BC: Lasqueti Island

Lasqueti Island welcomes you.

There is a joint for a tip in the cafe's tip jar. It's just sitting there, a few coins for company. This shouldn't come as a surprise. Lasqueti Island is full of green solutions.

Offshore of Vancouver Island, it's cut off from all facilities, utilities and services afforded regular British Columbians. No one seems to mind, they have their own solar and wind power. There are even a couple of bay side properties that could probably have a tilt at a small show tidal power system, if they really wanted. The people here all seem to be escaping something, there are writers, hippies, dancers and vagrants, they form a seemingly inclusive community with a very alternative sub-culture.

Sustainability is central, there are outhouses made of mudbrick and recycled bottles, people's possessions are recycled at the Freestore, a shop where everything is free, although it's opening hours are 1-5pm on a Thursday afternoon. Usefully, I was there on a Thursday, but refrained from taking their hundreds of records (classical and rock 'n' roll were well represented) only because I didn't like the idea of carrying them around for another couple of months...

... and I don't have a record player.

The cars wouldn't pass any roadworthy test in the world, indeed, I'm not convinced that many car owners in West Africa would trade down for most of what passes for vehicles here. Not that it mattered a great deal, walking around the island - large as it is - is perfectly fine, it's not like you could be rushing to go anywhere.

Except the cookie store. That's a place worth rushing to. It's just a cabinet off the pier. Once every other day or so it gets stocked with baked goods. Inside is an absolute treasure trove of sweets and savouries, all priced to move and sold on an honour box system. It seems a masterstroke of a business plan, set up a permanent snack stall between the two places on the island that spend their afternoons and evenings in a shroud of marijuana smoke.

My whole reason for being there was the see Luba. A friend of Gabby's, the three of us and Adrian (an old housemate) had a particularly large NYE a few years back in Sydney and since then I've kept in loose contact with her, mostly following her travels here (her blog is very well written and well worth losing a day or more reading). Luba was on Lasqueti for a dance thing and while there had teed up some work exchange and an invitation to a large community wedding. She had taken to the island like a fish to water, quite literally throwing herself at the community.

I on the otherhand appreciated the place more like a recluse may; using my few days there to read, write and just enjoy my own company after having had a particularly frenetic fortnight with Greta.

To each their own.

Five and a half years and a lot soberer later, I get to see Luba again!

Alaska: Skagway is Cam-hell.

"Oh, four ships have docked in Skagway today, you guys are in for a treat..."

The man selling us ferry tickets seems sincere. He carries on by telling us hwhimper. e of his daughters - our age - is in Melbourne and how much he loves Australia. He doesn't look more than thirty, but I suppose in a world where you're exposed to half as much daylight as your typical Australian, your skin is going to look like it has spent most of its time further than ten feet from the surface of the sun.

Skagway - which we reach by ferry, a journey that takes fifty minutes and shaves about six hours of driving off our day - is the port at which men and women rushing to the Klondike find would disembark. From there, they'd carry their supplies over multiple journeys over White Pass to Whitehorse before eventually getting to Dawson City. To prevent a humanitarian disaster unfolding in the sub-Arctic wasteland that the Yukon can be, the Canadian government mandated each gold digger to take (over many, many trips with a 50-80 pound bag) a literal ton of supplies - enough for one year - with them to Dawson. To ease part of the ludicrous nature of the trip, a railway was built at White Pass and is largely considered to be one of the great feats of engineering in the pre-WWI era. For anyone who has been on the Kuranda rail in FNQ - an Australian railway of held in similar regard - this makes it look like child's play.

Photo a result of dumb luck, not extensive planning and forethought.

Where Skagway was once a port for men hard as nails at the metaphorical and literal foothills of their adventures, it is now the zenith of flabby rich people's Alaskan experience, as delivered by a cruise ship.

Skagway fetes the demands of tourists and their excesses. Modernity with all its trappings and comfort in familiarity is shoehorned into theme appropriate store front facades. Where I gushed over similar aspects in Dawson City, Skagway does away with the quaint and quirky and juices the whole experience up to completely tacky. There is simply no challenge or effort to arrive there. All you need is a bundle of money and the ability to put up with being on a floating prison with a thousand of your peers for a week or so. It's Alaska for tourists...

... not adventurers.

Juxtaposition intentional.

The highlight of the town - there is one - is a trip to the Red Onion Saloon. A building that has formerly been all sorts of things, the current proprietor plays almost exclusively to its history as a brothel. Women get around in period appropriate garments with their breasts jacked up to their chins and patrons are awarded with garters.

It's tacky, make no mistake, but it's self aware and that makes it excusable, just. Somewhere along the tour of the upstairs area it just gets to being kind of funny...

Beware of Greta, too.

... and for a little while, you can manage to forget just how awful these sorts of places really are.

This is how Alaska ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Alaska: Haines, the penultimate Alaskan gasp.

Not a bad view to wake up to.

Dave Pahl is a gentleman who decided that the world needed a hammer museum and that it would be best placed in Haines, Alaska. He's a bit slack jawed and it's because of all of this that I'm caught underestimating him. In asking where I'm from, I offered up Broome instead of Perth, hoping its relative obscurity may excuse me from too much conversation. Instead, it turns out he has an encyclopedic knowledge of Australia, owing to his recent driving around it. He was particularly charmed by the Kimberley and Pilbara regions and as a result of this I go nowhere fast. The museum houses some five thousand hammers from all over the world and they fill a multitude of purposes, it's an impressive dedication of time and effort to a tool I'd only given a scarce amount of thought to (even considering it is reasonably iconic in my field). This wasn't exactly my reason for being there, but for a town with a main street a quarter-mile long, attractions weren't going to be hard to check off over the course of a few days.

Haines only really slipped onto my radar as an Alaskan place to visit by virtue of the listserve, an email lottery that I won in the weeks leading up to departing Australia. As a footnote to my tale I appealed to Alaskans to tell me where to go and show me a good time. Emily - an intern at the museum - responded with some assistance and was also pretty good drinking company over the course of two nights in town.

Part of her recommendations were to go out to Chilkoot Lake, a short drive beyond where Greta and I were camping. The lake is a flurry of activity; there is an abundance of anglers on the lake and in the stream at the bottom of it. The reason is clear; there are dozens of salmon jumping and showboating around, an endearing thought for any fisherman, no doubt. Hilariously, over the course of the few hours we spent there, not a single salmon was landed, surely a cruel twist of the knife given they were launching themselves out of the water a rate of much greater than a few times a minute.

That's not to say that there was no successful fishing going on though, there were a pair of bald eagles at work in the area too... and quite a mess of one salmon left on the rocks for someone else to finish off.

"Be right back, I have a salmon's day to ruin!"

The whole area is a bit of a bald eagle paradise. The drive into Haines is many-fold exciting. Miles out of town the valley rapidly descends and narrows, leaving you firmly with impassable mountainside on your left and fast flowing river on your right as you approach sea level. It's impressive scenery. Furthermore, this area is world class for watching bald eagles take care of business when the salmon are running, something that had both Greta and I rubbernecking on occasion. Compounding all of this is a windy road with a great surface, good visibility and a car with all wheel drive.

Throw in a casual bit of hiking at Battery Point (another of Emily's suggestions) and without trying too hard, a few days had passed with little effort at filling in our days or worry that we were doing the wrong thing.

Haines... Haines quite unexpectedly had a little bit of everything for me.

Yukon: The Dempster Highway, the Arctic, and why you shouldn't drink with Greta.

Armed with a mudmap in my travel book courtesy of Becca, I had been implored - both in person and by annotation on said map - to make the trip to Tombstone at least, and Eagle Plains as well, if for nothing else than to prank her sister and go to the Arctic Circle. As fun and bizarre as Dawson City was, Greta and I were completely amenable to the idea of driving for two days to do this.

The Dempster Highway leaves from outside Dawson and travels right up to the Arctic Ocean (I'm not interested in debating the veracity of calling it an ocean or a sea, if I say Arctic Ocean, everyone knows where I'm talking about so it is useful enough to say, plus if it boils the blood of a few people, then it's just like I'm there with you, right?). The weather is mostly inclement and the road is unsealed. Before long the car looks like it's gone ten rounds with the shit demon out of Dogma. Rather than be concerned about its state of uncleanliness, I'm excited. Now my bedroom as permanent blinds and I can sleep in a little longer...

... and y'know, it may actually get dark before midnight now.

Tombstone National Monument (why it's not a park is beyond me) is pretty. The terrain is broadly similar to that of Denali, ascending through glacier carved valleys we reach a plateau at about 4500 feet where it is mostly flat for long stretches.

Beyond the national monument is about two hundred and fifty kilometers of gravel to Eagle Plains. In  instantaneous response to my musing, "I'm surprised we haven't seen any large mammals, this is exactly the habitat for it..." Greta claimed to see a moose. I'm not suggesting that she's not worthy of trust here, but the confluence of the immediacy of the claim and my inability to spot it (albeit while driving) hardly confirm her claim. There was also a very real part of me that didn't want to miss seeing yet another moose; two scampering off the road before I could really get a good look had aided the development of a growing and great frustration. The drive is pretty great though. This is one of those times where the destination - be it the Arctic Circle, Inuvik or anywhere in between - is really just punctuation to the journey. Traversing a swathe of ecosystems controlled by some mixture of elevation, latitude or both is always going to a greater reward than an isolated roadhouse on top of the world.

Eagle Plains is really just an outpost on the edge of the Arctic. There is no real special moment to be had crossing 66'33", it's rolling tundra and cold, even in summer. I suppose we were perhaps a little misguided to think much different, but it's something to lay claim to, I suppose.

Eagle Plains' bar - because that is clearly the most important room of any commercial hospitality establishment - is what I imagine a hunting lodge to resemble; animals here are frozen in time courtesy of some fine taxidermy. Their eyes seem to follow you through the room and it is an altogether ever so slightly unsettling experience. Not that I'd be the only unsettled person in the room, after spying a girl that looked a little like Becca, I inquired if I may ask her a strange question. Fending me off with, "oh, once you've spent some time out here there are no strange qu-"
"Do you have a sister in Homer, Alaska?"
"Whoa! What?! How do you?! You're right, that is a strange question!"
... and that's how we met Kate.

Greta and I continued our beer appreciation to bar close and - with the lure of some Arctic-car-temperature PBR - had Kate for drinking company in the five or six hours after close during which we continued to avidly endorse Canadian brewed products while otherwise talking a large amount of otherwise enjoyable shit.

The following morning we made the decision to drive back to Dawson. Perhaps more appropriately, Greta told me that she'd be driving back, as I was in absolutely no state to do anything much more than sit and wonder where the wheels fell off. I consider myself a reasonable drinker and although my hangovers are beginning to catch up on me, a lot of the time I remain functional the following day. Greta on the otherhand, has a superpower. For the second time in my life while matching her one for one in the evening and keeping my act together then, it was in the following morning where I was exclusively a wasteland (a third was to follow more spectacularly in Vancouver) and she was fucking rosy.

Drink with her at your peril.

BC: Whistler Stinks of White Privilege

Route 99, more affectionately known as The Sea To Sky Highway, runs from Lillooet through valleys and over mountains to Vancouver. Make no mistake, it is remarkably pretty, especially the section of climb and descent between Lilloet and Pemberton.

Of course, during this section of the drive, rather than giving the scenery its due, Greta and I were both shitting bricks over a developing fuel problem. For the last thirty minutes of our journey - thankfully mostly downhill - we sat on E, needle with nowhere left to go. Crawling into a service station on the other side of the pass, we fuel up, relieved but still a little nerve wracked. Whistler, a further forty minutes away from Pemberton, is reached after dinner and we find accommodation in the old Olympic village, a pretty flash hostel that falls to pieces as far as its air conditioning is concerned. Oh well.

Whistler occupies a strange sort of place in my mind. A sort of ski Mecca, this is where a lot of friends have come to bust a knee before sitting in a hot tub for a winter drinking bloody marys. It wasn't so much a destination for me, but rather a place to go through (with some awesome roads on either side of).

Taking us in for the following two nights were Mel, Jonny, Janet and James. I'd worked with Mel at Inpex years ago and she became a pretty good point of contact for things to do and see, as well as simply putting a roof over our heads for the weekend. In traipsing through the village, the shops as well as just seeing the activities on offer and the people taking them on, one thing is tremendously clear...

... Whistler stinks of white privilege.

Here there are multiple lifestyles on offer but they can all be reduced to one commonality; affluence. Between the hippies, the barefoot yoga girls in notpants, the extreme sports junkies and the girls that deify them, they all seem to have the financial means to excuse themselves from life for regular people. It's utterly bizarre. There's a yoga camp, presumably in the mountains to better facilitate... something nature related. The extreme sport during summer is mountain biking. People ride down the mountain in search of adrenaline. In winter it'd be snowboarding, for much the same result. There are hippies too, pushing alternate lifestyles and green choices, they provide a preposterous and sidesplittingly funny juxtaposition to the consumer dens that their stalls are in front of. There is no cross section of society here. This is high society - in at least three ways - and it forms an exclusive, bizarre group of clubs that seem happy to co-exist, but if you're not one of them, there is no place for you in Whistler.

So much of this place sells itself as outdoors but it's almost impossible to take seriously. It's an outdoor theme park, certainly... but it's so divergent from appreciating nature for what it is, nevermind experiencing any outright wilderness. It's something altogether different... this is simulated nature there to be conquered.

Bet you've never seen this in Whistler before, Browning!

Yukon: Dawson City - Diamond Tooth Gertie's

"Oh, Gertie's will still be serving food. It's just over the road. Can't miss it."

The barmaid at Triple J is helpful but conveniently neglects to offer any sort of description of what Gertie's actually is. Perhaps this is deliberate. Dawson has a very, very strange feel to it. A few people had recommended it to me in my travels, "oh you'll like it..." or, "it's the gold mining town, you just have to go" but beyond that, everyone has been pretty scant on details. In our ten minutes driving around looking for something that looked like it would serve food we pass blocks of houses straight out of the 1800s. Two tone pastel paint - often times horrendously matched - sit eerily by hardpacked gravel streets. There's no signs in the modern sense, everything is painted on. Greta sums it up perfectly with an astounded, "it's like the set of a movie."

The town is a timewarp. The only sign of modernity are cars... and even then a lot of them are pretty long in the tooth.

We meander over to Gertie's and are met by a female bouncer who is dressed oddly and wears that universal gruff expression that security loves. There's a ten dollar cover charge but from the foyer we both note that there is something going on inside. Curiosity overpowers my baulking at paying to have the privilege of then buying some food to eat. Upon getting in we are assaulted by too much to take in. There is a burlesque show, indeed, under the proscenium arch is a plump red head in a corset, strangling a cat to "The Saints Go Marching In" in front of four gorgeous girls. It's somewhere between the opening scene of Temple of Doom and the burlesque show in Blazing Saddles.

There are waitresses in period inspired uniform ferrying drinks to tables. Croupiers are similarly attired. Around us are slot machines, antlers and frontier memorabilia. Finger still on the pulse, a murmured, "no one is going to believe us" escapes Greta.

I'm too busy looking at legs to really respond.

This place is just astounding.

Dinner runs us to not much as slices of pizza (which are quarters of pizza) are a dollar fifty. Over the course of four or so hours we both wind up a little ahead on the slots and blackjack so it matters little. The final show for the evening - commencing at midnight - is predominantly rock and roll covers, the only time the illusion of 1898 or whichever year it is meant to be is really broken.

... not that it really bothered me.

Alaska: Valdez - "I have lens envy"

Captain Fred and the Lulu Belle didn't come higher billed or even necessarily that much cheaper than the competition. They left earlier. Not by much either, a half hour or so. This is decision making with Greta, they had what we wanted and chances are that once aboard things can't vary much, after all, we're looking for animals and glaciers, not chasing five star dining and palatial cabins with bellboys.

Things got off to a slow start and Greta - the corrosive influence that she is - had redirected my sense of humour from drier than the Sahara to something altogether a little more absurd. After an encounter with a flotilla of sea otters (swoon) Captain Fred took us to see the salmon fishing boats further up the fjord. He narrates this straight faced while Greta and I borrow heavily from Attenborough as we describe how exciting it is to see the fishing boats thriving in their natural habitats after years of being threatened by invasive animal rights activists and the nuisance of an oil spill.

Fishing boats in their natural habitat voraciously chasing salmon up and down the fjord!
... and a yacht that I was actually trying to get a shot of.

Like I said, absurdity was settling in.

While on the bow narrating farcically to no one in particular beside ourselves, a camera toting girl politely interjects with, "I have lens envy". This paved the way for an afternoon of camera talk, much banter, unsubtle flirting and further narrative absurdity that probably peaked with the threat of giving a detailed and entirely erroneous geological history of the surrounding area for my own perverse amusement because, "tourists are idiots and it's not like anyone remembers anything that's said anyway". Karcy seems amused, but also wary of any further talk of geology. It was probably for the best.

These mountains, made by raining mud at the flick of that gull's wings. Maybe.

Fred's narration is brilliant. Cheeky and wily in an older-uncle sort of way, he knows his office of twenty seven years intimately. At Columbia Glacier - a tidal glacier - we park up to observe it calving. An already less than great day, the icefields of the glacier positively dominate the local weather to the point where it becomes downright miserable and cold.

Impressive.

This is my impressed face. Serious.

Undeterred, it's just the two of us on the bow watching the glacier, waiting for something to happen over the course of a little over an hour. Meanwhile, everyone else has elected to instead endorse freshly baked brownies and coffee, like regular sensible people and Greta. Fred indicates that he believes a section of glacier is about to collapse just off of our bow and not five seconds later a significant portion of the wall shears off into the water.

Fred did this. Somehow. He's the cause of global warming and the glaciers disappearing.

I am now convinced that Fred is some sort of soothsayer or telekinetic wizard. He looks like a friendlier more naval version of the Emperor. Maybe he is force sensitive. Who knows. He sees shit in the future and he makes stuff happen with his mind. It's pretty cool.

There were of course animals, otters were plentiful as were the sea lions and a particularly obliging humpback whale.

"Oh hi!"
This is the most adorable thing in the world.

Whereas the whale just flipped us off a couple of times.

... and the sea lion just barked at all his women in his harem.

Just get on boats in Alaska. Even if you don't see any animals it's still pretty impressive.

Alaska: Chicken and the Top of the World Highway

Leaving Tok there are two ways to the Canadian border. One is to follow the Alcan - the most traveled route - while the other takes a turn to the north on the "Top of the World Highway". It's a gravel road that goes for eighty or so miles, most of them on the US side and broadly speaking, it is a lot like the pointy end of this video:

With Greta's attitude toward things being a mixture of "if I'm bad enough at it the first time, I won't be asked to do it twice" and "well, you didn't die, did you?" it was with some relief (and I won't lie, a great deal of excitement) that I was behind the wheel for the section of road that was most likely to be outrageous fun and/or kill both of us. The road traverses ridgelines and spurs to skirt around ravines of the sort of depth that you don't consider walking away from, should you wind up visiting one.

The last place of note on the American side of the border is a small gold mining town of 39 called Chicken. The site of a minor gold rush contemporary to the Klondike find at the turn of the nineteenth century, the town owes its name to the ptarmigan bird. The locals - at least initially - wanted to call the town Ptarmigan as the bird was plentiful in the region and reasonably delicious. However, the problem that prevented this was that no one could spell it, so instead they settled on Chicken, as it kind of tasted like that. It's clear to me that by extension none of these gents counted the pterodactyl among their favourite dinosaurs.

Upon leaving Chicken we were - stupidly - racing the clock. The border shut at 8pm and we were pushing our luck as far as making it was concerned. Making matters more interesting, the road got a little more hairy as hairpins and sheerer drops were introduced as we passed through 5000 feet above.

Arriving at the border with mere minutes to spare, the Canadian official takes umbridge to the fact that I do not have a work visa while Greta does. I misread this as mock offense but over the course of a few questions become quite aware of his sincere disappointment that I am - at present - not prepared to work in his otherwise fine nation. After a few more questions we have to surrender our BB gun as it exceeds the firepower for such weapons allowed in Canada without a license. I joke that he just wanted to play with it over the campfire that night with his mates after work.

The joke sinks. He hands me a certificate outlining the weapon that I've surrendered and we depart, bound for Dawson. Safe in the knowledge that not much will be coming the other way for the remaining distance - knowing that the border is now closed - I open up a little more on the road and am suitably disgusted and terrified when we meet an RV upon exit of a particularly enjoyable switchback. Fun truly scuppered, we eventually roll down the hill, cross the Yukon River on a ferry that struggles against the current and get into Dawson City; site of the Klondike Gold Rush. The Klondike find spawned possibly the largest gold rush in history and almost certainly the most ridiculous in terms of conditions and remote nature. At any rate, it's now a little after ten which is just in time for most of the town's kitchens to be shut...

Alaska: Seward

Yes, it does look delicious.

Seward contrasts Homer nicely. Where the bulk of Homer sprawls lazily on low lands in an open bay, Seward sits confined by the steep walls of a fjord and its water. Both are comfortable enough, but Seward leaves you feeling ever so slightly claustrophobic. Katy - my couchsurfing host - echoes these feelings at some point during two nights of enthusiastic brewery sampling and ceaseless conversation. It's fantastic. Seward, like much of this part of the world, was largely rebuilt after being ravaged by tsunamis, tremors and soil liquefaction from the earthquake in 1964 but it retains a frontier and simple feel.

Quite accidentally four days pass. A day evaporated just recovering from Homer. Exit Glacier is a short drive and an easy walk away.

Exit Glacier, casually retreating its finger back up the valley it came down from.

The pick of these four days though was spent on a boat, cruising through the Kenai Fjords National Park. The blurb bills it as a day trip with the opportunity to see otters, bald eagles, sea lions, puffins, porpoises, whales, orcas, glaciers and fjords. They had me at otters.

So naturally, I was already pretty happy ten minutes into the trip when we came across a couple of sea otters just lazing about on their backs in the harbour. That we would then see everything else as billed over the course of seven hours was simply fantastic. A colony of puffins provided ample entertainment as they flew/crashed into the surf beneath their nests. What they lack in grace through the air they apparently make up for getting through the water like a guided missile. The sea lions smell terrible and bark aggressively, presumably at the smell. Dall porpoises - they "wear" a similar get up to orcas - race our bow for ten or so minutes, breaching to the delight of the masses up front. Reputedly the second fastest mammal in the sea, they tire of us and race off somewhere else. Not long after that we encounter a humpback whale and her calf. For the most part they don't get up to much... but then suddenly this:

Oh hi!

... and bye now.

However as with many of these sorts of things, it's hard not to feel that broadly speaking the attraction is simply the animals. We race from spot to spot, following radio reports of particular animals in different locations. Save for time spent at a glacier in one of the fjords, appreciating the landscape - thoroughly impressive in and of itself - is mostly incidental. It seems to be the general attitude of the people on these boats or buses that seeing all the animals is a requisite for a good day and that everything else be damned. I guess operators pander to that.

It's a shame.

Yes, why stop to look at this?

... or this?

Ok, so I have animal photos as well.

Dall Porpoises, just playing.

Hard to believe these were endangered not so long ago, they're all over Alaska.

Even at a distance, these guys stink.

Wait, don't go, I haven't shown you my barrel rolls yet!

And lastly, the jerks of the sea...

Alaska: It's only $700

This isn't a phrase I'm comfortable uttering. In Homer, $700 gets you a flight across to Katmai National Park. You land on a beach in Hallo Bay and there are bears. The bears are not afraid of you. They're not really curious about you. In fact, they nothing you.

Back in Homer - before any of this happens - we get a lengthy briefing about how to behave. Most of it is reasonably straightforward and appears to be common sense to me. Then we get to, "if they come toward you, don't run away". This one seems a little counter-intuitive to begin with but then is explained away by saying that running away invites a chase instinct and that's how you die.

It seems fair enough.

We have a large group - it fills four planes - and our subgroup of six is a mum and daughter from the US, a couple from Israel, myself and our pilot, Martin. Martin is the older of the four pilots and a comes off as a little brisk and lonesome - especially compared to the two kids flying other groups - but he basically discards the flight plan and takes us out over a chain of island volcanoes.

Chalk that up as a win.

We land on the beach, pulling up with the sort of J-turn that I absolutely never did in Wembley Downs as a seventeen year old. It leaves me grinning, most others seem altogether a bit more concerned. We're in a bay full of bears that we'll be walking amongst and they're all of a sudden concerned about their mortality?

The first bear we see bisects our group and another. It is maybe forty metres from either. Ambles down from the dunes and wanders across the beach. Casts cursory glances at both groups and carries on. It gives precisely no fucks.

I don't care. You're not near the salmon.

The pattern would be repeated for four or so hours. One sow and her cub come to within twenty metres of us. They stare for a bit, catching the eye of people in the group. After the first encounter everyone seems a little more relaxed about the prospect of being torn limb from limb and eaten alive but that doesn't stop me from positioning myself with a person that I could outrun in two steps between myself and the bears.

No need for a long lens when the bears come to you!

Over the day we see a dozen or so bears in slightly different settings. Cubs play fighting. Grizzlies fishing. Sows taking strolls on the beach. A sow protecting its cub from potential attack from another bear. Bears just chilling. It's like some sort of beach side resort for bears. It's tempting to wax lyrical about this being all kinds of fantastic but I'm just going to defer to photos instead. There's more. Lots and lots more. Go to my flickr page for ten or so, facebook for thirty (just for George) or bail me up somewhere in the world and you can look at all five hundred. They're great.

Alaska: Homer and Wake In Fright

"Are you here? I'm the idiot in plaid rain boots in front."

I had my suspicions that was who Becca was- there were only two girls at the Homer Concert on the Lawn that seemed to fit her couchsurfing profile - but it was useful to get in text nonetheless. As my third host, Becca, didn't so much offer me a couch but a place to park my car (and sleep in) and seamless integration into her social life. In the days that follow, I'm John Grant's inverse. He finds himself held financially captive in Bundanyabba owing to 2up and falls in with drunks and yobbos in the ensuing days and weeks (Wake In Fright). His arrival at The Yabba is only for it to be a port to somewhere else. Likewise, Homer becomes my port of call on the way to Seward, its on-the-way nature owing only to the vagaries of couchsurfing hosts and their relative availability, not any sort of geographical convenience.

Our stories are of course divergent. Wake In Fright - even forty something years on - remains one of the best and most chilling representations of the Australian outback I've ever seen. It's confronting. The Yabba's inhabitants want to inhabit the screen as caricatures but for every moment that seems an Australian stereotype, somewhere or sometime, I've seen it in the Pilbara, Kimberley or Territory. Homer has these people too, but they inter no terror. Both places hold you captive but it doesn't take losing all my money and being in a perpetual state of inebriation (OK, the latter probably did happen) for me to find Homer as inescapable. After a day or two - firm friends already made - you welcome its embrace. Nothing is so much planned but characters drift into each other with a charming regularity as if it were scripted. Becca the seeming anchor to my days, Sarah's tales of tattoos, hunting and Wyoming, Joe's case for Superman to be taken more seriously as a hero over the course of two nights of heavy drinking, Kelsea with her easily won affection and a chorus of barflies who make cameo roles through the last gasp moments of evenings or carry the atmosphere of the world cup final, they become the fabric to my time in Homer.

I came for two days and stayed for five. Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome.

Let's face it, Homer is not the most unappealing metaphorical jailor.

Alaska: 130 miles with 100 songs I like right now - Denali Highway

Going somewhere? Let's go the wrong way!

There is no short route from Denali National Park to Homer. As the crow flies, it isn't terribly far but by virtue of various impassable things like mountains and Turnagain Arm, there is no real direct route. That said, I'm also not taking the shortest route there. Denali Highway is regarded as one of the better drives on offer on the planet and it only takes me 130 miles in the wrong direction. Being mostly gravel, progress is already somewhat inhibited but throw in a desire to pull over to take photos a lot, the countdown from 130 to 1 is slow going. For the most part, the potholes' bark is worse than their bite. This knowledge engenders less cautious avoidance over a period of time by which point I eventually misjudge one, plow heavily into it and start avoiding them like the plague again.

I'm not always a fast learner.

Sometime before departing Australia my frenemy Cam told me of a playlist he has on Spotify, "100 songs I like right now". Now, I don't really like his music very much so I elected to create my own. His rules are simple; one song by one artist. No double ups. My take on this goes one further; no skipping. Loosely adhered to is the suggestion of "not that band's biggest song" but it's kind of hard to sincerely suggest Pulp did anything of note other than "Common People".  It's a playlist that's in flux. Hearing Jimmy Barnes' cover of "The Weight" is not something I need to happen too often so it met the chopping block pretty quickly.

Pleasurable enough without a Jimmy Barnes cover.

The drive itself is brilliant. Travelling along strike of the Alaska Range there are perpetual mountain views. The foreground shifts from alpine forest to tundra, then lakes and rivers. It's scarcely populated, there are a pair of rest stops and a few lodges along the way but save for a peculiar and large hunting party, I crossed bumpers with no one. There's something truly bizarre about fifteen trucks covered in camouflage, manned by men in more camouflage and high powered rifles just... lying about. I suppose they were trying to hide their trucks from moose UAV flyovers or something. With all that effort concealing the sight of themselves, I'm surprised they didn't leave the diesel generators at home to match their inconspicuous sight with a more forest-like sound track but I'm altogether pretty new to the hunting malarkey.

Safe to say, our shooting interests are probably divergent.

At just the moment that I had destroyed my voice singing along to all two minutes of "Fucken Awesome" I realised a growing need for food - it was 8pm - and like some sort of black magic Maclaren Lodge (set in the footprint of Maclaren Glacier) appears. Salmon and beers ordered through a husky, broken voice, time seemed to freeze. It was just as light when I got back on the road - a bit before eleven - so driving continued unabated. This elongated twilight is good for getting miles under the belt or outrageously beautiful photographs - typically not both - so I didn't get too far before locating a gravel pit off the road on the Richardson Highway to sleep in for the night.

I'm a simple man.

A never ending sunset was well used.

For those interested in critiquing/viewing/sampling my taste in music for this exercise, read on.

Name	Artist	Album
Dream On	Aerosmith	Aerosmith's Greatest Hits
Poison	Alice Cooper	The Definitive Alice Cooper
She Keeps No Secrets	The Angels
House Of The Rising Sun	The Animals	Forty Shots Of Rock
Roam	The B-52's	The B-52's
Bad Company	Bad Company	Bad Company
Good Vibrations	The Beach Boys	Sounds Of Summer
Spicks & Specks	Bee Gees	Their Greatest Hits: The Record
Rebel Yell	Billy Idol	Idol Songs: 11 of the Best
Love Burns	Black Rebel Motorcycle Club	B.R.M.C.
Harley & Rose	The Black Sorrows	Harley & Rose
Godzilla	Blue Öyster Cult	The Best of Blue Öyster Cult
Roll Me Away	Bob Seger	Greatest Hits
Streets Of Philadelphia	Bruce Springsteen	Greatest Hits (Bruce Springsteen)
I Will Survive	Cake	Fashion Nugget
Let's Go	The Cars	Complete Greatest Hits
Reptile	The Church	Starfish
I Fought the Law	The Clash	The Singles (Clash)
Bow River	Cold Chisel	Radio Songs
G.O.D.	Coloured Balls	Ball Power
White Room	Cream	Strange Brew - The Very Best of Cream
Who'll Stop The Rain	Creedence Clearwater Revival	Chronicle, Vol. 1
Boys Don't Cry	The Cure	Staring At The Sea: The Singles 1979-1985
Mistreated (Live)	Deep Purple	The Compact Disc Anthology (Disc Two) (Disc 1)
Pour Some Sugar On Me	Def Leppard	Best Of (Def Leppard)
Telegraph Road	Dire Straits	Love over Gold
Bare Necessities	Disney	Classic Disney, Vol. 2
Listen To The Music	The Doobie Brothers	Listen To The Music: The Very Best Of The Doobie Brothers
Light My Fire	The Doors	The Doors
Tales Of Brave Ulysses	Eric Clapton	Backtrackin' [Disc 1]
Sweet Dreams	Eurythmics	Eurythmics Greatest Hits
Weapon Of Choice (with Bootsy Collins) (Attack Hamster Edit)	Fatboy Slim	The Greatest Hits: Why Try Harder
Suspicious Minds	Fine Young Cannibals	80's Best Of The Best
Dreams	Fleetwood Mac	Greatest Hits - Fleetwood Mac
Slow Ride	Foghat	Dazed And Confused
Come Fly With Me (Live)	Frank Sinatra	Live At The Sands (with Count Basie & The Orchestra)
Pasisienne Walkways (Live)	Gary Moore	The Best Air Guitar Album in the World... Ever! - Volume 2
Wayne Gretzky	Goldfinger	Open Your Eyes
Civil War	Guns 'n' Roses	The Best Of Gun's 'n' Roses
A Thousand Miles Away	Hoodoo Gurus	Ampology
Back in the Hole	Hunters & Collectors	Natural Selection [Bonus Tracks] Disc 1
Tucker's Daughter	Ian Moss	Matchbook
Mystify	INXS	The Years 1979-1997 Disc 1
Leaving Home	Jebediah	Triple J Hottest 100 Vol. 05
Little Wing	Jimi Hendrix	Live at Royal Albert Hall
I Love Rock and Roll	Joan Jett	I Love Rock N' Roll [Bonus Tracks]
Satch Boogie	Joe Satriani	Electric Joe Satriani: An Anthology
Love Will Tear Us Apart (Live)	Joy Division	The Complete BBC Recordings
Highway To The Danger Zone	Kenny Loggins	Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: The Greatest Hits
God of Thunder	Kiss	Double Platinum
Babe I'm Gonna Leave You	Led Zeppelin	Led Zeppelin
Are You Gonna Go My Way	Lenny Kravitz	Greatest Hits
Roll On	The Living End	From Here On In
Free Bird	Lynyrd Skynyrd	Gold & Platinum (Disc 1)
Nothing Else Matters	Metallica	Black Album
Blue Sky Mine	Midnight Oil	20,000 Watts R.S.L.: Greatest Hits
Knights Of Cydonia	Muse	H.A.A.R.P [Live]
Sunday Morning	No Doubt	Best of: No Doubt
Married With Children	Oasis	Definately Maybe
Sleeps Like A Curse	The Panics	Sleeps Like A Curse
All Fired Up	Pat Benatar	16 Classic Performances
The Boy In The Bubble	Paul Simon	Graceland
Alive [Brendan O'Brien Remix]	Pearl Jam	Rearviewmirror: Greatest Hits 1991-2003 Disc 1
Another Day In Paradise	Phil Collins	...Hits
Comfortably Numb	Pink Floyd	Triple J Hottest 100 Of All-Time
Every Me And Every You	Placebo	Comedy
My Kind Of Scene	Powderfinger	Fingerprints: The Best of Powderfinger, Vol. 1
Lump	Presidents Of The United States of America	The Presidents of the United States of America
Breathe	The Prodigy	The Fat Of The Land
Common People	Pulp	Triple J Hottest 100 Of All-Time
Don't Stop Me Now	Queen	Greatest Hits I
Nightswimming	R.E.M.	Automatic For The People
Killing In The Name	Rage Against The Machine	Rage Against The Machine
Blitzkrieg Bop	The Ramones	Mania
Ghostbusters	Ray Parker Jr	Ghostbusters Sndtrk
Californication	Red Hot Chili Peppers	Californication
Black Bugs	Regurgitator	Unit Re-Booted
Sympathy For The Devil	The Rolling Stones	Beggars Banquet
Kathy's Song	Simon & Garfunkel	The Definitive Simon & Garfunkel
Alive and Kicking	Simple Minds	Live in the City of Light Disc 1
Bullet With Butterfly Wings	The Smashing Pumpkins	The Smashing Pumpkins
Tainted Love	Soft Cell	Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret
Fucken' Awesome	Spiderbait	Greatest Hits
Rock'n Me	Steve Miller Band	Young Hearts: Complete Greatest Hits
Russians	Sting	Fields Of Gold: The Best Of Sting 1984-1994 [International]
Skin Deep	The Stranglers	The Very Best Of The Strangler
Give A Little Bit	Supertramp	Even In The Quietest Moments
Once In A Lifetime	Talking Heads	Seven Talking Heads Tracks
Stranglehold	Ted Nugent	Dazed And Confused
Cowboy Song	Thin Lizzy	Live And Dangerous
Greg!  The Stop Sign!!	TISM	Machiavelli and the Four Seasons
Learning To Fly	Tom Petty	Tom Petty's Greatest Hits
Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon	Urge Overkill	Stull EP
(Oh) Pretty Woman	Van Halen	The Best Of Both Worlds
Blister in the Sun	Violent Femmes	Add It Up (1981-1993)
One Headlight	The Wallflowers	Bringing Down The Horse
Werewolves Of London	Warren Zevon	A Quiet Normal Life The Best Of Warren Zevon
Jolene	The White Stripes	White Stripes Singles & B-Sides
Baba O'Riley	The Who	My Generation: The Very Best O
Mind's Eye	Wolfmother	Wolfmother