Cruise review: drift down the Mississippi River from New Orleans
On a voyage to the USA’s Southern heartland, we discover music as soulful as the food – and historic mansions as haunted as the Mississippi’s gator-filled swamps.
The sound of toe-tapping jazz cuts through the clang-clang of red trams as I breakfast barefooted on chicory coffee and deep-fried, sugary beignets. This sublime pairing has been served for 150 years at Café du Monde: an institution that owes its prized pastry to French-Creole colonists in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Judging by the telltale trail of icing sugar, I’m not the first or the last to get my beignet fix on Jackson Square’s lawn.
Nicknamed NOLA, the great Louisiana port of New Orleans bookends Viking’s seven-night sailing along the Lower Mississippi – fondly known as ‘The Big Muddy’ – to the charismatic city of Vicksburg.
Viking Mississippi: a ship made for the Mississippi River
A hybrid of Viking’s ocean and river ships, the five-deck Viking Mississippi was purpose-built to ply North America’s second-longest river.
We may be docked 8,050km from Norway’s fjord-fringed shores but that doesn’t stop Viking’s Scandinavian DNA from imprinting the ship’s décor. Its blond wood and blue-cream palette extends to my deluxe veranda stateroom (cabin) with its sun-kissed balcony – perfect for drinking in those ever-changing river views. Yet 70m barges carrying everything from coal to corn are a daily reminder that the Mississippi remains very much a working waterway.
Captain Cory Burke navigates 697km of the 3,770km ‘Father of Waters’, which rises in Minnesota’s Lake Itasca and empties into the Gulf of Mexico, flowing through 10 US states, including Louisiana, along the way. The Southern flavours of the USA’s ‘Pelican State’ infuse everything from the ship’s à la carte dinners to the entertainment. One evening I dine on Cajun oyster gratin, spicy jambalaya – a one-pot Creole rice dish with smoky andouille sausage – and gumbo, an aromatic Louisiana stew, at the ship’s more formal eaterie, The Restaurant, followed by blues music played in the living room on deck one.
As for Louisiana’s famously friendly Southern hospitality, local guides deliver it in spades on daily excursions, including visiting the state’s poignant Civil War battlefields and bayous: a sort of marshy lake.
Spooky swamps & haunted homes in Louisiana
Day two’s standout excursion is the gator-flooded Manchac Swamp. Our guide, Dustin, warns, “Don’t lean over the edge of the boat, otherwise you might have a little something extra you weren’t expecting – which we call a lagniappe.”
Cypress trees appear to rise from the water’s chicory-coloured depths as our Cajun captain steers us steadily past motionless alligators and scurrying bankside racoons. “Old boats and buildings in NOLA’s French Quarter were made from rot-resistant cypress wood,” Dustin adds in his Southern drawl. The trees are draped in feathery streamers of grey-green Spanish moss – a marker of good air quality – that stuffed the seats of Henry Ford’s earliest motors and only add to Manchac’s eeriness. The shaded swamp is also said to be haunted by a guitar-playing voodoo priestess named Julia Brown, who lived here in the mid-1800s.
More ghost stories surround Houmas Estate, a 250-year-old plantation home in Darrow, set in 15 hectares of gardens, once producing 20 million pounds of sugar a year. Dressed in a bell hoop skirt, our guide Susanna descends its three-storey spiral staircase, explaining, “The home’s original owners thought the spirits came through the keyholes at night, so they kept voodoo death dolls in the bedrooms.” As our group shuffles into the mansion’s billiard room, Susanna tells us that an Irishman named John Burnside purchased the property in the mid-1800s. Nicknamed the “Sugar Prince of Louisiana,” he established a horseracing stable here.
Houmas was just one of Louisiana’s plantations. Around 500 more are marked on the entrance hall’s original 1847 map, which was recovered from the property’s attic in the 1980s. Another restored Greek Revival mansion called Rosedown – where the cash crop was cotton rather than sugar – is 89km upstream from Darrow in Saint Francisville, day three’s port of call. A magnificent avenue of ancient oaks makes for a head-turning entrance, and the interior is a love letter to craftsmanship, with silk-screen printed wallpaper and an original mahogany staircase.
Lower Mississippi: soul food meets Civil War sites
Day four has us dropping anchor at one of the Lower Mississippi’s oldest settlements: Natchez. Actress-cum-tour guide Judith brings the city’s colourful history to life as we stroll past elegant suburban villas of the Antebellum (pre-US Civil War) era. Wandering the hushed and hallowed halls of Dunleith – a national historic landmark where Oscar-nominated period drama The Help was filmed – is a highlight.
“Shakespeare came up with the phrase ‘soul food’!” Judith says, over a Southern spread of fried chicken, deep-fried okra, black-eyed peas and buttermilk scones, washed down with native Muscadine wine in Dunleith’s restaurant – a former carriage house.
After lunch we make a sobering stop at Forks of the Road, the USA’s largest slave market from 1833 to 1863. “The hymns the enslaved sang in the fields came on over into the church,” pastor Joe from Zion Hill Baptist Church tells his congregation of Viking passengers, before we’re treated to a stirring a cappella gospel performance.
In Vicksburg – our northernmost port of call – I head to church again, this time to marvel at six stained glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany, of light and jewellery family fame. A visit to the Church of the Holy Trinity is part one of a walking tour led by local lady Karen. “Coca-Cola was bottled for the first time in Vicksburg in 1894,” she says, as we pound the streets paved with bricks made from the city’s own soil; the same ground into which locals dug 500 ‘clay caves’ for refuge during the 47-day siege of Vicksburg in 1863. I’m led into a replica cave by the great, great-grandson of war hero Jefferson Davis; a cotton farmer who became President of the short-lived Confederate States of America. The icing on the beignet is stepping inside Bertram Hayes-Davis’s Vicksburg home, filled with museum-worthy heirlooms such as Jefferson’s sword, which was used during the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War.
French Connection: Baton Rouge & New Orleans
I spend my penultimate cruising day being guided on foot around French-flavoured Baton Rouge – the state capital – by tour guide Craig. “Do y’all know the unofficial motto for this city?” he says. “It’s laissez les bons temps rouler, which means ‘let the good times roll’ in English.”
In the space of just two and a half hours, we tick off landmarks such as the rocketship-like Water Tower and neoclassical former Louisiana Old State Capitol, which the river’s greatest son, Mark Twain, called the Monstrosity on the Mississippi. Another talking point is downtown’s Governor’s Mansion, set just four blocks from the mighty river. Modelled on the White House and now a run as a museum, it was originally built as a home for Louisiana’s country-singing governor Jimmie Davis, who recorded one of the US’s best-loved tunes, 'You Are My Sunshine', in 1940.
Fittingly, my voyage ends on a musical high note along New Orleans’ neon-lit Bourbon Street. Stretching 13 blocks in the city’s French Quarter, this historic thoroughfare can be a little bewildering for first-timers. Thankfully, Kevin – a Grammy-award-winning trumpet player – leads the way. The highlight of his four-hour tour – which includes a Cajun-Creole buffet – is a private concert by his four-piece band in NOLA’s oldest operating jazz club, Fritzel’s. “Ragtime music was written down, so you purchased the sheet music,” says pianist Richard, playing as he speaks. “But with jazz, you could mess around with it.”
The big crowd-pleaser at Fritzel’s is Scott Joplin’s 'The Entertainer', best known for being the ‘ice-cream van song’. As I sit back and savour a signature Berlin Mule absinthe cocktail on the house, I reflect that lagniappes come in many wonderful shapes and forms in lyrical Louisiana.
Viking Mississippi: our verdict
Great for Immersing yourself in Southern culture, on and off the ship, from music and literature to cuisine and voodoo
Don’t miss Ordering a mint julep cocktail from Observatory Eleven Bar. It’s made with authentic bourbon whiskey from the Deep South
Best spot on board On a sunny day, grab a table for lunch on deck five’s Aquavit Terrace
Value for money The fare includes daily excursions, onboard meals with wine and beer, Wi-Fi, tips, in-destination transfers and flights from selected UK airports
Saving the planet The ship is fitted with LED lights, as well as a propulsion system to reduce emissions and noise
Fast facts 386 guests; 193 cabins; 147 crew; 2 restaurants
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