Art Deco

Miami is the Art Deco capital of the world, (setting aside my mothers kitchen). Simply put, Art Deco is a style of architecture that, in its heyday of the 1920s and 1930s, used to be considered ultramodern. Today, fans of the style consider it retro fabulous. Art Deco made its debut in 1925 at an exposition in Paris. In Miami, Art Deco is marked by the pastel-hued buildings that line South Beach and Miami Beach. But it's a lot more than just colour. In the building design and facade you will see the intricacies and impressive craftsmanship characteristic of the '20s, '30s, '40s, many of which are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Waldorf Towers Hotel

The Carlyle (made famous in Miami Vice)

A 1960's Chevrolet Belair parked outside the Hotel Victor to give it a bit of Deco flair

Miami

It's a steamy 34 degrees and what feels like 95% humidity, the music is pumping out from the bars and cafés at the front of the beautiful Art Deco hotels along Ocean Drive, and massive cocktails adorn every table along the sidewalk. The colder weather is yet to arrive in Miami (winter is actually the tourist season) but that hasn't stopped people arriving early to experience Miami. It rains every now and then to make the roads steam.

Miami, like most cities in the world have a hop-on-hop-off bus and this has two sections: the South Beach loop and the City loop. I've included a few photos from the trip.

Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables, Miami 

Stainless steel diner

New courthouse meant to resemble a cruise ship...eh?

Holocaust Memorial

The Clevelander bar has two sidewalk dancers...in these heat?!

Is there such a thing as a Diabetic Alligator?

It was an overcast day with some light rain which made it a bit cold but this was swamp tour day. The large airboats travel at about 30knots which is fast enough considering the rain stinging your face. The airboats have V8 motors and man are they loud!! They supply earmuffs but once you're travelling at high speed you have to hold them on. All of the alligators in the swamp are probably deaf by now.

Our guide George was a local who confessed he swam in gator infested waters when he was young. As he only had 3 fingers on one hand we believed him (just kidding, he had all his fingers...and surprisingly appeared to have all of his teeth).

We only saw one 8 foot gator which the guide fed marshmallows too as encouragement to come over to the boat. Apparently gators are colourblind which is why they can see white marshmallows easier. I hope there's no such thing as Alligator diabetes because if there is, the gators in this swamp are going to end up with it. Perhaps that's the reason they can't see very well now?

George also brought a small (2 year old gator) with him that he passed around for show and tell. He kept it in an esky. He had another esky for drinks. Hope he doesn't make a mistake and absentmindedly just reach in to an esky one day...

George

Sally-gator

The white spot on his head is a marshmallow.

Houses along the bayou. There were a number of shrimpin' boats too.

Steamboat Paddlewheeler

The steamboat Natchez is 38 years old, weighs 1384 tons and carries 1233 passengers and crew. It has a 1500hp steam engine and can operate in only 5 feet of water. The cruise went for 2 hours, travelled about 6 miles down the river then back up to the bridges.

The Mississippi River is the 3rd longest in the world (behind the Nile and the Amazon). It begins in Minnesota and drains water from 31 US states, and 2 Canadian States.

Wharves damaged by Hurricane Katrina

MV Cape Kennedy (T-AKR 5083) is one of the United States Military Sealift Command's 27 Roll-on/Roll-off Ships.

The little orange boat at the stern is an escape life raft. Once the crew are aboard they pull the release handle and the boat plunges into the sea. So, they might survive a sinking tanker, but will they survive the 100 foot drop into the ocean?

Hop On Hop Off (Apologies to The Karate Kid)

The hop-on-hop-off bus travels over most of the city of New Orleans including the Garden District (the more wealthy part of New Orleans), the French Quarter (the original city), the cemeteries (such as Lafayette Cemetary, used in the movie Double Jeopardy), the CBD, and the shopping precincts. New Orleans doesn't favour chains or franchises preferring individual shops which is kind of refreshing but also frustrating too as they don't really have shopping malls - just shops along the street...but those streets stretch for miles.

There are still many parts of the city still showing damage after Katrina even 8 years on, such as boarded up windows and doors, and repairs and renovations are done as funds become available. The Louisiana Government explored ways to improve the inbound cashflow to the economy and one option was offering significant tax incentives for movies to be made here which turned out to be a highly attractive offering to Hollywood and Louisiana is now the most popular location for films being made in the USA (I know that's hard to believe but that's what the tour guide said). Recent movies (jut in the last 2 years) include:

Beautiful Creatures

Django Unchained

Contraband

The Expendables 2

Oblivion

Lee Daniels the Butler

Looper

The Paperboy

Broken City

and these were the ones I knew but are only about 10% of the total.

On the walking tour of the Garden District we saw John Goodman's and Sandra Bullock's houses which are only about 3 houses apart. Sandra Bulluck's house is across the street from the house used for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. While filming was going on, Brad Pitt stayed at Sandra's house - so he didn't have far to go to work.

Many actors that live in the city have helped out by putting on free performances (Harry Connick jnr), or simply donated money to the recovery fund to rebuild houses destroyed in the flooded areas. brad Pitt alone provided about 40 houses.

Mardi Gras is very big in New Orleans and there is a stop on the tour which makes floats 365 days a year, some of which are bookings for 2 years ahead. These floats are similar to Sydney's Mardi Gras and can be quite large.

In the cemetery, the actor Nicholas Cage already has his own crypt built and paid for. It's the pyramid shaped object below...and yes that's weird.

Sandra Bullock's house

John Goodman's house

Memorial art piece symbolising the struggle after Katrina

What looks like an abandoned power station is actually movie studios

New Orleans 2

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New Orleans is a quirky, eclectic kind of place. It trades on the voodoo culture, jazz, gumbo and creole, swamps and gators, and the Mississippi River. The French Quarter is all about double storey houses with verandas and plants hanging off them and is the original part of the city. Bourbon Street is a bit grotty and smelly with a number of Larry Flynn's Hustler bars along with the ubiquitous shrimp gumbo and other creole creations. Since Katrina its gone downhill according to the locals - it used to be the place to go for jazz and dancing but seems to be a bit seedier now. A shame really.

The city's history includes its founding by the French, then a period under Spanish control, then back to French rule before being sold to the United States which was known as the Louisiana Purchase. Notwithstanding the French and Spanish influences,  even the Irish and the Germans had a significant influence here, the latter contributing a lot of breweries!

They're called streetcars, not trolleys or trams. "A streetcar named desire" was filmed in New Orleans.

St Louis Cathedral

Statue of Joan of Arc

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.