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.