We’ve had two days to explore New Orleans now. We took a city bus tour yesterday but it was so bad that we decided to take another one with a different company today. The first one was rushed and so full that you couldn’t see out of both sides of the bus so we basically missed half the things the guide was talking about. Today’s tour guide however was much better, more relaxed and made three stops so we could explore a bit more.
Between the two tours and our own exploration we’ve seen a lot of New Orleans in two days and it really is an absolutely wonderful city. It has a richer history than most US cities having been ruled by the Native Americans, the French, the Spanish and then the Americans. The French Quarter 
is beautiful during the day and crazy after the sun goes down, the jazz clubs and street musicians are fantastic and we haven’t even had time to explore the swamps, the voodoo history, the Mississippi river or the plantations and the history of slavery here.
We did have time to explore one of the famous cemeteries though. New Orleans is built below sea level and floods so often it’s a really bad idea to bury people underground, so all the cemeteries are above ground. What’s more, space is limited so the tombs are often shared and even “rented” until space in another tomb becomes available. You can see in the photo below the rows of tombs which were built for yellow fever outbreaks when they had to quickly house hundreds of bodies! Pretty grim, but I must be slightly weird because I find cemeteries fascinating.
We also had time to check out the famous Cafe Du Monde 
in the French Market where they serve Beignets (pronounced ‘ben-yays’), kind of like a hot square doughnut covered in a ridiculous amount of icing sugar. I’m wondering how many I can bring home on the flight.
And now to the serious bit…
The two things you can’t avoid in New Orleans are great Jazz music and the after effects of Hurricane Katrina . It was the second of those that will leave us with probably the most powerful memories of our trip so far.
It’s six years this week since Katrina hit New Orleans and when we toured the Lower 9th Ward earlier today the trail of destruction was still evident. Some parts of the Lower 9th were under 28ft of water and much of it still looks like a ghost town. It’s an incredibly depressing sight.
80% of New Orleans was flooded and you can see it’s effects all over the city, but 1000 people died in the Lower 9th Ward and 4000 homes were destroyed, all because a boat (which shouldn’t have been there) was thrown into a levee wall and left a great big hole in it. You can still see the marks left on the empty houses where the water line came to, six years later.
Also obvious on a lot of houses are the markings left by authorities when they finally got to the lower 9th, two weeks late. Each house has spray painted markings on the front including a cross on it to show where the water level came to, a series of codes to explain the state they found the house in (e.g. TFW for ‘Total Flood Water’), the date they surveyed it and a number indicating the number of dead bodies they found inside…
Everybody you talk to in New Orleans was affected by the hurricane in some way or another, our tour guide lived on the Lower 9th, the jazz musician we went to see last night lost his father in the floods, everybody has a story to tell and it’s just such a massive shame because New Orleans was and still is such an amazing city and the people are so lovely. The way the city is being rebuilt is testament to that.
As I type this a state of emergency has been declared in New Orleans because there’s a tropical storm on it’s way this weekend and it could flood here again (not to anywhere near the same extent but still…) We’ll be fine because we’re leaving tomorrow anyway but it just seems like such a depressing cycle.