size of which our guide hadn't seen for a few months.

After pulling out a baby alligator from a container he brought on the tour, he gave us a dirty little explanation of how to tell whether it was a female.

We all got a hold of the gator. Except me. I got, what was referred to as, a Louisiana Mohawk.

Needless to say the swamp tour was great. Last year Cherie and I did a swamp and bayou tour on a regular boat instead of an air boat and we saw most of the same stuff, but doing it on an air boat was worth the extra money. The tour guide also made it worth the money too. We all tipped him well.

This post is already a bit long, so I'll finish up with a couple of restaurants that need mentioning.

One of our early dinners was at Acme Oyster Co. The boo fries - fries covered in cheese and gravy - were a great appetizer, as were the char grilled oysters - oysters with cheese and butter and probably some other tasty toppings - were the best oysters I've ever had. Even Cherie and James, who don't usually go for oysters, loved them. The main fare was mostly made up of po boys.

Another dinner we had, our last in New Orleans, was at Restaurant R'evolution, a much fancier and more pricy restaurant than what we were used to. Cherie and I ate there last year and the food and service was top notch. We were hoping it still was, after how much we boasted about it to Shaun and James, and it was. The food was amazing. My appetizer was a very tasty gumbo with a perfectly boned quail and Cherie had crab cakes. Our main meals were fish, filet mignon and porterhouse steak. Shaun was a little peeved at the size of his serve of fish, but the rest of us were more than happy with our steaks. It always makes me happy when you ask for your steak to be cooked rare, and it actually comes rare. Dessert was a couple of plates of hot fudge cake and chocolate beignets.

The next day, after what had been amazing four nights, we headed westbound toward Texas.