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.