Koningsdam wasn’t alone at Vancouver’s cruise port when we opened the curtains in our room and looked out for the last time.

Our debark tour started with a drive along some of Vancouver’s streets with some sights pointed out to us. Probably the most interesting and startling one was the sheer number of homeless people and drug addicts we could see, with many passed out on street corners.

Debark tours don’t tend to cover very much and don’t tend to have many stops because the goal is mostly just to get passengers to the airport by midday or shortly thereafter. Our first stop was in Stanley Park to see the totem poles. We’d seen totem poles in Ketchikan and I will say that those in Vancouver looked more detailed and in better overall condition.

As the totem poles were on the west side of Stanley Park we could look across the water to Canada Place and the cruise port, and of course to our ship and the Princess one also berthed there.

One of the nice things about travelling far and wide is that flora and fauna is different from home and it was nice to see some unusual plants and flowers in the park.

The second and final stop on this short debark tour in Vancouver was to the north eastern part of Stanley Park for views of the Lions Gate Bridge looking along its length and also from Prospect Point scenic viewing area. The bridge opened in 1938 and is one of many bridges you can cruise under if you cruise enough. Our ship would have passed under it early in the morning when we were asleep but we had witnessed the experience when we’d started on the cruise a week before.

And that was the debark tour, short and sweet. From there we were taken to the airport and a few more hours to kill before we could even check our bags in for the flight. It’s worth mentioning here that Vancouver’s airport for international travellers is very attractive with lots of water features as you can see below.

We grabbed a bite to eat and something to drink in the airport and made our way to a quiet area where we bumped into Jill and Jerry, the Canadian cruise bloggers we’d met on the ship. That helped to pass a bit more time until it came time for us all to start on our flights home.

That concludes this Alaskan cruise travelogue series. Our first time in Alaska was a great one with some spectacular sights. Our first experience of cruising with Holland America Line was also very good with excellent staff, food, ship, and entertainment. Its price point is a little higher than we really want to spend, though, so it will likely have to be a very good deal and a great itinerary that attracts us back to them in the future.

Travel bloggers do like to post photos and videos of their rooms in hotels and on cruise ships and since I consider myself a travel blogger I suppose I should too. The balcony cabin we had was spacious, laid out well, brightly decorated, and came with a daily towel animal too after our steward had been in to freshen it up.

With a meal arranged for later in the day we had a light lunch, and one of the reasons for booking a balcony cabin on a cruise ship, especially on bright and warm enough days, is that it makes for the perfect location to read, chat, eat, drink, and just watch the world go by with the accompanying sound of water in motion.

When we’d booked this cruise with Holland America Line there had been a special promotion on that included the drinks package, some money towards excursions, and a speciality dining meal. We’d already had that meal earlier in the cruise and it had been nice enough in terms of quality, but was so rushed that we couldn’t truly consider it a good speciality dining experience. Our old friends on this cruise, Paul and Carole, had a suite which meant that they could dine in all the speciality venues if they wanted. Another couple of cruise bloggers, Jill and Jerry, had the same deal as us and understood that they still had their free meal to take on account of being invited to another meal earlier in the cruise by the line. We knew we’d have to pay if we wanted to dine in a speciality venue on Koningsdam again, but when our fellow cruisers asked if we fancied a meal all together on the last night we were happy to accept anyway.

The restaurant booked was Tamarind, an Asian eatery which you could probably surmise from that name, and our first impression on approaching it was that the abstract sculptural artwork was gorgeous.

That artwork, unfortunately, was about as good as it got in Tamarind. Now, before I outline the issues, I will say that the food was very nice. Just as with our first meal in a speciality restaurant on the ship we had no complaints with what we ate, but everything around it detracted from the overall enjoyment.

Tamarind was busy when we arrived and everyone was chatting and laughing, and had this been a spacious venue then that wouldn’t have been a problem but the ambience in a location with not a massive amount of room between tables wasn’t the best. Then there was the fact that our table was near the bar area. Now, we like bars because bars are where you get drinks from, but bars on ships can also be where they put blenders for some of the iced and fruity drinks and there was one almost in touching distance of us. The noise was deafening when it was being used which turned out to be most of the time.

The main problem, however, was when it came to working out who would have their meals included as part of packages and who would be charged. We knew we’d be charged. Paul and Carole knew their meals were included. There was confusion for Jill and Jerry, though, and that would have been okay if it could have been sorted out with a quick explanation and a smile but an adamant (a generous term to describe the attitude) maître d’ and several minutes of back-and-forth heated conversations ended up casting a shadow over the proceedings. Over the incredibly noisy proceedings.

So, for the second time on Koningsdam we’d been a little let down with the speciality meal experiences, but the food on the ship as a whole was very good, and the important thing for this occasion was that we got to spend it in the good company of friends.

We only had a couple of plans for the rest of the day. The first was to meet up for trivia again with Paul and Carole – we’d done that earlier in the day and come second – but we were distracted on the way there when we heard people remarking that there had been sightings of whales. We headed onto the promenade deck and admired the landscape of mountainous islands passing by but didn’t manage to see any whales. We couldn’t complain, though, given the ones we’d seen earlier in the cruise. We finished second in the trivia again.

Our final plan, if you can call it that, was to get front row seats at the Rolling Stone Rock Room to enjoy the house band for one last night. It’s hard to put into words just how good they were, playing three 45-minute sets on all but one night of the trip, with hardly any repeated tracks and no use of song sheets or tablets for the music or words. On this night they were also joined with the show team singers and dancers for a few songs.

And that was that. Some excellent music, some drinking, some final chats with our cruise friends, and this all-too-brief cruise to Alaska on Koningsdam had come to an end. A good ship, a great itinerary, and a lot of good memories and experiences.

In the final post from this cruise travelogue series it’s disembarkation day, and with a late flight we’re able to take advantage of a short debark tour of Vancouver before heading home.

Our vintage trolley bus dropped us off not far from where the cruise ship had now docked. If you’ve read the post where we arrive at Ketchikan then you’ll know already that we’d had to take the tender boat ashore but by this point in the day a space had opened up to berth.

Close to this point was Ketchikan’s first bronze sculpture. Called The Rock, it featured general forms of a fisherman, frontierswoman, miner, pilot, logger, and a native drummer, as well as one actual person, Chief Johnson, a chief of the Tlingit tribe.

The part of Ketchikan that’s most famous and most photographed – and this travel account of our visit is no exception – is Creek Street, and that’s where we headed.

In 1903 a local law was passed that banned brothels from Ketchikan itself, limiting them to the Indian Town area, separated from Ketchikan’s main streets by the creek that gave the city its name. A boardwalk mounted on stilts sprung up to provide the service that the prudes wanted to pretend didn’t happen (and nobody likes a woman making decisions of her own and earning money, after all), and this became Ketchikan’s red light district until the middle of the 1950s.

What we found was a delightful series of colourful, old buildings, now given over to stores or museums, all sited right next to crystal clear creek water and nestled among tall trees backed by mountains. Bald eagles soared in the air above. Absolutely lovely, and while it’s a complete tourist trap, it’s a small one and a nice one to get caught in. We walked, we shopped, we took photos.

One enchanting moment that kept us and a few dozen other tourists glued to the water’s edge for several minutes was the sight of a seal in the creek. It had a part-eaten salmon which it would occasionally gnaw at but mostly just balanced or flicked from one flipper to another while it floated on its back. Then it would occasionally let the dead fish go, wait a few seconds, then dive under the water to catch the sinking bit of play-food, and repeat the process all over again. So enjoyable, and so typical of this entire Alaskan cruise that had blown us away with the variety of wildlife and what it all got up to.

Many of the buildings in Creek Street had a history to them, and not only as brothels. Information boards were present in many locations and brought the vibrant place even more to life.

Creek Street isn’t large, and even if you stop to buy a few things like we did then you won’t likely spend too long there. When we reached the far end of it we had time enough, had we wanted to, to take in the lumberjack show that’s another popular attraction in Ketchikan. Our friends on the ship had done just that when they’d arrived on this day, and they reported back that it was a lot of fun.

As you can tell, though, we skipped that and opted to keep up our run of visiting a brewery in every port in Alaska instead. We headed to the Bawden Street Brewing Company. As we arrived we saw a police officer – armed, of course – standing and talking to a man outside next to a wooden stand with books on it and I won’t lie, that’s not the most welcoming thing to see when you’re anywhere in the world, and particularly not anywhere in America with its reputation. However, it all seemed friendly enough once we’d ventured inside, found one of the very few seats there, and started down the first of two rounds of drinks we bought.

We liked this microbrewery a lot, and it was our favourite of those visited on this cruise. This had that proper feel of a passion project in the local community rather than something more commercial, reflected in the chaotic view to the fermentation tanks and the rough-and-ready menu. Not only did we taste-test and thoroughly enjoy a few ales – including a first ever cream ale – but we also bought some merchandise from the brewery and, after a quick chat with the bloke outside, bought a book off him too: he was Jeff Lund in case you’re interested in looking him up online.

But then it was time to head back to the ship. A short walk was all it took to get us to the dockside where Koningsdam awaited and where we would board her to step off Alaskan – and American – soil for the last time on this cruise.

In the next post in this Alaska cruise travelogue series there’s one final day at sea on Koningsdam to contend with, including a second stab at speciality dining with our friends aboard that doesn’t go entirely to plan.

A moderately interesting additional aspect of the trip was that we got to ride on a vintage trolley bus with a running commentary from our guide of the sights we passed and a little of the history of Ketchikan.

Our trip did not actually coincide with any live carving but we were still taken on a tour of the area with explanations given as to the methods used for colouring – yes, yellow does come from exactly what you fear it comes from – and how the meanings for totems are sometimes only discernible to those who carve them. The imagery on a typical pole can reference events in the life of someone, but the imagery is often representational and so is of clearest comprehension to those who know the subject.

One type of totem pole is called a shame pole and it will typically feature an image of the person being ridiculed. The famous one at Saxman is that representing William H. Seward, secretary of state in the nineteenth century, and shamed for not repaying his hosts for their courtesy and generosity. The one we saw on this excursion and which you can see below in the photograph is the third version of it, carved in 2017, and replacing an original carved in the 1880s and its replacement when that had started to deteriorate.

Another notable totem pole in Saxman was one with Abraham Lincoln atop. Again, this pole was a replacement for another 1880s one as totem poles last only sixty to eighty years on average. While some people think this is another example of a shame pole, perhaps for Lincoln’s role in general American imperialism, another story claims that the first pole was put up to commemorate a white person visiting the local tribe but the carver only had a photo of Abraham Lincoln to work from in lieu of actually meeting one himself.

The Edwin C. DeWitt Carving Centre wasn’t very large and the excursion wasn’t very long, but it was nice to do something a little different from the more expansive and expensive trips we’d taken while on this Alaskan cruise or the lumberjack show that we saw almost everyone else was planning to visit. We do like to do things a little differently on occasion. We bought some locally-made items from the gift shop before leaving and I’m even wearing a t-shirt with a local Tlingit artist’s work on it right now while I’m typing this post up.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll have a free wander around Ketchikan which will naturally take us through the historic Creek Street area and will even more naturally take us to a brewery, maintaining our record of visiting one in each port of call.

Ketchikan is Alaska’s sixth largest city by population size, but when it comes to population sizes in Alaska that doesn’t mean a whole lot. It, like most of the other places we’d visited, would struggle to qualify as a city at all in Europe. The remoteness of everywhere in Alaska and its resources sought after elsewhere also meant that the slow approach to Ketchikan in the morning was one of contrasts between the wonderful landscape views of rolling hills covered in trees and distant mountain tops with peaks of snow on the one hand but also frequent signs of industrialisation on the other. The need to cope with ways to get goods to and from locations such as this in high enough capacity to wait out any travel disruptions because of that general isolation is an understandable one, though, and something our guide was keen to point out later in the day on the excursion we’d take.

It was a strangely noisy slow sail into Ketchikan too with a constant droning that grew as we got nearer to the city. Sea planes were big business and were constantly not just flying in the distance but occasionally passing by our cruise ship too. An unusual experience the first time it happened. There had been excursions for sea plane trips but they were understandably pricey and we’d already spent a small fortune on trips on this Holland America cruise.

The reason why Koningsdam couldn’t dock at Ketchikan in the morning was because three ships had got in before us. Another HAL ship was there as well as two Princess ships in the form of Majestic (which we’ve yet to cruise on) and Royal (which we were familiar with).

While we were waiting for the tender boats to get permission to start heading ashore we could see that some were engaging in what looked like dancing off the starboard side of the ship. It was probably a bit of training, to be fair.

Ketchikan has the world’s largest collection of standing totem poles and in the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll head off to one of the locations in the city on a short excursion to see where totems are carved in Saxman.

Cruise ships typically take on park rangers to provide commentary and answer questions when they visit Glacier Bay, and Koningsdam was no exception, but we mostly kept to our balcony for the hours of cruising and admiring the landscape so missed out on most of that. A viewing deck at the fore of the ship was also opened up and we did head down there for a little while but it was very exposed, occasional drizzle would fall, and even if the speed of the ship was very low and the wind was not strong either, what wind there was carried with it the chilled temperature of all that ice in the area. At least on our balcony we could pop back into the room every so often to warm up.

By far the highlight of all the sights was getting to witness part of Margerie Glacier calving. Amidst near silence to suddenly hear what sounds like a gun shot echoing all around and to then see blue-white ice slide and crash into the flat, frigid water of the bay took our breaths away.

Anyway, you didn’t come here for the words, you came for the photographs of Glacier Bay, and without any more distraction, here they are.

Glacier Bay was stunningly beautiful.

In the next post in this Alaska cruise travelogues series we’ll reach the final port of call as we visit the city of Ketchikan.

We had quite a bit of free time after our excursion in which to look around Skagway for ourselves. Our friends Paul and Carole had been on the same trip as us and were after some hardware for their vlogging equipment so we started off with a walk around to find a store that would sort them out while we all admired just how pretty the historical district area of Skagway was. There was something of a western movie film set feel to the city but, generally, the buildings genuinely are from the gold rush era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We all liked the raised wooden pavements (sidewalks if you want to be American about it) and the colours and varying-but-similar styles of the buildings.

You can see from the photo below just how close the cruise ships dock to Skagway. It’s a very easy city to walk into from the port.

After we’d located a store towards the far end of the main part of the city and Carole had bought what she needed for her camera we started back now in search of something for us. That something was beer, which won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows us, and though we’d been entertained in the Red Onion Saloon on the brothel tour we were after something a bit more authentic.

We ended up visiting two breweries in Skagway. The first of those was Skagway Brewing and the second was Klondike Brewing. Both had very different styles of drinks available and we enjoyed both locations very much. I don’t think Paul and Carole were quite so impressed; Paul’s a lager or cider drinker, and Carole likes a Sauvignon Blanc or Bloody Mary so craft ales simply aren’t their thing. They were, however, gracious in accompanying us and polite when describing their experiences.

We started to make our way back to the cruise ship now but there were still some interesting sights to see on the short walk. A number of historic train carriages used on the White Pass train route were visible and there were a few sculptures and monuments dotted around. Most poignant was one dedicated to the SS Princess Sophia which lost all hands (364 crew and passengers) in 1918. That is a link well worth reading, particularly for the letter written by someone who feared the worst during the grounding, and whose fears were well-founded.

To finish, some views of the two ships to the right of the city as we walked away from it to the port; there were berths for more ships to the left side too. Crown Princess was the second cruise ship we ever cruised on.

Our home for this week in Alaska, however, was Holland America Line Koningsdam.

In the next post in this series we’ll have a day of scenic cruising, and it’s very scenic indeed as we make our way through Glacier Bay. It’s a bay, it’s got lots of glaciers, and we even see one calve while we’re there.

The final organised tour portion took us the Red Onion Saloon.

Built in the last few years of the nineteenth century the saloon didn’t just provide a place for miners to have a drink at the end of a day’s hard work. The saloon also operated as a brothel with the women based in the upstairs rooms selected by the miners picking a doll from behind the bar. It would be laid down to indicate the woman was busy, and raised back up when she was free again. The women were paid well for their services and many soon became far wealthier than most of the miners; they bought property and influence to improve their lives in Skagway, and many only needed to work for a short time.

Our quick tour of the museum began with a glass of champagne and some of this history recounted by a “madam” who was very entertaining. We were then led through the various rooms where many original artifacts remained on show and it was interesting to see the layers of wallpaper still visible. The women of the brothel were allowed to decorate their own rooms.

A silver dress was one of the most prized exhibits in the Red Onion Saloon Brothel Museum.

The museum was small and the tour a short one, requiring us to mostly file through the rooms in single file, but it was extremely interesting and helped wonderfully by the guide with her risqué commentary. I even received a compliment on the size of my equipment. Camera, of course.

In the next post in this Alaska cruise travelogue series we’ll have some time to explore Skagway on our own and we might just get to try out a few of its breweries too.

Oh, and flies. Lots of flies. So very many flies.

This was Liarsville.

Our visit began with an introduction on the bus from one of the local actresses, all frontier accent, winks, and associated bawdy comments, before she led us through the camp towards the Hippodrome for a short show.

The show was a combination of a little bit of acting and singing, all explaining a little of the history of Liarsville and how it got its name. Assuming you believe it. The general gist, though, was that this was a convenient location for the prospecting miners to return to and for journalists sent out to cover tales of the riches of the Yukon to meet up. Whether the miners embellished stories of the riches nearly in reach, or whether the journalists embellished the accounts of the miners, or whether both occurred, nobody knows. But those drawn to the area on the back of what they’d read were often somewhat disappointed by the reality and so the name Liarsville came to be. Perhaps.

We’d have paid more attention to the singing and acting had it not been for a distraction. No, not the squirrel near me, although that certainly was a factor too. It was the flies. Flies flying around is irritating, but not that big a deal. Flies landing on your clothes, your hair, your face, your arms, though. So many flies. Everyone was flicking their hands, hitting their bodies, flapping at their hair. I had my hoodie pulled up and hood on, drawn tight, just to reduce the number of flies requiring immediate slapping away, and it wasn’t enough.

The flies were such a problem that taking photographs of the other activities involved simply got relegated to the back of my mind.

Following the show we made our way to do some gold panning. Everyone was shown the technique to pan for gold and given a plate within which there was some soil, stones, gravel, and gold. That was guaranteed because it had been put there for each of us. We gathered around water troughs and set to work and quickly realised that whatever the technique for isolating gold was, we didn’t have it. It turned out, after our actress guide came to see how we were doing, that we were probably being a little too timid with the whole swirly-swirly, shakey-shakey element of panning. As she helped us uncover our flakes to keep as souvenirs she also remarked “Oh, there are a lot of flies around here today!” Yes. Yes, we knew that. I’d like to say that they were also impeding our gold panning attempts, and it might even be true.

Us and our two travelling companions on this cruise excursion, Paul and Carole, then went to get some lunch. This was a buffet style salmon bake and a chance for us to try Alaskan salmon for the first time. We were quite keen to do this because back in 2016 we’d been on a trip in Chile that included lunch near Lake Llanquihué and an amusing encounter with a loud passenger proclaiming they only ate Alaskan salmon. We’d been blown away by the quality of the farmed, Chilean fish – my wife particularly, as she hadn’t like it before then – so were interested in how much better the salmon in Alaska was.

It wasn’t. Now, to be fair that might be the way it was cooked. The salmon bake aspect of the food at Liarsville took away the ability for a direct comparison. It was still very nice, very tasty, and the food was very welcome, but we preferred the Chilean experience here because you could really taste the salmon. Plus, Chile didn’t have flies trying to land on you and the food all the time. Have I mentioned the flies? There were flies here. Lots of them. I’m not saying that every time we travel on a cruise with Paul and Carole that we encounter flies but I’m starting to get suspicious about the high frequency when compared to other people.

We enjoyed Liarsville despite the flies. It was a fun experience, regardless of its authenticity – but what can you expect with a name like that? – and worked well when combined with the other elements of this day’s tour.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll return to Skagway for a visit to the Red Onion Saloon Brothel Museum.

After our usual breakfast we met up with our friends Paul and Carole to head ashore for the tour because they’d booked the same trip as us on this day.

Our excursion in Skagway was to start with the White Pass Scenic Railway trip.

The narrow-gauge railway running from Skagway, Alaska in America to Whitehorse, Yukon in Canada unsurprisingly owes its existence to the gold rush of the very late nineteenth century. Prior to its construction the only way from the port locations for easy shipping to and from the gold fields in Canada was on foot or by pack animal over the border at White Pass but the Canadian authorities insisted on so much winter gear for prospectors (for obvious don’t-die-in-a-snowdrift reasons) that many weren’t permitted to legally pass. The train would make transporting people and goods faster and safer.

Gold prospecting and mining gave way to mining for other minerals but by the 1930s and the Great Depression the train service was barely in use any more. Despite a surge in operation thanks to fears over Japanese attacks during World War II, and more ore-carrying requirements post-war, by 1982 the train route could not operate at anything other than a loss and closed down. Fortunately, the 1980s started to see an increase in Alaskan tourism thanks to the growth of cruise ship travel so by 1988 a pure tourist service had restarted on the White Pass line.

Now, if you book a tour to travel on the White Pass Scenic Railway route while visiting Skagway on a cruise ship then you’ll have a few options for how to do it:

• travel up and down the line and over the USA-Canada border on the train,
• helicopter to the moving train and descend to its roof by rope,
• travel up and over the border by bus, travel back down to Skagway on the train,
• travel up and over the border by train, travel back down to Skagway on the bus.

The benefit of picking one of the latter two options is that the road and the track, while running roughly parallel to each other for the most part do deviate either side of valleys frequently, so if you want to see the largest number of scenic views on your trip then those make more sense. We chose to drive up by bus then come back by train. It seemed the best choice before we went, and having done it we still think it was the best choice to make. The train in both directions might be ideal for those worried about the bus not making it to the station in time. The helicopter option is just to see whether any web scraper ever offers it as a serious suggestion.

We stopped a couple of times on the drive to the border, over the other side of which we’d join the train. You can see the sort of landscape in this part of Alaska in the photos below. The odd waterfall would cascade down rock faces, and you can get a sense of the scale of the Alaskan mountain ranges in the picture that shows our bus where it had stopped to give us all a few minutes to walk around a bend further along the road to take some shots.

Crossing the border into Canada proved to be problematic. A queue of traffic had built up ahead of us. At the border the guards were checking passports of everyone travelling. There were some buses ahead of us but mostly cars, and the time that we were supposed to be boarding the train had come and gone. Our guide assured us, though, that the train knew about the delay and would wait for us. I’m pleased to report that it did, and we were the last to arrive, with the train setting off very soon after we’d all grabbed seats.

I’d told everyone in our group we needed to be sat on the right side of the carriage as it faced forward because that would have the best views heading in this direction towards Skagway. The opposite would apply if we’d taken the train up, of course. However, the reality is that while you can’t move from carriage to carriage – they’re assigned to specific tour groups – you can get out of the front and rear of each carriage onto a small, open-sided section giving you views either way.

I ended up spending almost the entire time outside. I found that it was fairly crowded at the start because the excitement of getting out appealed to everyone, naturally, but that most people decided they’d rather sit inside soon enough and headed in. Only a few of us stood outside most of the time – it wasn’t particularly cold and the train moved at a smooth and sedate pace – and I tried to make way for anyone who’d pop out for a photo or video or two when they did so. Unlike some other passengers. Ah, selfishness, my old travelling companion, I’ve missed you.

Crossing back over the USA-Canada border by train didn’t involve a border guard stopping us there and then but we would have our passports checked again before being allowed off the train at the end of the ride.

It was fascinating and only a little disconcerting to see the partially collapsed remains of one of the original wooden trestle bridges used on the White Pass rail route. These bridges were phased out of use and replacement routes opened as the train engines got larger and heavier to move ore during the twentieth century.

As you can see, at times the train would pass very close to the rocky face of mountains.

At one point we stopped on a spur line to allow a train on the way in the other direction to pass by. We passed slowly enough and close enough that I high-fived a guy passing by on the other train. Should you do this to people in other trains as you pass? You know the answer to that. Of course you should. It’s fun to touch people at speed.

A lot of people who’d cruised to Alaska before had recommended taking the White Pass Scenic Railway trip while in Skagway and we were very happy we followed that advice. And, as I’ve mentioned already, I think heading up by bus then back down by train gives you the best experience. The landscapes along the rail route were tremendous, but then they all are in this part of the world.

In the next post in this series we jump back on our bus and pay a visit to Liarsville to try gold panning and have some lunch.