Voyage to the Arctic; Day 6: The Glaciers

Another day all at sea, navigating between islands and huge pokey-outy bits of the Alaskan coastline.

Today is a day that we were thankful for our balcony overlooking the magical mystery that is the Alaskan coastline.

Yes, we have a balcony. Now don't run away with the idea that we were to sit out there all day admiring the view. No. The challenge was to get out there, snap a photo, and get back in before bits of you fell off.

My search for wildlife continued in vain, with only visiting chicken-drumstick-hunters searching for lunch.

And maybe a seal?

As we went further north, the sea began to fill with mini-icebergs.

A wall of ice was ahead of us, blocking our way.

We did a quick 180 (it took about half an hour)...

...only to be blocked by yet another glacier. This time, a blue version. We could go no further. Time to start the long voyage home, all the way to Vancouver, with just one more stop en route.

The Misty Fjords. (click here)

Voyage to the Arctic; Day 5, Skagway to the Yukon

Skagway, a small township originating from the gold rush, with a Main Street built of facades from the Wild West, and a general air of dereliction.

Great name though.

We were here to board a train. Its two hour route through formidable valleys, tunnelling through mountains and snow, was built near what was originally simply a rough track for footslogging. Prospective gold miners had to bring a ton of personal goods with them, resulting in an unimaginably difficult path.

Building the train track had been turned down by six construction companies until they found someone who offered to build it providing they were supplied with enough explosives and endless whiskey.

The views from this train are unique and totally superb. Taking photos and videos resulted in me only losing three fingers to frostbite. Two fingers of whiskey would have been preferable.

Arriving at the final station involved, once more, passport control.

No further fingernails were required.

We continued our travel by coach, stopping for a barbecue in tacky town where we narrowly avoided purchasing a vast array of intrinsically useless items, managed a photo of two stuffed mountain goats and a moose (also stuffed), before visiting Carcross, probably the most run down town I have ever seen. 

Welcome to the Yukon.

Photos from this fantastic route can be found in this video. Seven minutes to travel two hours. Easier than walking with your ton of goods...

Next episode here.

Voyage to the Arctic; Day 4, Wildlife.

So what has spurred me to come on a cruise? It's true that I'm here for a marriage, but could there be something else here to drag me screaming and kicking onto a giant boat in the distant frozen north?

Maybe that long favourite of mine, wildlife photography?

Photography is a funny old thing. We all have our preferred subjects that we like to capture with our cameras/phones/tablets/shotguns, but if you want to make money, photographers tend to end up doing wedding pix. I have managed to escape such a fate by having had a proper job (ie sticking aforementioned arms into animals private parts), but heck, guess what I'm going to do on this cruise!

And no, it does not involve internal massage...

Well, apart from that, I have been reliably informed that there would be lots of wildlife to snap. 

Hmmm...

Scenery? Yes. Lot's of it. Sadly even that is often shrouded in mist, rain or darkness.

We were to arrive in port at around midday, so the morning was taken as an opportunity to try out some shots for the wedding, using a nearby model:

We moored, on time, at Juneau, the Capital of Alaska. The arrival over our boat increased the local population by almost a quarter, so it must be a pretty big town.

We then set off on another boat, medication in hand, this time a very much smaller one. (Boat, not medication.)

The scenery was once more stunning. No shortage of stunning scenery around here to be found.

Initially there was little wildlife to see apart from local birds doing a turn.

But then, well, call me Ishmael! Contrary to all expectations, two humpback whales were spotted in the far distance!

They dived!

That's a bucket-list shot.    

Three times we saw this mother and daughter pair dive, but this was not the time of year that we were likely to see them breach, so we sadly said our farewells.

On mooring the boat and gathering up our various bits of anatomy, we then went by foot through some tropical rain forest...

...where our way was blocked by a retreating glacier.

It's deep blue colour is apparently due to it not wanting to reflect other colours.

On our return walk, we spied a long discarded hairbrush sitting on a rock next to us. 

A porcupine, but clearly of a lesser race than those that I have hardly ever seen in Africa (due to their nocturnal habits).

These scruff-bags prefer to eat during the day, although rarely seen on rocks as their favourite feeding spot is in a tree!

Not a prize winning face...

Bad Hair Day

So, finally back to the ship to cast off and head north. 

To catch a train...

I've thrown together a few photos of Days 3 & 4 here. As the previous video featured the Beach Boys, I had no choice but to use another of theirs. I do apologise, it's nothing personal, but I wanna go home...

Next episode here...

Voyage to the Arctic; Day 3, Water, water...

This day was one purely of voyage across the open sea. A group of wedding guests becalmed at sea. Now what does that remind me of?

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: 

He cannot choose but hear; 

And thus spake on that ancient man, 

The bright-eyed Mariner.

The bride hath paced into the hall, 

Red as a rose is she; 

Nodding their heads before her goes 

The merry minstrelsy.

And now there came both mist and snow, 

And it grew wondrous cold: 

And ice, mast-high, came floating by, 

As green as emerald.

The ice was here, the ice was there, 

The ice was all around: 

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, 

Like noises in a swound!

Water, water, every where, 

And all the boards did shrink; 

Water, water, every where, 

Nor any drop to drink.

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell 

To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! 

He prayeth well, who loveth well 

Both man and bird and beast.

I think they caught the 'flu...

We were traveling up the Inside Passage along the coastline of British Columbia and Alaska. Traveling at sea was disturbing to everyone's inside passage, but more so to Annick than most. She had however come prepared with multiple medications and even a pretty but useless acupuncture-point wristband. 

Once we came out of the Inside Passage and onto open sea, these tablets proved their worth. 

Or was it the wrist band?

Our luck was with us. The normal weather pattern around here could be incorrectly summed up as damp. Correctly it could be summed up as bloody soaking. Today, and the next couple of days, were exceptional in that blue sky could occasionally be glimpsed. 

This was no beach holiday.

We met with the Hyde family and friends over afternoon tea (a quaint custom in Canada presumably originating from the primeval British Empire)...

...then later with a quiz organised by Adam, which, without doubt, in any rational civilisation, our team should have won. However the judging committee (Adam) clearly confused our creativity with cheating, and failed to give us our just deserts. 

Our subsequent appeal fell on deaf ears.

We then retired to the casino (oh the joys of a life on the open waves). I strayed by Adam's poker table, awed at his innate ability to skilfully move the cards hither and thither.

And lose. 

Sonia's mum, on the other hand, sat in front of one of those electronic non-armed bandit machines and won thousands. 

C'est la vie.

Alone, alone, all, all alone, 

Alone on a wide wide sea ! 

And never a saint took pity on 

My soul in agony.

Next episode here...

Voyage to the Arctic; Day 2, The Big Boat.

(Previous episode here) 

Waking to a clear morning, the view was sharp. 

Clear enough to see that our ship had arrived. 

Our heads, on the other hand, were less than clear. The time difference was currently nine hours behind, increasing by another hour in the next day or two (who knows?) as we enter Alaskan waters.

Time to leave. 

The photos that I remember admiring in the 1965 edition of 'Beautiful British Columbia' looked nothing like this.

And so to our boat. A Big Boat. So big that the word 'big' is hardly big enough. It is paradoxically too big to see, as you can only see a part of it. 

This is all that was within our range of vision upon boarding.

But from a distance:

(This photo was taken later in the week whilst on another boat.)

Boarding gave us a preview of the week to come. People everywhere, crazy long queues, organised disorder. The first queue (after the traffic snarl up from Adam's flat to the harbour) was USA Immigration. The ship we were getting onto was to go to Alaska, which belongs to the United States (sold to them for loose change by Russia). This process involved all 4,000 of us queueing obediently, in fear of deportation. Thankfully, after the removal of only a couple of fingernails, they learned all the necessary information about our love and admiration of King Trump, and allowed us through.

We were a speck amongst over 4,000 other specks. An earlier 4,000 had already disembarked that morning. And yet, despite the ship's enormity, on board it was strangely small. The corridors are claustrophobically narrow. The bedrooms no bigger than an average to small bedroom at home, the washroom matching that of our camper van. 

This was to be a very strange week.

We left harbour majestically, sipping our champagne. What do you mean that champagne is not included in our 15 drinks a day?!? There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. Everyone is out to make a fast buck here...

We were there to celebrate the marriage of my cousin Adam (technically my first-cousin once-removed), to Sonia, soon to be my first-cousin once-removed-in-law. (?) 

This is she...

As the sun went down on this exhausting day, we got to know over fifty new friends and family, most of whom can be seen towards the end of the short video below this photo of the sun going down on me...:

Next episode here...

Voyage to the Arctic; Day 1, Into Vancouver.

 Day 1: Into Vancouver

A short abridged and censored history of The Hyde family:

I grew up in a small terraced cardboard box near Croydon, the Concrete Capital.  My dad, Victor, named after something to do with some war or other, worked with computers. These were immense structures built in giant barns and run on cards with holes punched in them. They were difficult to carry around on your wrist. 

One day, we moved away from our cardboard box south of London, into a huge mansion north of London (size is, of course, inversely proportional to age) where we accidentally moved to a house around the corner from one of my dad's brothers, the one that we had hardly ever seen before, from the 'posh' side of the family. Now, living so close to them, we carried on hardly ever seeing them. 

Dad had two brothers and one surviving sister. One brother, Louis, was down to earth and married the life and soul of any party involving 'Knees Up Mother Brown'. The other brother, Clary, didn't mix well with us poverty stricken lot, and married into the upper class. Well, the accent was upper class if not anything else. His sister, Olive, lived in sin, which, as a young child, I was quietly informed is in West London near the Chiswick flyover. 

This family politics was well out of my sphere of comprehension. However, moving closer did have two unforeseen consequences. First was a rare visit to their house to bid farewell to their son Alan, someone that I knew not at all. With him was a cot, inside of which was a mewling baby boy. Babies were also well out of my sphere of comprehension. This particular baby had been named Adam. And still is. Although he is no longer a baby. He is, in fact, the reason we are now heading to Canada, for Alan was emigrating with his family to British Columbia.

That's the top left-hand bit of North America, just below Alaska.

The second unforeseen consequence was that Alan would, every few months, send over copies of a magazine called 'Beautiful British Columbia' rammed full of amazing photos of Vancouver and the surrounding area. From this came my fascination with photography.

Fast forward to today. An invitation to Adam's wedding on a cruise to Alaska.

Some of you may be aware of my fondness for weddings and for cruises. You may also be aware of my fondness for sarcasm...

We very nearly didn't make it. Canada has recently introduced the same visa waiver system (eTA) that is being introduced in the EU and the UK. It is not without its flaws. Despite us having received emails confirming our acceptance on the eTA system, on arriving at Toulouse airport we were found not to exist. 

Looking around me I had the feeling that we did exist, but maybe in an alternative reality. A stressful alternative reality.

It took an hour. A whole hour of phoning and begging before they finally accepted our existence and let us on the plane. 

We feared that we would suffer a similar fate upon arriving in Vancouver. But no, they couldn't give a shit.

So here we are:

The view from Adam's window.

And a few hours later:

The same view from Adam's window.

Not bad eh? 

The houses around here are pretty smart, with always the ultra neat gardens and immaculate hedges. All you need is a few million Canadian dollars, which is a lot of dollars whatever kind they are.

The view from here was pretty good too, although you had to stand in the middle of the road to peer over those hedges.

On popping down to the local harbour...

A local variety of goose.

...we realised that the weather was changing. I suspect that the weather will be a recurring theme on this cruise, as the forecast was dire. Rain, snow, wind and woolly underwear.

Incoming weather.

At least the birds were excited.

Evening sets in on our first day in Canada.

Tomorrow we attempt to get onto our cruise ship. We are to face the immigration department of the United States. 

El Salvador he we come...

Next episode here