angusmccoll

I finally get to the beach, and with very few ‘recalculatings’! Miss smug gps had it easy today! The beaches here are interesting. They are long island strips that go for miles but are only about 100 meters wide. They connect to the mainland via many bridges of course. The beach front is solid with hotels. I can’t imagine how they all find enough custom to survive. The holiday season is over now and Americans are back at school so it is relatively quiet. The beaches front the Gulf of Mexico but it feels like you are on the edge of a lake. There are no waves and the water gently folds onto blindingly white sand. Brown pelicans work the waters just off shore bomb-diving for food. They are about a quarter smaller than our pelicans but are a beautiful brown colour. The weather is sweat.

The news in the papers today is full of bad statistics. Overall unemployment in the US is running at nine percent, 15 percent among African-Americans. Nearly one in six Americans live below the poverty line and this is the highest of any major industrialised nation. And it is expected to get worse. Obama is desperately trying to push job-creating measures through a hostile senate bent on making him fail despite the needs of the country. The political system is the USA’s worst enemy to my mind.

Another story in Florida is about a inmate on death-row in Georgia, Troy Davis, who is due for execution this Wednesday. Many whose evidence put him there now want to recant their stories claiming their statements were made under police duress. There are now serious doubts about his guilt. ‘Beyond reasonable doubt’ – I don’t think so. Davis is accused of shooting an off-duty policeman who stepped in to break up an argument. The wife of the murdered policeman has no doubt about Davis’s guilt.

Can you smoke a cigar backwards? I think I just have! Should have got instructions with these things! It seemed like a good idea at the time!

I caught a bus to the airport and picked up my little hire car. You can get great walk-in deals with hire cars, less than half of what I would pay if I pre-booked. Suzy gave me a great deal and she is from Peru so she gave me great advice on what to do when I get to Lima next week, including traditional foods and drinks, alcoholic and non-alcoholic. I can’t wait to get there. But for now I have to negotiate the American style of driving! It doesn’t start well as I try to get into the car via the passenger side rather than the driving seat (what hope is there for me)! Anyway I head off. I’m told it’s straight forward but it isn’t! I struggle to get it right at first and I’m following the instructions of a gps, which I’ve never used before. There is a lot of ‘recalculating’ coming out of the gps as I take the wrong turn and I swear each consecutive ‘recalculating’ comes with a more sarcastic tone than the previous as the journey continues! The voice has quite an attitude I think! I eventually get back to the hotel without incident. I want to visit an aquarium I have found on the tourist brochures that features manatees. Manatees are cousins to our beautiful dugong and this is their territory – fantastic. I set the gps and away I go. It’s about 80 kilometers away and the trip takes me onto some amazing skyways over water. These bridges are four lanes each way, eight lanes in all – just amazing. And miss gps has to do many sarcastic ‘recalculations’ before I eventually get to the aquarium. It is the Mote Aquarium, which is an active marine research centre started by a Mr Mote. Sarasota Bay is full of manatees, dolphins and many birds. They have two beautiful captive manatees in a large glass-walled aquarium. They are brothers and huge! Manatees are about twice the size of our dugongs and the obvious difference is in the tail. They have a large paddle-like tail. They rely on sea grass for food, a lot of seagrass!

Surprisingly they are sensitive to the cold so follow the warm waters around. The manatees here have found a consistent source of warm water all-year-round. The power stations purge heated water from their cooling towers into the bay so the manatees flick there during the winter. This change in their behaviour can be a problem because if for any reason the powered station shuts down for an amount of time, these manatees can die from cold.

I also do a narrated cruise around Sarasota Bay and Roberts Bay. We find plenty of dolphins and birds but no wild manatees. The water in these bays is shallow, only a couple of meters deep for most of it. The dolphins like it because there are no sharks. The human element is at the top of the economic scale with the water line solid with exclusive looking homes and private jetties, complete with boat hoists. Our guide takes us to some islands in the bay that are man-made from dredgings. Trees were planted there including a pine from Australia that looks like our casuarinas. Apparently they are now a pest and the guide scathingly attacked them. I kept very quiet.

I catch the bus at 8.30 pm on Wednesday and after a couple if interchanges through the night, arrive in Tampa at around 12.30pm.

The overnight bus from New Orleans was uneventful. No interesting characters to talk about. A young fella plied with grog didn’t make the trip as he planned. He gave his condition away by persistantly giving cheek to the security staff. Not clever!

Florida feels like far north Queensland. The temperature and humidity is very familiar and there is green everywhere.

ALL WHO WANDER ARE NOT LOST
Anon

The flavour of Ybor.

Tampa has history and I found that out at the Tampa Harbour History Centre. It’s called the History Centre rather than museum I suspect because it is a collection of displays that tell the story rather than being a collection of artifacts. Some of the displays are very innovative and like nothing I’ve seen before. They tell the story of the removal of the Semolian Indians from this region through a series of rotating stages, television monitors, lights and noise, and see-through screens that display images while the sets change in the background. Very effective.

The Semolian Indians, a collective name given to the Indigenous people’s of this region, were forcibly removed in the 1840s by the government and relocated to Oaklahoma, far away. They didn’t give up without a fight but after three wars (costly to the US government) they were suppressed and relocated.

NOTE: the Indians took in and protected run-away slaves, not just here but this was explained in Louisana as well. This resulted in a collision of cultures that evolved over time. The military or militia would constantly raid Indian villages to chase down escaped slaves.

Florida is wet and fertile. It is a great producer of timber cattle and crops of all sorts. Tampa is, and has always been, an important port – one of the busiest in the state. It has a heart though and that is Ybor (pronounced eebor). Tampa us not on the tourist trail and most of it doesn’t have much to say but Ybor is different. There are Cuban influences here. Cigar manufacturing was big in Tampa and this is where it was done. This region has the humidity, fertility and port facilities for growing tobacco and importing from Cuba. Refugee Cubans colour Florida and they are here. Tampa was the major producer if premier cigars in America. Famous people from around the world have smoked cigars from here, according to the locals!

The buildings have old-worldly charm and the streets are paved. Ybor has survived the city ‘rejuvenation’ to retain it’s character. They still make cigars here and you can sample some authentic Cuban food, although the Cuban sandwich I’m eating is very similar to something I got in a deli in Cairns! Ybor is a sample of Cuba – and I like it a lot!

You can go into bars here and watch your cigar being rolled then sit down to a beer and smoke it. How very civiliaed! Of course I choose the biggest fattest cigar possible and after much puffing, I was only a quarter of the way through. Hard work. But this didn’t stop me buying four more for the road! Ybor burnt down in the 1920s and I think I know how! These cigars produce serious embers.

I finally got access to my credit card statements online and I’m in better financial position than I thought. I hope I don’t rue not going to New York City. I wanted to go there very much but bypassed it because of money concerns. I will come back for NY.

Everywhere you go (or is it just my warped way of thinking) you can identify human equivalents of the animal world. While at an extended bus stop a young girl of about 10 years of age busied herself with cleaning the bus of rubbish. She clearly was not an employee but that’s what she did. It reminded me if those little fish that groom the big fish. The big fish deliberately park themselves at these grooming stations to get serviced!

The Scientoligists are here too!

From the map it looks easy. I want to check out the local beaches but I’m in west Tampa and the beaches are across the water at Clearwater. There are buses but not direct to where I want to go. I take on the bus system and after five interchanges, I give up! It’s so complicated and the further I ventured the more I had to remember to unwind this process to get home. I get home defeated an realise the only way to seriously get around here is by hire car! Watch out Tampa, I am hitting the roads. I will hire a car for a few days from Sunday. This will be my first driving attempt in the US and I’m afraid – fir my self and the locals!

Tampa is a series of bays and peninsulars. It is essentially a port city. But typical of America, they don’t build roads around things. There is plenty of water in the way but they just build their roads over the top! Why go around? So there are long bridges (or skyways) connecting the various peninsulars to the open coast. They go for miles.

Not much to report today, just packing up and catching the all-night bus to Tampa in Florida. I’m leaving New Orleans before I am ready but I must move on. I will come back here one day.

While there is little news to tell I would like to write about a story that was in the news papers here not long after I got to the US. A feature item appeared up front on one of the big Californian papers about a speech made by a noted leader of some national medical authority (sorry, bit short on specifics). She made a key speech that caught commentators off guard. Obesity is a well know problem in USA and I have seen plenty of it. And African-American are a significant part of the problem (I wouldn’t disagree with that) because she (African-American herself) made a plea to black women to forget about their hair and get out there and exercise. African-Americans naturally have very frizzy hair. Men deal with this by either cutting it very short, shaving it all off or growing it into dreadlocks. Women spend a fortune having their hair straightened and coloured and maintaining that straight hair. Sweat undoes all that hard expensive work so they forgo exercise! This key speech was about urging black women to not forgo exercise for the sake of their hair. Only a black women could make such a speech.

Another day looking around town. I catch the trolly up to another cemetery for a great example of how to bury people above ground. If buried underground here the coffins just pop out of the ground when it floods.

I catch the ferry to go across to the other side of the Mississippi River to visit Algiers Point. This is an old part of New Orleans and the wooden houses here are beautiful. I believe thus side escaped the flooding. Tradies seem busy doing all sorts of renovations.

Not all is rosy in New Orleans. The news is filled with murders happening in parts of the town and we are being warned not to go into certain areas sadly because some of those parts are of historic interest.

Statue of Andrew Jackson who defeated the English at the Battle of New Orleans and later became President of USA.

A lazy start today, I go down to the ferry terminal to meet up with Narelle. Narelle is a good friend from Cairns who is here visiting friends in New Orleans for the second time. She loves it here and I can easily see why. Narelle is coming from the other side of the river by a ferry that takes cars across and allows passengers on for free!

We spend most of the day coffeeing, lunching and riding the electric trolley cars around parts of the city. Narelle has a great appreciation of the culture here and a big part of any culture is the food.

Some traditional foods here include po-boys, gumbo, and etouffees,

Po-Boys are overstuffed sandwiches served on French bread. Traditionally they were a simple bread and meat sandwich for the poor.

Gumbo is a delicious seafood, chicken, sausage, or okra dish with a serving of rice placed in the centre.

Crawfish Etouffee is a savory Cajun specialty and is one of the city’s tastiest dishes.

More walking of the streets of the French Quarter. I catch a tour in the afternoon. The tour includes two hours of bussing around some interesting parts of town. The driver provides a rapid fire description of everything that flashes past our windows. He takes us into the areas worse effected by Hurricane Katrina. Six years have now past and there are areas that are still to be prepared. The most devastated part, Ward 9 lower, was also the poorest and the levee breech that caused the flooding here was caused by a run-away barge. The levees were quite flimsy, twelve foot high and about 8 inches thick cement panels from memory. And basically just stuck into the ground. The replacement levee is far more serious. Some of the houses are still in their original damaged form complete with holes in the roof where people had to bust their way out from the inside. Interestingly houses in this sector are being rebuilt from Brad Pitts pocket. He has taken it upon himself to side with an engineer to come up with a highest house design that is very energy efficient and capable of withstanding a repeat event. The authorities had not planned on rebuilding this part of town, leaving it go back to it’s natural state – swamp. This whole area is reclaimed swamp for the city to expand. It is below sea level and well below the height of the levee walls. But the residents wanted to return to their homes and about 40 percent of them have. But very few government services have returned to support them.

Other parts of town flooded as well. In all 85 percent went under including middle and upper-class areas. These areas were flooded by two other breeches in the levee walls and there is a conspiracy theory as to why these breeches happened. It is thought they were deliberate, blown open with explosives to sacrifice certain areas to save others. Nothing is admitted of course and nothing can be proved. Anyway the town is rebuilding but there are still houses waiting fir repair. A bizarre twist, the huge pumping stations in place to keep the water out ran only on electricity! When the power went out, they were useless. New pumps are now connected to huge diesel generators.

New Orleanians seem to be sensitive about what people think of them living or rebuilding in such a risky place because without prompting the driver broke his tour marathon with an explanation of all the other dangerous places in America that residents persist to live. The whole west coast live on an earthquake belt and the mid west keep rebuilding in the tornado belt.

Graves are above ground here because of the flooding.

Another stop was at a cemetery. These are no ordinary cemeteries here. The dead are buried in crypts above the ground because the flooding causes the coffins to pop out of the ground. They tried everything to prevent this happening but the only solution was to encapsulated the dead above ground. But these tombs don’t just house a few members – they are designed to house entire families. How? Bodies deteriorate to nothing and then they can throw in another. It is law to wait one whole year and one day after the last burial before you can bury the next. One year gives the deterioration process enough time to neutralise any chance of disease transmission. Then you wait one day because you can’t disturb the corpse on it’s anniversary! What if a family member dies within that waiting timespan? You put them in another section of the crypt. Amazing process. These plots can be expensive to buy. Sorry,

The there is the story about the ‘shot gun’ houses. They are a unique house design, popular in parts of New Orleans. I will leave it to Wikipedia to explain – http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house

New Orleans is known lovingly as NOLA to the locals. This stands for ‘New Orleans Louisiana America’. I have only just arrive and already it is clear this is easily the most interesting city I have visited in USA. There is history here and it’s not just written in the amazing buildings but the people as well. The architecture is strongly influenced by French and Spanish design. The people are descended from a much richer mix and you need to have an appreciation of Louisiana’s complex history to understand the human makeup here. From my understanding the Spanish first arrived for a look back in the 1500s but were scared off by alligators and indians. The French arrived looking for mineral wealth about 150 years later and while not having any luck with the precious minerals, decided to stay anyway to strengthen their colonial intentions. They brought in convicts and hardy pioneers to develop New Orleans, Then war-weary Germans were encouraged to bring their farming skills to the region and for labour they brought in slaves from colonies in Africa and later the Caribbean. The Spanish took over control in 1769 as France was too busy fighting the English. The Spanish introduced bricks and decorative wrought iron to the architecture as well as a new administrative structure. Spain then gives Louisanna back to France in 1803, who held it very briefly for just 20 days before selling it to America. This was known as the Louisanna Purchase. America put in an offer for New Orleans and Napolean sold them the whole of Louisiana. He needed the money to fund his war effort but more importantly he didn’t want Louisiana getting into English hands. In one moment America doubled in size. And the story goes on. Wars followed against the English in the Battle of New Orleans and of course the Civil War that ended slavery. If the mighty Mississippi could talk, what a tale it could tell.

People from all parts of the world flooded into Louisiana after Americans gained control and those influences can be seen today. The culture here is unique to other parts of America I have visited. Afro-Americans make up a large proportion of the population and they are much darker in colour than other places I have been. I love the way they talk. It is English and I eventually understand what they are saying but it is hard. Conversations are heavily punctuated with ‘Ya know what I’m sayin?’ They are the workers here. They are the ones running the hotels, restaurants, cafes bars, taxis, buses, everything really. They built this town. And of course they provide the bulk of the music you hear.

The Superdome.

I start the day with a walk down to the river again and then to the Superdome. The Superdome was such a feature of the news stories going around the world concerning the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This sporting arena was refuge for so many people escaping the flood waters from Katrina and the failed levee banks. They were held up in the Superdome for way too long before help arrived and conditions there deteriorated into filth and anarchy. I wanted to see this place and while walking around it, they were preparing to open up for football. It’s Saturday afternoon and there is two games on the schedule. I decide to catch one. It’s college football between Tulane and Tulsa. It’s very impressive inside. It is completely enclosed and heavily air-conditioned. There are college brass bands playing and heaps of colour and spectacle – and this is for a college game! The pro games would even be bigger. Anyway it’s confirmed in my mind that American football is a tedious sport to watch! It didn’t help that I couldn’t understand the rules. The crowd was certainly passionate about what was going on. The noise at times was deafening. I couldn’t last the whole game. It was too cold, my fingers went numb. The Saints represent New Orleans in the pro league and they won last year. They are passionately followed by the locals.