Postcard from... New Orleans

Jackson Square, New Orleans (Getty)

It is a ritual undertaken with every visit to the Big Easy. A walk in the early morning to the Café du Monde in the French Quarter and, after brushing off the icing sugar that departed your beignet on to your lap, a few moments spent gazing at the Mississippi River, always alive with assorted tug-boats, ferries and the occasional cruise liner too.

It turns out that this summer there is a little less boating activity going on than there used to be.

For one, the paddlewheel steamer, The Creole Queen, tied up just a little upstream from the café, is inexplicably out of service for half of August. Maybe the heat – touching 100 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend – is too much for the old girl.

Also dwindling are options to get to Algiers, across the river from the French Quarter, with its off-the-beaten-track restaurants, shops and galleries. The people who run the ferry services back and forth saw fit recently to stop taking cars but also to cut the hours.

Last ride back to New Orleans if it is a Sunday? No later than six o’clock.

Nice for the ferry captains but a disaster for Algiers business owners who completely depend on those tourists adventurous enough to leap the river.

Neil Timms, owner of a very British-themed pub, the Crown and Anchor, laments that profits have dropped by about a third. “They’d come on a week night… and as soon as the ferry got cut they disappeared,” he told the Times-Picayune.

Lazy river, indeed.