This was published 8 years ago
Confederacy of Cruisers: New Orleans bicycle tour
By Alison Stewart
Elizabeth's Restaurant, in the Bywater District.Credit: Alamy
If you plan to visit the sumptuously storied city of New Orleans, make sure you let the good times roll, and not merely by carousing on Frenchmen or Bourbon streets.
Guided cycle tours are a superb way to appreciate a destination's soul but the guide is critical. You need someone who can gather the threads of the city's narrative – historical, cultural, culinary, musical and architectural – and weave them into a rich tapestry. A healthy dose of humour never goes astray either.
Hello Confederacy of Cruisers (CoC). This poetic choice of name is a nod to New Orleans writer John Kennedy Toole's cult classic, A Confederacy of Dunces, and underlines the importance of narrative in understanding this lovely, though sometimes troubled Crescent City.
Cycling through Faubourg Maurigny.Credit: Alison Stewart
Thanks to his mother's persistence, Toole's novel was published after he committed suicide at 31, disillusioned by failure. The novel is considered to be one of the most accurate depictions of the city in a work of fiction.
Chronicling the real New Orleans is what CoC – the city's original guided bike tour company - strives to do. Their tours take you out of the Vieux Carre or French Quarter and into areas tourists may not visit, like Treme, Faubourg Marigny and Bywater.
Tours include Creole New Orleans, Culinary New Orleans, Cocktails in New Orleans, Ninth Ward Rebirth tours (the area devastated by Hurricane Katrina) and Pedal to Paddle Kayak tours. Guides – all friends – research and write their own material to share their passion for the city with visitors.
"Rain Girl" – one of three remaining Banksy portraits in New Orleans.Credit: Alison Stewart
We'd love to do every tour, but choose the Creole one – an easy 10-kilometre, three-hour cruise on upright, puffy-seat, one-speed bikes through neighbourhoods of cupcake-coloured houses, churches, parks and levees. This tour through Faubourg Marigny, Bywater and Treme highlights the French, Spanish and Caribbean influences that fashioned a city from a swamp.
Jeff Shyman is our guide. He started the company years ago out of his living room, offering small local tours (maximum of eight people) of the old Creole neighbourhoods that were settled after the French Quarter.
Jeff says it took him 38 years to realise that his passion for biking, history and talking were finally going to amount to something. That something is a carefree plunge into the cultural gumbo that is New Orleans.
Having a break.Credit: Alison Stewart
A short stroll from Frenchmen Street with its tight cluster of clubs pumping out modern jazz, reggae, Latin and funky brass band music is CoC. It's tucked into a little butter-yellow wooden house in the Faubourg Marigny with mauve trim and an art deco orange, blue and yellow bike logo with a "fat tires, slow riding" tag.
Nearby is Washington Square Park and we congregate there to claim our bikes, sized by height. We grab helmets and welcome bottles of iced water to counter Louisiana lowcountry humidity.
And the story begins. We're off into bike-friendly neighbourhoods, trying to take it all in while keeping a keen eye out for the occasional Lake Pontchartrain-sized pothole or Mississippi-shaped divot.
As we negotiate Elysian Fields Avenue, I'm reminded of how Tennessee Williams' Blanche Dubois took a streetcar named Desire, transferred to the Cemeteries one and rode six blocks to Elysian Fields – precisely where we're cycling!
Crepe myrtle canopies shade us as we cruise through streets lined with Creole cottages, candy-coloured shotgun houses and hipster coffee shops. Jeff stops every couple of blocks to tell his tales of the city.
We hear about an unnatural place, dug from quagmire, plagued by yellow fever and cholera, a rich ethnic melting pot, place of hurricanes, wiped out twice by fire, coveted for its strategic position on the grand Mississippi. Or, in Jeff's words, "a loser's swamp below sea level and sinking".
We're served tasty spoonfuls of New Orleans spiced with waggish commentary, like, "The Garden district would be where your unindicted mayors live".
Jeff explains the origins of Creole culture – "those born in the new world, descended from the old", the difference between sophisticated Creole and simpler one-pot Cajun cooking, New Orleans' history of integration, the city's "free people of colour", the Quadroon Balls and the system of placage where wealthy white men entered into common law marriages with mixed-race women.
We cycle to the levee to discover how these barriers protected the wealthy during Katrina. We wend between countless colourful "shotgun" houses, which are being renovated for more privacy because "who wants to see their grandmother naked?"
There's a discourse on how all American music comes from New Orleans in an unbroken chain. We admire one of the city's three remaining Banksy street artworks of 14 and pass trees festooned with Mardi Gras beads – Jeff explains.
We hear about Faubourg Marigny's founder, the prodigal charmer, Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville who gambled his district away.
We stop for drinks, then pedal on, a gentle ride through a wild town. The story ends, but we are far richer for the telling.
The writer was a guest of the New Orleans convention and visitors' bureau but cycled at her own expense.
TRIP NOTES
MORE INFORMATION
GETTING THERE
Qantas flies daily return from Sydney and Melbourne to Los Angeles or Dallas, then codeshares with American Airlines or United to New Orleans (about 21 hours). See qantas.com.au
CYCLING THERE
Confederacy of Cruisers tours cost $US49 a person – booking essential. See confederacyofcruisers.com
STAYING THERE
The Windsor Court Hotel on the edge of the French Quarter has doubles from $US325 ($448). See windsorcourthotel.com
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