One of the “absolute must do” items we were told we had to check off on our list when visiting New Orleans was a swamp tour. Turns out that’s advice that is highly dependent on season and weather.

There are multiple companies that offer swamp tours around New Orleans, most of them operating in and around the Honey Island Swamp to the south east of the city itself. It takes about 30-40 minutes to drive there depending on trafic and they all have poor signs and even worse driving instructions so they’re a bit tricky to find.

All the swamp tour companies offer the same basic service: They take you out on a shallow bottom boat and sail around in the swamp looking for animals. The big draw of course is the aligators and if you’re lucky you can see up to 20 or even 30 gators on one trip. Pretty impressive, right? And even if you don’t see many gators “you see a lot of other animals”. Well, that’s a truth with some major modifications. Turns out (not surprisingly) the number of animals and other “cool stuff” you end up seeing on a wamp tour is negatively related to the volume of water currently in the river and in the air. In other words, the higher the river is and the more it rains, the less critters you will see.

In our case the river was the highest it’s been since the mid -80s (excluding Katrina of course) and thus all the non-aquatic critters we were promised, such as deer and racoons, were long gone or drowned and the aquatic ones were mostly washed away. Furthermore the normally shallow and dry areas were all submerged and the water was the colour of chocolate milk rather than the regular “tea colour”. Great stuff. As we sailed up the river our guide (who was great by the way) told tall tales of gator encounters while he frantically searched high and low for anything to show us. There was a lot of talk of plants and birds and we spent a lot of time trying to get close to a couple of snakes but for the majority of the ride it was all foileage and nothing else.

Anny got to hold a tiny aligator

You know you’re in trouble when the guide drags out a tiny gator he has in a box for emergencies. Sure, the little critter is cool and all, but that’s not what you pay to see. Fortunately, at the very end of the trip we did find a small gator, barely awake and not really interested in playing with us, who made some lethargic attempts to eat hot dogs on a stick before leaving. It was so slow and uninterested it was almost as if it had been hired in last minute and the captain wasn’t paying it enough.

Gator visit over we hightailed it back to the dock passing a bunch of hunting cabins, many of which were destroyed by Katrina and never rebuilt. Interesting, but again not what we paid for.

I have to cut them some slack though: The gators go into hibernation toward the end of October and the water was rediculously high because of the insane rainfall they’ve had down in Louisiana. But they should have told us that they hadn’t seen gators in weeks before we bought the tickets. Had we known the trip would probably be a bust where gators were concerned we would have paid more attention to the other stuff, what little there was.

That said, if you’re in New Orleans during the summer I would highly recommend going on a swamp tour. I would go back and do the tour again during a better season.