New Orleans a-la-vom

I so wanted New Orleans to be a romantic trip.

After three weeks holed up in a Manhattan flat situated right next to a noisy fire station, I needed a break. I had found New York extremely hot, extremely expensive, and exactly as Kurt Vonnegut described: “Skyscraper national park.”

Lots of cool skyscrapers and buildings and god it looks so good in movies but not on an iPhone 8 and when you’re jobless and down to your last savings. Having thought I would get on well (I am a London girl, after all, very much accustomed to the bustling city), I had actually spent the three weeks feeling very, very overwhelmed.

Why was I there, anyway?

Basically, the love my life had been seconded over there, and so I had non-consensually entered into a long-distance relationship with him, and also just before that quit my job in law. Sound chaotic? It was.

The only silver-lining that while I was sweating my [fill in what you feel comfortable with] off while in Times Square (of all places) I got news of my first journo job offer!

It felt AMAZING and as some kind of celebration we had decided to swap the oppressive heat of New York City for the equally-oppressive heat of New Orleans. (Smart.)

I had only seen New Orleans in the movies - the mix of hipped roofs and French-colonial-style steel balconies lining cobbled streets; po’boy sandwiches the size of your entire arm; the legends of beignets, vampires and jazz brought together in one historical place… it was surely going to be a trip to remember.

Once we arrived off our shuttle bus from the airport, the most sensible thing to do was to eat our bodyweights in beignets. We found a cute café with palm-printed wallpaper and a stone-tiled courtyard outside and rested our legs while showering our beignets in punnets of strawberries.

As we sat there, D dusting some of the icing sugar off the top of his beignet, I scrolled the internet for top recommendations of things to do in New Orleans.

These were our last few days together before I would return to London and we wouldn’t see each other for some months, so something really special needed to be on the cards.

And then I saw it.

“I know what we’re going to do tomorrow!” I was full of excitement. “An alligator swamp tour!”

D spluttered out a morsel of beignet and looked at me. “A shmalligator tour?” he mumbled through the mouthful of pastry.

“Yes, an alligator-kayaking-swamp tour.”

D swallowed, and put a hand up at me to pause.

“Did you say kayaking? Through an alligator swamp?”

I was unsure what the confusion was. “That is, indeed, what I just said. Is that not the coolest thing you have ever heard of?”

“Sure.” He laughed at me.

And so it was official. We were about to do the least romantic activity in New Orleans, but damn I was excited.

We woke up bright and early the next day to be picked up in a minibus and driven to a swamp forty minutes outside of New Orleans by our newly-acquainted swamp-tour-guide.

Our guide was from Boston and was actually a theatre major but did swamp tours on the side while he waited for his acting career to take off (as you do in Louisiana). I remember thinking he looked particularly unsuited to swamp kayaking tours, a stocky chap barely able to fit in a kayak, with hair and a beard knotted down to his waist. Regardless of my thoughts, he’d done numerous of these over the past two years and so I felt satisfied that he was well-qualified enough to be taking us through alligator-infested waters.

After he shared his entire life story with us (two brothers, both followed the beaten track and went into finance like his parents, they are still in Boston, god he hates Boston, blah blah, dream is to open his own theatre company but not quite there yet, have you tried the drinking spots in New Orleans, what do you mean you haven’t come to New Orleans to drink…you get the picture).

On to the good stuff.

“So, do the alligators ever bother you in the kayak?” I asked.

“No, they’re shy creatures. I tell you what though. I did a tour last August in 113 degree heat [that’s 45 Celsius for us on the other side of the pond]. In the middle of it I was so hot I thought - hell, I’m going to pass out! I started panicking to myself thinking - I have to get it together and get this group back back to the starting point which was an hour or so away.” He pauses to take a sip of his Gatorade.

“The easiest solution was for me to just dive into the water and cool down. I probably should have told them that’s what I was doing though, as one of the group thought I had fainted not realising I was just cooling down, so actually jumped into the water to help me. Once we realised we were both fine, she started to swim back to her kayak. As she did, she grabbed on to a log to pull her closer to the boat - only it wasn’t a log. It was a baby alligator! The poor thing had a fright and wriggled away as quick as it could. Didn’t even try to nip her. Might’ve been different if it were a daddy alligator, but they’re generally too smart to get close to a group of loud tourists kayaking.”

I laughed at the thought and was suddenly grateful that we had chosen 9am on a June day to do our kayaking.

Unfortunately, my gratitude was short lived as it ended up being one of the hottest June days that year, seeing us kayak through 40 degree heat until 12pm.

Even worse was the fact that D and I weren’t natural kayakers together. After half an hour, I told him he needed to just be the muscle while I steered so that we could stop crashing into swamp trees. He told me he thought that was what we had been doing for the first half hour. I was shocked, but adjusted my steering accordingly.

Also on the trip with us was a group of local women who crashed into more trees than us though (to my delight) and who the tour guide kept telling “screaming will only scare the alligators away!” They took no notice, so the number of alligators we saw was low, but to be honest the scenery around us of canopies of wispy trees for miles was gorgeous enough. It also meant that when we did spot the occasional alligator, it felt really special. They were so much smaller than I imagined.

I had felt pretty hot and a little light-headed coming to the end of the tour, but I only started to feel really unwell when we got back in the van to drive back to the city centre, realised too late it was likely heat stroke, proceeded to drink a bucket load of Gatorade, peeled myself out of the van and promptly puked up said-bright-orange-Gatorade on the side of a cobbled New Orleans street, at midday on a Monday of this supposed-to-be-romantic-trip.

New Orleans, I discovered, is in fact the city of people who know how to go hard or go home (happy hour starts at 8am) which meant that local eyes looked at me and assumed I had had a pretty heavy night. I was mortified. Even more mortified that my sweet, caring boyfriend had to witness this and attempted to hold back my hair to which I sobbed uncontrollably at him to “get away from me! You don’t want to see this!!!” *nose running, eyes stream, wails at the side of the road feeling sorry for herself*

Things I did not get to do in New Orleans:

• hear any New Orleans jazz

• eat any New Orleans food (bar the beignets)

• do any New Orleans sightseeing (except for the alligators.)

• get any photos to prove I saw alligators (they were tiny and very well camouflaged)

• celebrate new journo job

Things I did do in New Orleans:

• lay in a blacked-out room for three days

• pretended to an Uber driver I was pregnant so he wouldn’t kick me out for smelling of vom (I know, awful, I’m sorry, one of the lower points of my life)

• told my boyfriend he was better off without me (wandering around New Orleans, at least)

• Drank my first and last bottle of Gatorade

Was it worth it?

It’s hard to say.

The swamp was beautiful and an amazing experience to see now just where wildlife lived but also the conditions that Americans had managed to build around.

Buuut, it was a pretty expensive trip to see not much more than alligators. It was also extremely unromantic, and my boyfriend was left to fend for himself as I cried about feeling so unwell for two days. Thankfully, we are still together. I returned to London and started cool journo job. We now live in suburbia together with a blonde dog. He survived seeing me vom-up orange Gatorade and still found me attractive despite having that memory burned into his brain.

The moral of the story, is know your limits. Mine is being sat on a kayak for three hours in 40 degree heat. #kayakaware