|
Captain Tommy's Office The Kajun Kadillac A Real Live Steamboat Michele and I on the Swamp Michele and David Gray Aligator Head Aligator in the Water Aligator out of the Water Aligator Full View Aligator in Hand Aligator Changing Hands Aligator Gore - A Fish The Beautiful Swamp! Swamp Waterway Marshy Swamp Reedy Swamp Man-Made Treeline Swamp, Dave and Drummer Christmas Tree Project Swamp Trees Moss in the Trees Spanish Moss in Swamp Trees Swamp Land |
The Swamp Tour
On Friday morning Michele and I arose at the relatively early hour of 930am to take a tour of the famous swamps of the Mississippi Delta area. We met the van driver, a cheerful, highly religious and absolutely over-matched man named Patrick, in the lobby of the hotel. He got us successfully loaded in the van and we were off to pick up the other tour-goers. The second stop did not go so well for him. After struggling to find the corret hotel, he could not locate the people that he was supposed to pick up. This caused much hand-wringing and worry for the dear man, who eventually had to give up on them and move on to his next pick-up. This next stop brought on board three very English fellows, one of whom Michele tabbed immediately as looking like Kramer from Seinfeld. Once they were loaded we swung by the storefront for the tour company so Patrick could pick up the last of his group and consult with the agency about what to do in regard to the no-shows. He was finally told to go on without them, and with that we were off. The drive out to the swamp was pleasant, made all the more entertaining by the conversation amongst the three English blokes. One was on his cell phone almost constantly trying to arrange a sound check for the band, of which the other two appeared to be members. After a while, one of the ladies from the backmost seat asked if they were in a band that her daughter might have heard of. The blonde fellow in the middle replied that they were with David Gray. Michele, who had heard of David Gray (and I believe she was the only one who had), then asked the obvious follow-up question: "Would one of you happen to be David Gray?" And in fact, one of them just so happened to be him. They were a pleasant bunch of guys, and we had chatted with them a bit before that, and then chatted with them some more after this revelation. It turns out that they were in about the middle of a seven week tour and were going to be playing the House of Blues that evening. They were also scheduled to perform on Jay Leno a couple of weeks later, and Michele just happened to tape that show because the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, was on. So we have the tape of our new friends David Gray and his drummer (Kramer) performing on Jay Leno. In the picture entitled "Michele and David Gray", David is the blonde guy in the background. No, we did not pester them for photos, so I very sneakily made sure I got him in the frame on this picture I took of Michele. The swamp tour itself was great. We rode through the swamp on a dual-engine airboat, the Kajun Kadillac, and saw a number of aligators. They were a little disappointing, though, because a six foot aligator is six feet from the end of his tail to the tip of his snout, and that makes the actual body only about three feet long. We expected much bigger. The tour guide, Captain Tommy, turns out to be one of the original aligator wranglers of that area, and is involved in a number of aligator preservation projects, including going out and gathering the live eggs and delivering them to the people who then hatch the eggs and oversee the first two years of their lives before returning them to the wild at the exact same spot they were snatched from. One of the interesting things we learned about was the prime example of government inefficiency at work in the swamp. It turns out that the United States government spends something like 3 or 4 million dollars per year on the "Christmas Tree Project," which is designed to help slow erosion of the swamp lands. In the picture of the same name you can see rows of stakes in the water, and those stakes are filled with evergreen trees. The thought is that by making these barriers, it will prevent the silt and mud, etc., from escaping the swamps and getting pulled out into the delta and eventually the sea. Good idea, bad application. According to Captain Tommy, the evergreen trees decompose too fast to actually serve their purpose, so once again the government is essentially wasting money. The rows of trees you can see in the background of "Man-Made Treeline" are non-indigenous trees that have been brought in by the oil companies to build up and hold together bits of land, so that they can continue to drill in the swamps. Notice how the trees form a nice, neat row? Not the kind of formation you would expect to find in a naturally-formed copse of trees. We were amazed at how surprisingly beautiful the swampland is. The marshes were green and lush, and the trees - the indigenous ones - were all covered with Spanish Moss and were a beauty to behold. It was much prettier than either of us expected, and the part of the trip that we both most enjoyed. I am a definite scenery-geek and Michele was right there with me on this part of our vacation. |