Bourbon Street Reverie

(New Orleans - Holiday Inn - 1.30pm 31/5/10)

The French Quarter is a grid of packed in colourful colonial bungalows. People crowd the second floor balconies and the thin one way streets. The past, the innumerable stories, linger in the back alleys. The ghosts of public figures like Tennessee Williams and Louis Armstrong lurk heavy behind the bright facades. Traffic and time take a leap back and so do our inhibitions. 

A busy French Quarter Street

The Mississippi flows alongside the Quarter, dark brown, muddy and high up on the banks. An old man from Texas strums a decrepit guitar, blows on a harmonica and sings in the folk tradition. The river is his backdrop, flowing slowly by.

The Texan Busker

A young lady, skin crudely smudged black, holds up a sign: "Think outside the barrel." She stands on the Joan of Arc monument. Her protest silent, the oil rig ever-leaking somewhere beyond the city skyline out in the gulf. 

An abandoned inner city building

It's hot and humid. All is wet. Tourists walk with grenade cocktails and plastic cups of beer, oblivious even to cars and road rules let alone larger political and environmental concerns. Bourbon St is chaos. By 10pm all-day drinkers stumble up and down the street and in and out of bars. The bars more often than not pretentious replications of a stylish and debauched past that we are all trying to recreate.