Is New Orleans Ready for Tourists?

Krewes News

The daytime tourist offerings are similarly mixed. The aquarium was still closed, but the National D-Day Museum was open, as were most of the antiques shops of Royal and Magazine streets and the many tchotchke shops around the French Market. At the Audubon Zoo, which is open weekends only until March, all seemed as it should be in one of the most pleasantly organized zoos in the country. The wildlife glockenspiel at the entrance still burps out the Neville Brothers/Meters' homage to the Audubon, "They All Asked for You," every few minutes. The elegant, languid live oaks still stand sentry over the grassy fields and the alligators live in the mock bayou. Only the sea lion pool looks deserted; a red tetherball hangs unmoving over leaf-covered water. "Our sea lions evacuated to Moody Gardens in Texas," a small sign says. "We miss them and look forward to their return."

A short drive across the Mississippi at Mardi Gras World, the wondrous float-building workshop and tourist stop, the neighborhood was filled with shotgun houses, many sporting blue-tarped roofs and FEMA trailers in the yard. But inside the warehouses themselves, where outrageous parade floats are born, the tours go on as usual and it's always Fat Tuesday. That's especially true now that the big day itself is only a month away.

Several of the Mardi Club krewes, the private clubs that run the parades and hold the balls, moved their floats here for safekeeping before Katrina. Endymion's giant riverboat, 80 yards long and led by a massive alligator, blinked in fiber-optic glory in a hangarlike space. In an adjacent workshop, new floats were taking shape. A massive foam head of New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin loomed over the huge Cleopatra of a previous year. (The reputations of Nagin, President Bush and former FEMA director Michael Brown will not fare well in the coming parade season, judging by the blueprints lying around this cluttered workshop. Likewise, the sentiment on T-shirts for sale in the French Quarter run decidedly, and obscenely, against them. Who knew the letters FEMA could be made to stand for so many coarse activities?)

"I love how feisty these people are. They seem to be in surprisingly good moods, in spite of everything," said Carla Scott, a tourist from Sydney. "We were expecting much worse."

Hurricane Bus Tour

Well, there was much worse to be seen. Most of the city, of course, is a mind-blowing wreck. Any tourist with a car can drive around the ruined neighborhoods, either from morbid curiosity or to understand firsthand just how injured this city is, in spite of the functioning life of the tourist zones. Mid-City, Lakeview, the Upper Ninth Ward -- all can be entered by anyone willing to risk a flat on the dirty, deserted streets.

But the post-Katrina disaster tour has become another part of New Orleans tourism, and on Sunday morning, a couple of dozen outsiders who wanted a closer, narrated look boarded a Gray Line bus.

"There is no way I can adequately prepare you for what you're about to see," said Julie Gorney, New Orleans native, returned evacuee and now Gray Line tour guide.

Hers was not a happy-talk spiel. As the bus rolled up Canal Street on its way past the Superdome and the Convention Center, she pointed out the water line still visible on shop walls. She noted the businesses, electronics stores and shoe shops, that still wore plywood shields and hazarded to explain the difference between looting food for survival and a DVD player for fun. Block by block, she unreeled the events leading up to Katrina's landfall and the chaos that followed. She debunked many of the reports of lawlessness, even as she pressed her silent passengers to comprehend the horror of families trapped in their houses or stranded within the mobs.

"The water is coming in, people," she said as the bus passed the jail. "There are people behind bars."

In the Lakeview district, the bus cruised along one shattered block after another, house after house with the vacant eyes of blown-out windows, cars askew and sheathed in grime, trees inverted over rooftops. Each house bore a sort of creepy spray-painted pentagram, the marks of rescue and recovery squads who came through looking for victims and stranded animals. Gorney explained how to interpret them to determine what National Guard units left it and what they found.

"Three killed there," she said quietly as the bus passed a filthy yellow bungalow close to one of the levee breaks. "It's all so sad."

The tour took a break at Russell's Marina Grill, a surprisingly lively restaurant near Lake Pontchartrain. Visitors stretched their legs or looked over the paperwork of this unusual tour: Each customer selects one of five Katrina recovery charities to which Gray Line will donate a portion of its $35 fee, and each is asked to review -- and hopefully sign -- a petition calling for a more robust government rebuilding effort. Most quietly contemplated the surrounding moonscape.

"I'm just thinking how I'm going to explain this when I get home," said Janet Lee, a visitor from Denver. She marveled at the existential whiplash she'd been feeling as she moved from the normalcy of the French Quarter and the other tourist areas to the still-obliterated parts of a city on the edge of collapse.

"It doesn't even feel like the same world."

Steve Hendrix will be online to discuss this story Monday at 2 p.m. during the Travel section's weekly chat at www.washington post.com.