New Orleans

For pilots, long haul flights are often described as hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror. Passengers aren't so lucky, they don't even get the sheer terror part. So it's 14 hours of sitting watching movies, sitting reading, and trying to sleep in a chair that has all the appeal of a chair on death row with electrodes and leather straps. You just want to get out of it!

But get out of it we did....in the land of longhorns, Stetson hats, oil, and JR Ewing. Dallas. Dallas is Qantas's preferred stopover point for Southern America and to be fair, unless you are going to California or Seattle, it's a more direct route to just about everywhere in North America. The other plus is the airport is newer than LA, with a fast food franchise every 3 feet. "Ain't nobody goin hungry in this here airport boy!"

From there we flew to New Orleans and landed about 6pm. New Orleans is on the Mississippi River and is also surrounded by a triangulation of 3 large lakes. From New Orleans, the Mississippi runs about 160kms into the Gulf of Mexico and is a major shipping route to inland America. Much of the land surrounding New Orleans is swampy pools of all shapes and sizes with lots of green algae. It's like hovering over a fuzzy green jigsaw puzzle.

The city is named after Orléans, a city located on the Loire River in Centre, France, and is well known for its distinct French Creole architecture, as well as its cross-cultural and multilingual heritage.

New Orleans was catastrophically affected by the worst engineering disaster in the world since Chernobyl when the Federal levee system failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and floodwalls and levees constructed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers failed below design specifications and 80% of the city flooded. More than 1,500 people were recorded as having died in Louisiana due to Katrina. Currently the city's population is about 350,000 and including the surrounding districts about 1.2m.