Day 11: New Orleans

After a long drive, we arrived in New Orleans rather blearily eyed. From the first impression, it is full of graveyards; we passed lot of them on the route to our campsite. Sadly, I think they are after-effects of Hurricane Katrina. There were no pencilled crosses on them which are a mark of voodoo culture which I have expected to see because I visited the city when I was a teenager to see my Uncle Ben when he lived in New Orleans.

We checked in the RV Park which was rather nice. We decided to have a swim before exploring the city as it was scorching hot. It was a great fun as Ashley and I teamed up to have a wrestling match with James/Richard.

We all eventually had enough and decided to explore the city. The RV park was in a desolate neighbourhood which was a sign of things to come. We arrived in the city centre and decided to go to Riverside. The walk was enjoyable as New Orleans is a city fuelled by the music and dancing as we saw a band playing in the middle of a street with a crowd surrounding it dancing away. Richard and Lucy thought the music was great but it was funny when a police patrol car drove past, the music died down!

However we felt bit uneasy as we walked through the city as it is clear that majority of residents are rather poor and that the city is below the poverty line. James saw several residents who have a knife hidden in their coats. I even saw a newspaper that has pages and pages of mug shots of wanted criminals as well name and shame page for caught criminals and their offences. Majority of them looked like a drug addict as well. This could be either an after-effect of Hurricane Katrina or the effect of the society itself as majority of residents are black and are likely to be descendants of slaves who settled in New Orleans when they are freed.

After chilling out at Riverside watching ferries, we went to a market and occupied ourselves trying wines. We got hungry and decided to go to Bourbon Street which is a well-known lively street full of music, restaurants and seedy nightlife as we all will find out later on!

Eventually we settled on an Italian restaurant but we all had a nasty shock when we finished our meal and saw a mouse running out of the kitchen! James,Julie and Richard decided to go back to the RV so rest of us decided to explore the nightlife bit more. It was lively as expected with drunken sweaty revellers everywhere throwing beads to women which apparently mean that they have to flash their t***! Sara and Lucy attracted quite few beads and rather amusingly when a bead hit Stuart he responded by pulling his t-shirt off which made the thrower laugh. We wandered around French Quarter for bit more and shared a fishbowl to top the night off.