There was a lot I didn't know about Cajun country. Exactly where it was, for starters. I had it in Louisiana, but it had no point of orientation, no borders. So it remained until, headed to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, I decided to do a little exploring on a six-day visit.

Cajun country covers a wide swath of south Louisiana that includes 22 parishes, as Louisiana counties are called. Starting just west of the Mississippi River, it reaches to the Texas border, extending more than 80 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. Much of it is a vast wetland that drains the forest and grasslands to the north; its fertile soil, enriched by floods, is part of North America's continental life cycle.

Over the years, much land was drained, waters channeled to man-made lakes like Pontchartrain just to the north of New Orleans. Flat and well watered, the land attracted sugar planters who imported a lifestyle that became part of the Cajun country, with tens of thousands of acres planted in cane.

Sugar would provide a link between Cajun country and Hawai'i starting in the 1870s, when Louisiana's congressional delegation fought approval of reciprocity that allowed Hawaiian sugar into the United States duty-free. The issue was resolved in 1890 when the McKinley round of tariffs replaced sugar tariffs with subsidies to American growers, effectively eliminating the advantages of reciprocity and ultimately fueling the momentum leading to Hawai'i annexation in 1898.

Large portions of Cajun country remain wild, although the inroads of civilization are now centuries in the making. The wilds retain the feel of an earlier time, with wetland stands of towering cypress hung in graybeard trappings of Spanish moss, home to stately white egrets and herons, flamingo-pink roseate spoonbills and alligators that loll about in steely-eyed indifference in places like Lake Wilson (just outside Breaux Bridge) and the expansive wetlands of Atchafalaya Swamp, where flat-bottomed boats take visitors on a tour of the cypress-dotted shallows.

Awkwardly roosting on cypress branches, the spoonbills are graceful once they take off, brilliantly colorful against the deep blue sky. These are the early arrivals, I am told, the first hundreds of the thousands beginning to arrive from South America, an exotic harbinger of spring.

Water still makes its way through the Cajun flatlands. The water table is high, and nothing is more than a few dozen feet above sea level. Water collects in swampy shallows and lakes, rivers and streams that the locals call bayous. Bayous, it turned out, were another of my misconceptions, not the swampy wetlands of my imagination, but the rivers or streams that drain these wetlands.

CYPRESSES AWAKEN

My take on cypress also needed some correcting. I had always assumed they were evergreens suited to the subtropical climate of the South. I was surprised to find the cypress forests bare and gray during the days of my late February visit. By the time I left, five days later, sunny days and temperatures in the 70s and 80s were awakening the cypress from their winter hibernation, the hint of green a prelude to the springtime explosion of new-leaf color.

Warm temperatures had already drawn the azaleas and camellias into full bloom, great bushes of pink, red, white and orange blossoms beside the leafy canopy of centuries-old live oak, true evergreen giants native to Cajun country. I was basing myself in Lafayette, a town with a long history and a center of Cajun culture since French exiles from Nova Scotia, which the French called Acadia, settled here starting in the 1750s. It was a time when Britain and France were facing each other in battles for empire at home and in North America, where Britain was divesting France of its Canadian colonies, making exiles of the Acadians in the process, with French Louisiana an obvious alternative home for them.

It was an expulsion remembered for its tragic consequences, yet it also forged a new culture that came to be called Cajun, a dialectic transformation of Acadian. In the centuries that followed, that culture would evolve its own language, music, food and lifestyle. Amazingly, that regional identity remains strong throughout Cajun country, providing a visit with a distinctive sense of place. Luckily for the Acadians, they were welcomed by friendly native tribes like the Houmas, who helped them establish themselves in a wild landscape far different than the rocky, hilly, coastal lands of Acadia, teaching them its secrets and means of survival.

What followed for the Indians was a tragic story of disease and deportation that played out here, as it did throughout the Americas. Some tribes died out entirely, some survived, their numbers greatly diminished. Some natives married into Cajun families. As in Hawai'i, people trace their ancestry to many sources, including the United States, which in 1803 bought the vast acreage of French Louisiana, for $15 million, nearly doubling the size of the United States. Eventually, American states from Louisiana to North Dakota were carved from its 827,000 square miles.

The purchase put Cajun country under the American flag, opening the door to social, political and economic changes. Foremost were the expansion of plantation agriculture and Mississippi River trade. Ambitious, with big dreams in tow, planters established huge plantations based on slave labor. By the mid-19th century, tens of thousands of acres had been planted in cane, transforming the landscape and society.

A free-spirited people, the Cajuns expressed themselves in French even as they learned English, preserving their heritage by adapting the musical and culinary traditions they brought with them to suit the climate and temperament of their new home. Both remain key elements in making a visit to Cajun country special.

MUSIC IS UBIQUITOUS

Today, Cajun music flourishes, with bands playing to dancers throughout Cajun country and to audiences around the world. I've been a fan since the 1960s, when I discovered the wild rhythms of Doug Kershaw, and still find the music irresistible, which saw me out dancing on more than one evening in Cajun country, warmly welcomed by ladies willing to give me a try on the dance floor.

The great houses that still dot the Cajun landscape are beautiful reminders of the gracious face of an era corrupted by slavery. Battles would be fought here during the Civil War, with Louisiana part of the Confederacy.

Luckily, several of these grand plantation homes survived and have been restored, including three that I fit into my schedule. Built by planter David Weeks in 1834 as the mansion for a sprawling sugar plantation, Shadows-on-the-Teche (www.shadow sontheteche.org), was built alongside Bayou Teche, the small river that runs through the town of New Iberia. Today it is maintained and managed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The home, and a century's accumulated contents, was given to the trust by namesake descendant David Weeks Hall.

The next day, after visiting Avery Island, I spent a late afternoon at the nearby Rip Van Winkle Home & Gardens (www .ripvanwinklegardens.com), built as a retreat by a 19th-century actor who had gained fame and fortune playing Rip Van Winkle. The home is beautifully furnished, and the grounds are alive with camellias and azaleas. The sunset, with live oak in silhouette against a pastel sky, proved a perfect setting for the peaceful end of a very full day.

Sugar cane still grows on thousands of Cajun country acres, with the town of Jeanerette the capital of the state's cane industry. But as in Hawai'i, cane is threatened by competition, and crops like corn and soybeans have replaced cane in many places. Elsewhere, it is suburbanization that has gobbled up farmland, with "Land For Sale" signs frequent along Lafayette's once-rural roads.

Small-town charm adds to Cajun country's appeal. Lafayette proved a perfect base, providing easy access to a variety of natural and historic attractions. Lafayette, founded as Vermilionville in the mid-1700s, and renamed after the French general who fought in the American Revolution, offered the masterful architecture and artful decor of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist and its interesting museum, a collection of nice shops in a gentrifying downtown that includes a planetarium and hands-on science museum.

I'd chosen Lafayette because it was home to several sites that linked the Cajun present to the Cajun past, including the informative Acadian Cultural Center (www.nps.gov/jela), operated by the National Park Service. Adjacent to the center is Vermilionville (www.vermilionville .org), one of two living history villages (the other is Acadian Village (www.acadianvillage.org) that provide a context for the Cajun lifestyle and the music that has evolved from it. The Alexandre Mouton House is a 19th-century gem with period furnishings.

Lafayette also is a university town, home to the 18,000student campus of the University of Louisiana and its Ragin' Cajuns. A highlight of the beautiful campus is the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum (www.Louisiana.edu/uam), which plays host to high-quality traveling exhibits, like the art glass exhibit I visited.

And there are smaller, quieter towns like Breaux Bridge, where the food and musical entertainment are legendary: Abbeville; St. Martinville; and New Iberia, home to Shadows-on-the-Teche. The town's name is a reference to Spanish explorers and settlers who made their way here before the French arrived.

Tabasco ice cream!

Later arrivals would become Cajun-country celebrities. Like the McIlhenny family, which developed the hot Tabasco sauce that is one of the world's best-known brands, sold in more than 160 countries. Now in business at the same Avery Island site for more than 130 years, the McIlhenny Tabasco Factory tour (www.tabas co.com ) is followed by a taste of Tabasco ice cream (way better than it sounds ) and dozens of other Tabasco-linked products at the site's shop. McIlhenny's also operates Jungle Gardens and Bird City, where nesting egrets and the world's biggest collection of camellias are the big draw.

I departed Lafayette on a sunny morning that still held the edge of the nighttime chill. I was heading back to New Orleans, stopping en route to a lunchtime visit to Houmas House Plantation and Gardens (www.houmas house.com), about 90 minutes from Lafayette. Built early in the 19th century as the mansion for a 20,000-acre sugar plantation, the grand-pillared home now sits on beautifully landscaped grounds about 50 minutes from New Orleans, just off Route 10. Beautifully restored as a museum, its restaurant, called Latil's Landing, under executive chef Jeremy Langlois, was named one of America's 20 best new restaurants by Esquire magazine in November 2005. A delicious multi-course lunch, served in one of several elegant period-piece dining rooms, confirmed the selection.

The beautifully landscaped grounds, alive with flowers, provide a gracious setting for Houmas House's classic architecture, the main house framed by centuries-old live oak trees hung with Spanish moss. Bed-and-breakfast accommodations are available.

I set out for New Orleans an hour later than I'd expected, lingering over black pansies and beneath the spiraling arms of live oaks planted in the 1830s. And although the Big Easy beckoned, I was wishing I'd had a few more days, time to see the cedar leaves emerge, to watch a thousand spoonbills fill the sky, and to find out just what other misconceptions time here might dispel.