Stranded in the Bayou

Hey y'all

Adam and I are taking a short reprieve in New Orleans at the moment before heading out on the town. The reprieve was an absolute necessity because we were stranded in the backwaters of the Atchafalaya Swamp for an hour at almost high noon. Let's start from the beginning.

While visiting Adam's friends in Baton Rouge last night, we wanted to go on a night tour of the swamp and hopefully see some alligators. Unfortunately, a night tour wasn't in the cards, but we scheduled one for the following morning and went to Boudin's restaurant, a famous local joint with great Cajun food and live music. I had the highly recommended and highly delicious blackened redfish with cajun corn and rice and a cheesy baked potato.

Then we went out to a bar in downtown where we got the picture from last night.

This morning, we woke up at the buttcrack of dawn to a milder 85 degrees and drove down the Mississippi River to Bayou Sorrel in the Atchafayala Basin, the largest swamp in the United States, where the Atchafayla River and the Gulf of Mexico come together.

Our guide was Dean Wilson, a Spaniard from the Basque region with a Ohioan father and a Spanish mother who migrated to Louisiana twenty years ago on his way to the Amazon. He never made it to the Amazon, but instead became a lifelong advocate for the preservation of the Atchafalaya wetlands. [He is exactly what you imagine a Spanish Steve Irwin to be like. Oh, Chadé basically says that further down the post. nevermind. - Adam]

We put in the water around 8:30am when the sun was already approaching a daunting temperature. He took us rocketing down the Atchafalaya River to give us "air conditioning" and wove us back and forth through the network of canals deeper and deeper into the swamp.








Below is a collage I made of our tour through the swamp. Unlike some of my previous misconceptions, swamps can be thriving ecosystems full of all kinds of life, not just fetid water and ornery alligators. According to Dean, the definition of a swamp is a flooded forest, while a marsh is a flooded grassland. The trees you see in the pictures below are cypress trees, all hollowed out, as loggers took all the remaining unhollow cypresses back in the early 20th century.  The swamp used to have an oppressive canopy that didn't allow any light through and Spanish moss hung almost to the water's surface.

Despite the logging and dredging from oil companies, the swamp was full of all kinds of life. We saw ospreys







giant egrets

and little green tree frogs.







We also saw baby blue herons (which are actually white), giant katydids, ibises, cormorants, turtles, but unfortunately no alligators. Those tend to come out at night.

After this wonderful expedition and when we were deep at the farthest point in the swamp, Dean tries to start his motor to zip us back to the landing, but the boat won't go forward. He throws it into reverse to clear out the motor, and puts it back into drive. It still won't move. The engine revs, but the boat won't pull forward at all. He pulls the motor out of the water, checks the gear shifter, checks the blades, tries it again. Nothing. So, here we are, two people who recently left San Francisco during a cold spell, in the heart of a Louisiana swamp, in August, at 11:00am, during a heatwave, stuck in an open air boat. The only way back to the landing was driving in reverse the whole way, which took an hour at best, all the while Dean drove sitting on the front of the boat driving backwards like the Cajun Steve Irwin. Nevertheless, we tried to make the best of it.

The individual pictures of us were taken before we became sweaty disasters. The last picture was at the peak of humid misery (hence me covering my sweat marks).

Despite the detour, the swamp tour was ah-mazing and highly recommended. And in no time we were back in a Max AC car, ready to head to New Orleans. And with that, we're gonna get ready to get some hurricanes and see Bourbon St. (of course).

Gaux Saints!

-Chadé

Progress and cuteness:

Stats of the Day:
3 hours in the Atchafayala swamp
100 degrees fahrenheit
1000% humidity
2645 miles driven

More competition after tonight