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I spent several days in the area of Houma (pronounce Ho-Ma) Louisiana looking for Cajuns. Today I took a "swamp tour" which you see advertised everywhere. As far as I could tell, it was they only way get off the road and on the bayou. I always though the bayou was the swamp, but it actually refers to a small river which may be, and often is, surrounded by swamp. Kinda looks like the Wiccacon creek where I grew up in North Carolina.
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Looking into the actual swamp. When driving around Cajun county there were a lot of what seemed to be canals along the side of the road, which were called bayous. As you drove along, the bayou got wider and the boats (a lot with shrimp nets) got bigger, but I still haven't figured out how they got out to open water. Maybe the nets were for crawdads.
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The highlight of the trip. We pulled into one little "bay" and this BIG alligator swims up to the boat as fast as he can. Our tour guide said he was training this one. In other words, he was feeding wild animals so they would come when the boat pulled in.
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The alligator takes a piece of chicken off the end of a pole. Supposedly they will eventually jump out of the water (about half their body length) to get the chicken - I saw pictures - none of the alligators today had that much energy. They must have to "train" new alligators every season, 'cause about 30,000 are taken during the hunting season. Actually they catch them with bait and hooks, so it's more like fishing season. What do they use for bait? Chicken.
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Everywhere I went in Louisiana there was some evidence of the petroleum industry. Refineries, pipelines, wells. Even in the bayou in the middle of nowhere, wells just stuck up out of the water. Notice that they don't have the pumps like you see in California. The guide said the pressure of the oil and gas was so high pumps were not needed.
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How do they get the oil out of the well? I thought you'd want to know. As you float through the wilds of the bayous, suddenly you pass a barge parked ready to transport oil from well to refinery. At one point, as the alligators circled the boat, our guide turned off the engine and pulled out his guitar. He said if anyone didn't want to hear him play they could leave now. We all stayed, and it turned out not to be so bad, and the closest I got to a real Cajun.
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