Chapter 7
(Note: None of the pictures taken on this section were successful enough to display. Expect more next time though.)
“Everyone who has lived dies. Not everyone who dies has lived.”
T-shirt slogan, Anchorage
So I came to be listening to the struggling guide on a walking tour of the city as he uttered the immortal line
“Over there, if you could see it, you would see Mount McKinley.”
It reminded me of a comment from the pilot as I had approached Kathmandu some years earlier. He had remarked, apparently seriously
“For those of you who wish to see Everest, it isn’t visible from this route.”
Anchorage wasn’t any more interesting for having someone show me around it although by now I had met the group for the next leg and had about half of them with me. I had come into town early and gone to the joining hotel, a rather run-down motel which looked considerably less comfortable than my Bed and Breakfast had been. The overlanders had been easy to spot as they gathered in reception to meet the drivers and hear the speech about how the trip worked. There seemed to be an awful lot of them crowded into the tiny room. All of us would be together until Mexico in seven weeks time, most of us for fifteen weeks all the way down to Panama, a few as far as Ecuador and one, I discovered would still be on the journey when I left it in Rio next March. I was only now beginning to realise that what I’d done in quitting my job for this wasn’t all that unusual.
The most important people on these things are the drivers who can make the trip work like a dream or turn it into a nightmare. I knew this already from my shorter travels. Years ago in Peru I had had a tour leader who against all reason insisted that there was no danger of crime even after we had had a rucksack stolen in the morning and a ‘razor’ theft - where someone runs a blade along your pocket and steals the contents - in the same afternoon. She had been trying to keep people calm but denying that problems exist won’t get rid of them it just makes them more likely to happen to you instead of someone who is better prepared.
On other trips I have had leaders who were incredible, unflappable in any situation, able to cope with just about every disaster and still keep everyone smiling and happy. A tour leader in the Philippines had to cope with an elderly passenger who managed to lose his passport not once but twice during a three week trip and others have had to deal with muggings, thefts and serious illness. Whether you get a good one or a bad one is something of a lottery. The two who were in the room with us at the joining meeting, Helen the driver and Charlie the co-driver, looked so far to be the good sort. They were friendly and funny, a perfect double act. Their description of what we would be up to on the trip as a whole and specifically for the next couple of days made me eager to get started. First though we had a free day in Anchorage - as if I needed another. The group was an extremely mixed one. Nationalities included English, Australian, New Zealand, Danish, Norwegian and Belgian. Ages ranged from twenties to seventies. There were singles and couples. It was going to be interesting to see what kind of itinerary could be devised to be suitable for all of us.
When we had dealt with the preliminaries Helen and Charlie took us out to show us the truck. It was my first close look at a vehicle type that I was to come to know well. It was not, Charlie informed us a ‘bus’. Use of the word was banned. Overlanders did not ride in buses they rode in trucks. He and Helen were not bus drivers they were truck drivers. All this was delivered dead pan but fooled no-one. As, over the months I met more and more drivers from various companies I came to realise how widespread is this standing joke. Charlie even had a T-shirt listing truck ‘rules’ and penalties (payable in beer) for breaking them. One of the rules was ‘No inappropriate use of the word ‘bus’”.
We went to the Public Lands Information Centre, which somehow I’d missed on my previous exploration, to find out if we could get a tour of the city. It seemed a sensible sort of plan. It had a small museum and a video theatre which while not as spectacular as the Alaska Experience at least managed to keep me awake, due more I suspect to having the air-conditioning set to the brass monkeys position than to any intrinsic merit of the film. I watched shivering as we discovered, via a cleverly rotating graphic, that corner to corner Alaska is actually longer than the rest of the United States is wide. It’s a startling revelation to realise that Alaska alone is eleven times the size of the United Kingdom. More to the point a free guided tour was beginning at eleven. About half of us decided to take it, the others preferring to explore on their own.
That’s how we came to be standing at Cook Inlet looking out across the water trying to locate an invisible mountain. The guide left us at the Railway Depot, steering us in the direction of the nearby market where a large variety of Alaskan souvenirs were on sale but even that managed to be busy without once approaching interesting. It was quite a relief when the truck arrived to take us to the camp ground and we set up camp for the first time.
I now felt as if my journey was properly beginning. In some respects the previous few weeks had felt like a rehearsal. That had been the sort of holiday I normally take. What I was doing now felt like the real thing, as if my extended travels were in fact only now beginning. It wasn’t an auspicious start. I woke on this first proper day of the trip with a stinking cold that had stolen my voice and left in its place a throat full of razor blades and a head full of cotton wool. I could hardly breathe as we set out South towards our first stop, Portage Glacier. When we reached it I wondered what all the fuss was about. It was a particularly unspectacular block of ice on the far side of a floe filled lake opposite the visitors centre which was without a doubt one of the ugliest buildings I had ever seen. It was squat and blocky and looked like it had been assembled from assorted grey cardboard boxes. On the side of it facing the water a glass observation bubble blipped out like a wart making it, hard though it was to believe, even more grotesquely unattractive. While the displays inside were competently presented and the film of the glacier was rather more interesting than the reality it was hard to work out why it’s one of Alaska’s most visited tourist attractions. What I wondered would Seward be like?
If Anchorage had been safe, clean and unbelievably dull then how best to describe Seward? This was once the most important port in Alaska and is still considered a major town although its population wouldn’t fill a medium sized concert hall. That speaks volumes about the scale of Alaska. By any other standards Seward is so small that to describe it as a town at all seems the most ludicrous of overstatements. You can comfortably walk at your slowest amble from one end of the town to the other in about ten minutes where, having discovered that the visitors centre is closed you can turn around and amble back. If, as I did, you stop for some lunch and a couple of beers - for Seward does indeed boast a couple of quite nice bars - you can make the whole process of exploring the town last almost an hour.
Of course exploring the town isn’t a reason to come to Seward. The best reason is that it’s an ideal place to start from if you want to go out onto Resurrection bay and the Kenai Fjords and sail up to the glaciers or watch the whales. That was why we were there, to go out to take a close look at Holgate Glacier. It was a cold and windy afternoon and the waters were pretty choppy but the boat was large enough that no-one apart from Helen - who turned a very uncomfortable shade of green the moment she stepped aboard - really felt the motion. We were all too busy spotting the sea-life that appeared even before we had cleared the harbour. Cormorants circled above us, following our wake. Sea otters swam backstroke ahead of us and big-eyed harbour seals kept pace with us. Would we, we wondered see any whales? We certainly would. As we circled Rugged Island there it was, too far away for all but the best zoom lenses but definitely a whale. The boat turned and approached and when it next surfaced, it was very close. It dived again and a hundred shutters simultaneously clicked to get one of the classic tail in the air shots that you always see. For more than half an hour the whale swam near to us, surfacing then diving again and reappearing a few hundred yards further away - obligingly posing for as many photographs as we could possibly want before finally getting bored with the game and heading out to sea.
It was a fortunate sighting for even as it departed the captain was announcing that the weather was worsening and we could no longer safely make it out to the glacier and would instead be taking a bird watching tour of the inner islands. It didn’t seem all that rough to me but the captain had anticipated the possibility of people wanting to continue. By way of demonstration he took the boat a few hundred yards out into the swell of the main bay and soon the deck was pitching alarmingly as it climbed up one wave and down the next. Everyone was suitably convinced and glad when he returned us to calmer waters and we could get to the salmon and rice suppers included in the package.
While we went below and ate, for those more interested in seeing puffins, more puffins and yet more puffins the captain took the boat within yards of the rocks and provided as close up a view as they could possibly desire. It was interesting enough for twitchers I suppose but as for me I’m the kind of ornithologist that can only tell a chicken from a duck by the taste. I once toured with a group of twitchers, the kind of people prone to yelling ‘Lesser Crested Grebe’ or some such nonsense and pointing their binoculars at the top of some distant tree, while they chatter on about beautiful plumage and tick of the picture in their books. I was always the one saying
“Where? Which tree? What birds?”
I took a quick look outside but the lure of the salmon on my plate was much greater than that of the puffins on the rocks and I quickly returned to my dinner.
I had hoped that after the sea air my cold might be improving. It wasn’t. We headed North, needing to cover in one day that distance we had just covered in two plus an extra 200 miles to get to Denali National Park. We drove back through the magnificent but ultimately rather repetitive scenery - tree covered hillsides, mountain lakes reflecting the cloud filled sky, shafts of bright sunlight painting stripes in the air. No matter how beautiful it is I always find myself getting restless watching it through the window. With the best will in the world it doesn’t manage to keep my attention for six hours unless I’m walking around in it.
We arrived late in the afternoon and set up camp on a camp ground about a mile outside the park. Denali is six million acres of more or less unspoiled wilderness and the parks administration are quite rightly determined that it should stay that way. To this end they strictly control not only the number of people camping in the park but also the number of visitors and vehicles allowed in on any given day. Permits for camping need to be obtained in advance and the officially encouraged way for day visitors to see the park is on one of the organised bus tours. By the time we’d set up camp and prepared dinner in the rain I was feeling terrible again. I went straight to bed hoping against hope that tomorrow I would feel well enough to appreciate the park.
