Down On The Bayou

Every time we travel, I have one off day where we waste precious time in a new place. Yesterday was it.

Today was for nature and photography. Bear in mind, to this point, I’ve probably taken 500 photographs of architecture, wrought iron railings, flowers, street performers and more so when I say this day was for pictures you might get the wrong idea. This was the day we took a flat bottom boat into Bayou Barataria to see alligators and herons and turtles and anything else we mind find. Of course with a bunch of very hyper children on board, well, anything we might have seen was long gone. People were telling us about these animals called nutria, a kind of cross between a beaver and a guinea pig, more like a capybara from South America. I’d describe them more like Big Foot. We didn’t see any sign of the creatures.

Our tour guide told us how he used to own a shrimp boat but because the price of shrimp began to drop at the same time fuel prices began to rise, he gave it up. The recent BP spill, in the gulf, was a natural disaster but contrary to what we’ve been told on the nightly news, many of the commercial boats made way more money helping to clean up the spill than they would have if they had been able to fish. And, the shellfish industry everyone is so worried about has had more quality testing since the spill than ever before so as a result, it’s a much safer product now. What the eventual effects on the ecology of the region will be no one can say. We can only look to other areas like Alaska and Monterey Bay to see how they have recovered. Nature, if left alone will recover, will cleanse itself. Sometimes, it just isn’t fast enough for humans or the way they’d like it to be.

Every time we go to an eco system like the Bayou or the Everglades, I always hope to have an airboat ride, not one of those party affairs with 20 or 30 people in them, but a private ride where I can tug on the operator’s pant leg to get him to slow up and allow me to take a photo. And, then, I’m reminded of just how noisy these airboats are. You can never sneak up on anything in one of them.

The evening was reserved for our river boat Dinner Cruise complete with Dixieland Jazz for entertainment. The food aboard the Natchez was mediocre, as most buffets are, and the view of the river was non existent because the sun had gone down before we left the dock but the Jazz was great and we had a first rate ride on an authentic steam driven paddle wheel river boat. It wasn’t a total loss in the photographic category either. I used the evening to practice on my manual shutter speed and aperture settings. Let’s just say I need a lot more practice.