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New Orleans 2 Years After KatrinaGreat Music, Great Food, and the Chance to Help Rebuild the Big Easy
August 29, 2007 is the second anniversary of the hurricane that nearly wiped out New Orleans. The French Quarter is full of tourists, but other areas need your help.
New Orleans is a great town. Great music, great food, great energy, and a great hole in its heart from Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the city on August 29, 2007. The images of the flooding and devastation when the levees gave way and the loss of life are seared into our collective memory. New Orleans probably will never be the same, but it is still an exciting place to visit, always an adventure, and every dollar you spend as a tourist will help it recover even more. The French Quarter is lively with tourists again. The music pours onto Bourbon Street from the open doors of its clubs, there’s classic New Orleans jazz at Preservation Hall on St. Peter, and street musicians are everywhere. Legendary restaurants such as Brennan’s, Galatoire’s, Arnaud’s and Court of the Two Sisters are packed for their famous brunches and dinners, some with jazz trios, others not. Inventive new restaurants such as G.W. Fin’s, which opened just before Katrina and re-opened after, and trendy new 7 on Fulton, are busy, too. And Café du Monde still serves the world’s best beignets, the New Orleans version of a breakfast donut, dusted with powdered sugar. Antiques shops and boutiques lure visitors on Royal St. and Magazine St. And the Cajun two-step still rules at Tipitina's and Mulate's. Surprisingly – or maybe not – tours of the Ninth Ward, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, are among the city’s most popular tours. It’s a must-see, to view how much has been rebuilt in these two years – and how much has not. Despite all those TV images and photos we know so well, it simply is not possible to understand what happened here when the levees broke unless you see it for yourself. The Ninth Ward ranges from streets full of life and freshly-painted houses to other streets where the front steps lead to nothing but overgrown grass and weeds. Some abandoned houses contain abandoned furniture, others are empty. Some grocery stores still have a jumble of broken glass and soggy packages on the floor, others are re-opened. And everywhere, the painted marks on the front, indicating which rescue group searched these houses and what they found. More than just visit, here is how you can turn your vacation into a true adventure, by helping: The Ritz-Carlton, New Orleans offers room packages that combine "volunteer” efforts and "tourism,” referred to as voluntourism. Package prices start at $430 and allow travelers to learn more about the city and give something back at the same time. Packages are called the Crescent City Comeback and A Night of Jazz. For those looking to do the right thing ecologically, book the Bring Back the Big Easy package and a donation will be made to Operation Sudden Impact (OSI), an organization committed to planting trees to renew the landscape and decrease the carbon levels. Both W Hotels in New Orleans have a similar package. Hands On New Orleans includes one day of volunteering with the group Hands On New Orleans, transportation to and from the worksite, sturdy canvas workgloves, lunch, a gift box of spa products to help you soothe those aching muscles after the workday, and complimentary cocktails. The packages start at $239, and W Hotels will donate 10% of your stay back to the rebuilding effort. Habitat for Humanity welcomes volunteers to help rebuild houses. One of their biggest projects is Musician Village, a community of 70 brand new houses in the Ninth Ward for some of the thousands of musicians who lost their homes. New Orleans natives – and world-famous musicians -- Harry Connick, Jr. and Ellis Marsalis started the program with a $2 million donation, which has now doubled with contributions. If you just want to see without helping to pound nails or paint walls, here are two very personal tours, by local residents – Tours by Isabelle will show you what Isabelle Cossert describes as “70 miles of devastation in 3 hours”, including the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, the Musicians Village and the major levee breaks.. Seventh-generation New Orleanian Pamela Pipes has released the first self-guided audio tour of post-Katrina New Orleans. Tours BaYou is a two-CD set with personal stories of those in the most affected neighborhoods, the science underlying coastal erosion and restoration, and local tales of heroism and help. The New Orleans French Quarter and Garden District have recovered in the two years since Hurricane Katrina, but there is still much to be done in areas like the Ninth Ward and elsewhere along along the Gulf Coast, including Mississippi.
The copyright of the article New Orleans 2 Years After Katrina in Adventure Travel is owned by Evelyn Kanter. Permission to republish New Orleans 2 Years After Katrina in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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