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.