The Manchac Swamp holds 23,000 acres of bald cypress and tupelo gum forest, its waterways dark with tannins leached from centuries of leaf decay. Tiki boat operators launched their first BYOB cruises here in 2018, converting pontoon vessels into floating tiki bars with thatched roofs and Polynesian décor, an improbable collision of South Pacific kitsch and Louisiana wetlands. The tours depart from Paris Road in eastern New Orleans, where the bayou's brackish fingers thread through land the Choctaw called "the place of many fish." The tiki boat tour New Orleans route cuts through the same cypress corridors that supplied timber for the city's French Quarter buildings in the 1700s. The waterway still functions as a commercial fishing route, its banks lined with crab traps and the occasional camp house on stilts. Guides navigate around submerged stumps and floating vegetation mats while passengers scan the water for American alligators, which number in the thousands across these wetlands. Great blue herons and great egrets fish in the shallows, and Louisiana offers 300 species of birds migrate through this flyway each spring and autumn. The cypress trees that dominate the landscape grow pneumatophores, woody root projections that rise above the waterline to capture oxygen for submerged root systems. Some trees along the tour route exceed 500 years in age, their trunks swollen at the base and scarred by high-water marks from hurricane storm surges. Spanish moss drapes from branches in gray curtains, the plant technically an epiphyte in the bromeliad family rather than a true moss, drawing moisture and nutrients from humid air rather than the host tree. The bayou's water level fluctuates with rainfall and tidal influence from Lake Pontchartrain, creating shifting habitat zones where freshwater marsh transitions to brackish swamp. Nutria, an invasive rodent species introduced for fur farming in the 1930s, graze on marsh grasses along the banks. The tiki boat format allows wildlife observation without the noise and wake of airboat tours, the pontoon's flat bottom drawing less than two feet of water and permitting access to shallow backwater channels where alligators nest and wading birds forage.