I went on the ultimate Louisiana road trip with swamp tours and frog feasts

Heading east across Louisiana’s swamp-like bayous, the scenery becomes almost dreamlike: air thickens, light softens and the horizon blurs into a watercolour smudge of marsh and sky. Bulging cypress trees plunge their roots deep into the mud, while prehistoric-looking pelicans skim low over the murky waters.

It’s in this otherworldly landscape that Cajun culture endures, with all its stubborn, joyful energy. The Cajuns arrived in the 18th century, French-speaking exiles from Acadia in what’s now Canada, fleeing British land disputes. They adapted to Louisiana’s watery terrain, turning hunting, fishing and farming into an art form and cultivating a scrappy resourcefulness that still defines the region.

You could zip from the city of Lake Charles in eastern Louisiana to New Orleans in a day, but that would miss the point entirely. Better to slow down and fall in step with the state’s languid pace. It’s also wise to arrive hungry, as home-cooked food is the heartbeat of the region, seasoned by French, Spanish, African, Native American and Caribbean influences.

Five days driving along the state’s marshy veins gives ample time to appreciate these distinctive flavours. Along the way, fresh discoveries wait around every bend: immersive swamp tours, rollicking Cajun music and even lessons in voodoo from a modern-day queen. They all flow into the easy, delicious rhythm of life on the bayou.

Day 1: Down-home cooking and Cajun music

Starting point: Lake Charles

Way down in southern Louisiana, it’s perfectly normal to live and work within hollering distance of your birthplace. Few lives, however, can match the sheer poetic symmetry of Mama Reta’s: a chef running one of the state’s most beloved restaurants, right where she first drew breath.

“This was my mum’s house. I was born here,” she says, sweeping her hand past gleaming stainless-steel fridges and pointing towards a room at the back. “A midwife delivered me right there in 1962.” Her chilli-red headscarf and beaming smile light up the room.

Mama Reta’s home underwent a transformation in 2022, when she renovated it into a drive-through take-out joint. The menu — a celebration of home-cooked Creole, Cajun and soul food — was an instant hit in Lake Charles, a small city about 30 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Mama Reta’s post-church feasts have become a Sunday touchstone, with families piling into cars, hungry for her signature chicken with red beans — and maybe a generous heap of velvety, seven-cheese macaroni, if blessed.

Inside her kitchen, the air is rich with the smoky aroma of barbecue ribs that have been slow-cooking all morning. Mama Reta slides a squeaky polystyrene box across the counter towards me, in which golden-brown fried chicken is piled high. It comes cloaked in a lightly spiced, salty batter, the meat slipping from the bone without fuss.

“This is what we grew up eating around here,” Mama Reta says after I voice my appreciation. “With black-eyed peas, smothered cabbage, okra and cornbread.” But it’s not just the Southern staples that earned her a cult following. “Girl, let me tell you: the secret ingredient is love,” she says, handing me a homemade sweet potato pie. “That’s what you taste at Mama Reta’s Kitchen.”

Feeling well fed, I’m eager to dive deeper into Cajun life. In this pocket of Louisiana, the community has kept its French-derived dialect alive, most expressive in the old-timey songs drifting over the bayous. That sound spills from Panorama Music House, too, a venue tucked into a walkable downtown Lake Charles neighbourhood full of shops selling everything from vinyl to antiques.

Inside the red-brick dance hall, the Ivy Dugas Band is finishing its Saturday Cajun brunch set. Lively accordion twangs, lilting fiddles and exuberant Cajun French lyrics tempt a few regulars to stomp beside the tables. Taking a breather on the sidelines is musician Chris Miller, a flat cap on his head and a 10-button accordion slung across his body. “Cajun music blends folk, blues, Caribbean and French Acadian tunes,” he explains. Spot a silver washboard on someone’s chest? “That usually signals zydeco music, which comes from Black musicians.”

After coaxing a rousing ditty from the accordion, Chris tells me, “Cajun music could only have been born in this patch of America. What you’re hearing is southern Louisiana’s melting pot.” The tune stays with me as I jump in the car and drive out of town, my vehicle’s headlights pointing east.

Day 2: The frog capital of the world

Lake Charles to Rayne
Distance: 50 miles

With Lake Charles in the rear-view mirror, po’boy shops with hand-painted signs flash past the window, giving way to country churches and endless fields of swaying rice on the approach to Rayne, a former railroad hub. A giant billboard proudly announces my arrival in the ‘Frog Capital of the World’.

On street corners in the sleepy downtown area, 4ft-tall concrete frog statues appear to leap from the pavements. Business facades are splashed with colourful amphibian murals. The town’s frog motif may seem baffling at first, but a visit to Chef Roy’s City Frog Cafe reveals a heritage that’s anchored in the food of French settlers and Cajun custom.

Amid the lunchtime rush, co-owner Robert Credeur pauses for a tableside chat. He tells me that his bullfrogs’ legs come three ways: deep-fried; grilled with marinade; or with rice, folded into etouffee — a rich, roux-based sauce popular in Cajun and Creole cuisine. “In 45 years, Chef Roy’s has always offered some kind of amphibian,” Robert says, placing a plate of fried legs before me.

These aren’t the spindly little things I’ve tasted in Paris, more for novelty than nourishment. The cartoonishly large frog’s legs could rival a plump chicken drumstick, and are similar in taste, but with a bit more chew.

Rayne’s frog trade took off in the late 19th century, when French merchant Donat Pucheu supplied bullfrogs from local rice and crayfish ponds. They were sent to fine-dining kitchens in cities like New Orleans, where frogs were less abundant locally, but diners still valued them as a European-inspired delicacy.

Commercial farms were soon introduced, boosting Rayne’s homegrown population. By the 1930s, Rayne’s Louisiana Frog Company reportedly exported 100,000 frogs annually. The industry dwindled in the 1970s, but the city still honours its legacy with the annual Frog Festival each May. “It’s kind of a big deal,” says Robert, who runs the cafe with a French chef who’s originally from the Champagne region. “It’s been going for about 50 years, with live music, frog derbies, the works.”

Outside, I bump into a group of locals in their twenties who see the festival as part of their Cajun identity. “Down here, our culture is so thick, it’s everywhere. Our parents listened to Cajun and zydeco music while cooking this kind of food, so the festival celebrates the traditions we grew up with,” says Victoria Peltier. “There’s also a frog’s leg eating contest. My cousin won last year. She’s tiny, but ate grown men under the table!” In Rayne, it seems, frogs really are pillars of the community.

Day 3: Southern history

Rayne to Oak Alley Plantation
Distance: 120 miles

About 40 miles from Rayne, the highway pours onto the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge. The 18-mile ‘Swamp Freeway’ skims the edge of the Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge, a place where big alligators lurk and long-necked egrets glide past like graceful white kites.

As I join the Great River Road, columned mansions dot the roadside, rising like elaborate wedding cakes. Grand as they are, they’re a mere throat-clearing for Oak Alley Plantation.

Twenty-eight oak trees stretch their limbs over the driveway, their canopy of gnarled branches like a cathedral’s vaulted ceiling. At the far end, the Greek revival ‘Big House’, completed in 1839, looms. It’s a masterclass in flawless symmetry — the marbled columns, expansive verandahs and imposing shuttered French doors commanding the view.

Oak Alley has become the archetypal image of the Deep South, featuring on postcards and across social media accounts. However, it isn’t simply an example of architectural splendour; it’s a reminder of wealth built on the back of the business of slavery. Records show that up to 120 people were enslaved here and forced to work the surrounding sugarcane fields.

Six reconstructed slave quarters stand beside the mansion: sparse, wooden structures with dirt floors. They reveal the squalid conditions endured within sight of the opulence enjoyed by the estate’s owners. “Ask someone to picture a plantation and Oak Alley is what comes to mind,” says Hillary Loeber, Oak Alley Foundation’s director of programming, as we walk towards the main house. “But an ugly reality is inseparable from this beautiful setting: this was a place where people were denied even the most basic human rights.”

Evening is falling as I take a final stroll along the oak-lined avenue, Spanish moss draping the branches like ghosts — a haunting reminder of the complex history that lingers in the South.

Day 4: Louisiana’s wild waterways

Oak Alley Plantation to LaPlace
Distance: 28 miles

Dry land gives way to mire on the drive towards Lake Pontchartrain. The air turns hot and steamy, carrying the swamp’s unmistakable musty scent, as the ribbon of road, set high on stilts, skims above the Maurepas Swamp, a haven for turtles and bald eagles.

At Cajun Pride Swamp Tours’ dock, Thomas A Billiot (or Captain Tom, as he’s known) waits beside his silver, flat-bottomed boat. He’s been guiding tours of the Manchac Swamp for 40 years, which still surprises him. “Funny thing is, when I started,” he recalls, beard clipped and camouflage cap low, “I never thought anyone would actually pay to come out here.”

The swamp runs in his blood, he says, shaped by generations of ancestors who have lived here, including Indigenous Houma Nation Tribe members and Cajuns. Eager to share their way of life, Captain Tom’s tours soon took off. “I was born on the bayou and I want people to experience what this place offers,” he says.

An astonishing abundance of wildlife keeps his work from feeling humdrum. As we motor into the quiet backwaters, passing a sounder of grunting wild boars, he explains how each season brings its own cast of characters. “Winter is raccoons, pigs and hawks. February and March, it’s wildflowers. ’Gators start mating in April and bask on the shores, then by July and August, they’re big and lazy.”

Louisiana’s waterways shelter nearly two million alligators, and it doesn’t take long to spot one. A nine-footer lies stretched along the bank, sunning itself like a holidaymaker relaxing poolside. Perfectly still, only its beady black eye catches the light as we glide by. Before long, we’ve spotted around 20 more, the alligators beginning to feel as commonplace as pigeons on the streets of London.

“Honey Bun is my favourite,” says Captain Tom with an affection usually reserved for pampered pets. “She’s 12ft long and probably about 60 years old by now.” The legendary alligator has been a frequent fixture since he started the tours, making her a long-term colleague of sorts.

Swamps might not be everyone’s idea of paradise, but they are to many people in Louisiana. “Hunting, fishing, shrimping — we’ve got everything we need to live a good life out here,” Captain Tom says. He adds that the swamp’s natural refuge, offering space and freedom from outside interference, has appealed to his Cajun relatives ever since they settled here after fleeing Canada. ‘It’s why, even when the weather beats us up, we stick around,” he tells me as we dock back at basecamp.

That evening, from the deck of Middendorf’s, a near-100-year-old, family-owned seafood restaurant, I round off the day with a plate of fried catfish wrapped in a buttery, crisp batter. As the sun sinks over Lake Pontchartrain and a zydeco tune jangles through the speakers, it’s easy to see why Captain Tom stays tethered to these enigmatic waterways.

Day 5: New-wave voodoo in the Big Easy

LaPlace to New Orleans
Distance: 26 miles

Arriving in New Orleans, I abandon the car and continue on foot. Streetcars trundle past and the heady smell of beignets (fried pillows of dough buried under an avalanche of powdered sugar) wafts from nearby cafes. Drawn by the hypnotic beat of a drummer practising in the shade of an oak, I cross Congo Square, where enslaved Africans once gathered to sing and dance and preserve their music and stories, and continue into the Tremé neighbourhood.

It’s here that I meet Kalindah Laveaux, New Orleans’ reigning voodoo queen. Sitting in the courtyard of her home, hair wrapped in red cloth and a string of tiny white shells hung from her forehead, her voice is calm but resolute as she explains that “most people have the wrong idea about voodoo — they think it’s evil, or something to mock”.

Dispelling these misconceptions has become Kalindah’s life’s mission. “The tradition came with my enslaved African ancestors, who fought to preserve it,” she says. Through a blend of African spiritual practices and French, Spanish and Caribbean influences, voodoo found a home in New Orleans, evolving over centuries into a deeply rooted faith. Kalindah can trace her own lineage back to 19th-century Marie Laveau, New Orleans’ most famous voodoo queen.

Voodoo is a source of intrigue to many visitors to New Orleans these days. They come in search of gris-gris (talisman) bags and voodoo dolls to take home, but Kalindah aims to teach a more nuanced perspective. She founded the annual Voodoo Conjure Festival, which features workshops, parades and drumming sessions designed to show the religion’s true essence. Outside of that, she directs the curious to the nearby Backstreet Cultural Museum. On display are African American artefacts, a voodoo shrine she created and exhibits on New Orleans’ masking traditions, tied to the Mardi Gras Indians carnival group.

Before I leave, Kalindah shows me the room where she holds cleansing and blessing ceremonies. The shelves are lined with jars filled with dried nettles, sage and even a snake’s shed skin. “Voodoo culture has long been there, hidden in plain sight,” she explains. “People are more open-minded now — I tell them to come to New Orleans and find out more for themselves.”

Later that evening, I make my way past the colourful buildings in the French Quarter, their balconies adorned with tropical greenery and lacy ironwork. My destination is the Loa Bar at the International House Hotel. I find mixologist Abigail Gullo crafting a smoking cocktail in honour of Baron Samedi, the voodoo spirit that governs the realm between the living and the dead. With a blowtorch in hand, Abigail — a witch by her own admission — carefully finishes her creation, placing a tarot card over the glass and offering a quick reading to the customer perched on the stool next to me. “Cocktails are our medicine here,” she says with a grin. “And there’s a sense of ritual that links the drinks with these older indigenous traditions, like voodoo and witchcraft.”

As she speaks, a second line marches past the window. The New Orleans tradition — where a brass band leads the procession and a dancing crowd follows behind — is rooted in the city’s Black communities. It’s a whirlwind of feathers, twirling umbrellas, sparkly costumes and shiny brass instruments.

“There’s an authenticity to this place,” Abigail says, as the parade continues past. “It’s in our food and it’s in our cocktails. Because the people came from all over — from Haiti to Havana, Sicily to Vietnam — here in New Orleans, they created a powerful spirit that you won’t find anywhere else in America.”

As I bid Abigail farewell, I leave behind a patch of Louisiana where cocktails, voodoo, swamps and centuries of history converge — a place that’s always danced to its own irresistible beat.