A toilet is seen on May 9, where a house stood before Hurricane Katrina struck the United States Gulf Coast. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, it also ravaged a series of small towns. Nearly two years later they have faded from the spotlight but are still struggling to rebuild. - Reuters

NEW ORLEANS (AP):

"This is the last pretty thing you're going to see until we get to the lake front," tour guide Rose Scott tells passengers gazing at the live oaks of City Park.

They're a bit more than an hour into a van tour of the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Scott's employer, Isabelle Cossart of Tours by Isabelle, calls it 70 miles of destruction in 3 1/2 hours.

Nearly two years after Katrina turned the New Orleans area into a lake of misery, demand for tours of the devastation overwhelms that for visits to mainstay attractions such as cemeteries, plantations and swamps.

"Our survival depends on it. If I quit doing the post-Katrina city tour, I'm out of business," Cossart said.

Scott's van passes the convention centre and Superdome, where thousands of refugees suffered after Katrina. "The convention centre was never supposed to be a shelter. That's why they didn't have food there," she says.

She turns the van toward areas little known to outsiders before Katrina: Gentilly and Lakeview, where the view of Lake Pontchartrain provides respite on the way to the Lower 9th Ward. Scott drives on to the St. Bernard area, a hard-hit sector east of New Orleans where she lived until the storm.

Plantation tours

"It used to be we did nothing but plantation tours," Cossart said. The US$58-per-person Katrina tour nowmakes up three-quarters of her business, and she recently bought a third van.

Tourism officials have struggled with post-hurricane stress on the industry. Some downtown hotels - including the Hyatt and the Fairmont - remain closed. But the convention centre and most tourist attractions are open. The bellwether French Quarter was almost untouched by the hurricane.

Kelly Schulz, spokeswoman for the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the disaster tours help convince travel agents and convention bookers that devastated areas are distant from tourism venues.

Cossart said the tours began just over a month after Katrina, which struck August 29, 2005. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hired her as a guide for Japanese engineers who had worked in Kobe after the 1995 earthquake.