We were invited to Paul and Carole‘s suite – yes, suite; they’re big-spenders on occasion – to have a nose at it and admire the views from the large balcony on two sides, and we were offered the chance to stay there for the full sail into port but declined so that we could set up on our own balcony instead.

Two other ships were already docked alongside. One was another in the Holland America Line fleet, Eurodam, and the other was a ship we’d cruised on many years before, Royal Princess. HAL tend to get the best berth spots in Alaska, though, and that was the case here as our ship cruised past the Princess vessel and drew up nearer the city centre.

Juneau is the capital of Alaska, becoming so in 1906, and takes its name from that of a French-Canadian gold prospector. With the terrain around the city being so mountainous, Juneau is effectively an island city in terms of road connections to the surrounding land. What we mostly noticed on our final approach to the dock was the eclectic range of buildings in terms of size and colour, and there was a clear frontier look to most of them reminiscent of movies of westerns genre. We couldn’t really tell if these were authentic, original looks or the sort of thing you’d find in theme park recreations, though. Still, if you’re visiting Alaska then you’re likely there to see what nature has to show rather than what town builders have thrown up.

There was no point rushing to disembark until clearance had been given so we waited until we started to see a steady stream of passengers from our cruise ship heading ashore.

We’d booked an excursion for our day in Juneau – well, we’d booked one for every port on this cruise – but we had time to have a short look around the city before that started. Heading ashore the first thing we did was hunt down where we’d need to meet for our planned trip.

There were a number of places where it was possible to book trips near to where the ships dock but if I were in an advice-giving mood – and I am – then I would strongly consider booking whatever the cruise line offers if there’s a particular type of excursion you’re keen to do. The reason for this isn’t value for money, because let me assure you that these excursions were not cheap through the cruise line (and I don’t know how much of a saving you’d get direct on land), but because they sell out quickly, especially if you’ve got a few cruise ships in at once. And you almost always will do.

We’d pre-booked a trip, and our friends Paul and Carole had done so as well (and an almost identical trip, as it happens), but the other cruise bloggers we’d met on Koningsdam had decided to see what they could get at the port, and were ultimately left disappointed that all the whale-watching options while our ship was in port were sold out.

Things you can expect to see on a cruise to Alaska include fabulous landscapes like that above, and totems like those below carved by the indigenous people, the Tlingit, and there will be more about those totems and the tribes in a later post in this cruise travelogue series when we see more of them close-up on another excursion.

While we’d stopped to take a photo of one of the totems a local man who was sat at a bench nearby called out for my attention, then pointed at the metal bridge structure mounted between the two Holland America cruise ships in port. It was something else that you can likely expect to see in Alaska, but which, being a wild animal, you can’t necessarily guarantee spotting: a bald eagle. A symbol of America, of course, alongside a rapid descent into fascism, and Alaska’s largest bird of prey, and we were incredibly pleased to see one within minutes of being on land.

As it would turn out, by the end of the day we’d see dozens more bald eagles, and over the course of the cruise perhaps over fifty. We still absolutely loved spotting them gliding through the air no matter how many times we caught sight of them.

We had time for a little more wandering past the shops – Do you want something in tanzanite? No? How about some gold? What about gold and tanzanite together? Well, sorry we couldn’t tempt you, but don’t worry if you change your mind because we’re absolutely everywhere in Alaska – and past the famous Red Dog Saloon too. This establishment is the oldest of its kind in Juneau although the building itself was only moved to its present location in the 1980s. We considered visiting even though it looked a little bit of a tourist trap and rammed, but we’d spotted something more to our taste anyway so gave it a miss.

Where we ended up ahead of our excursion, instead, was at the Alaskan Brewing Public House. Anyone who knows us knows that we like craft ales and ciders, and that we always try to seek out locally-brewed drinks when we travel, preferring to experience them than simply the same old stuff you can get anywhere else. We treated ourselves to a pint each, and my wife bought a t-shirt too because that’s something she likes to do at breweries in addition to drinking. We didn’t actually realise until we were back on the ship in the evening that some of the beers were available aboard, but we’d still have visited the brewery’s pub regardless because that’s just something we do.

It was time to head to our meeting point for the excursion now so we made our way there and spotted a couple of pieces of public artwork on the way. Both showed symbolism associated with the Tlingit. The raven and the eagle are the two moeities into one of which indigenous people are born and are expected to marry those from the other.

In the next post in this Alaskan cruise series we’ll head off on the first part of our excursion in Juneau when we hike through the woods to the Mendenhall Glacier.

Ahead of the views of the glacier, though, there was a hike to take. We are not hiking people. We’ve been on hikes and we’ve not really enjoyed the hikes. We’ve got knees and ankles and hips and backs that have firm opinions about how much exertion they’re prepared to put up with. But, we were here and no hike has killed us yet so we braced ourselves.

As it was, this particular hike – called The Trail of Time – was very gentle, largely flat, and not especially long. The reason for the name would become evident as we were guided expertly on the broadly circular route that started once we’d disembarked from the bus at a designated parking area.

It was cool, occasionally drizzly, and the guided walk featured a lot about moss. If you’ve ever wanted to learn about the different types of moss and lichen that grow in Alaskan woodland then this is the tour for you. For me it was less about the learning and more about just enjoying the look of it all. Those mossy carpets decorating the trees muffled the sounds from all directions, even muting small waterfalls where they ran alongside the hiking trail.

The Trail of Time’s name can be connected to the giant boulder markers we encountered on the walk through the trees. These boulders were inscribed by how far the glacier reached decades back and, as you’d probably expect, the oldest markers were those we first encountered with newer ones closer and closer to the end. Five minutes of walking could move you back dozens of years of glacial melt and recession. It also made the wooded area of the hike that much more interesting too, because the feel of ancient land wasn’t strictly true given how much of where we walked would have been within the extent of the glacier’s reach and covered in ice a century before.

We reached a spot on the hiking trail where we were told there was a good view of Mendenhall Glacier usually, but the weather wasn’t being too kind to us on this day, at least at this moment. Low cloud had dropped into the valley and bled all the colour and details from the sight. However, we would get more chances to see the glacier at the end of the hike and, weather being the changeable thing it is, our views of it would improve.

By the time we got around to the visitors centre and close to the lake that is one of the benefits to the local ecosystem of the glacier’s shrinkage we could see more of Mendenhall’s majesty.

Those who needed to pee got the chance to do that and when we were all ready to move on we set off for a shorter walk to where our bus would pick us up from to take us to the next part of the tour.

But there was time for a surprise – to us, at least – when someone in our group spotted a porcupine up a tree. You can just about see it resting in the crook of the branches two thirds of the way up the main trunk in the photo below. We had been told that we might see a porcupine on this hike but we hadn’t realised that they climbed trees, assuming instead that they spent their time at or maybe even below ground level. How Porcupines Live just never popped up in any school lessons for us.

In the next post in this Alaska cruise travelogue series we’ll be off on the main thing we wanted to do when visiting Alaska: spotting humpback whales. And this turned out to be spectacular!

A short bus ride from our hike near Mendenhall Glacier brought us to a marina at which there were many boats – well, you’d expect that from a marina – with a large number given over to sightseeing tours to look for whales. One of them would be ours.

We boarded, met our captain, and were given some information about the trip to come. There were rules that the whale sightseeing boats had to follow – keep the speed down when whales were around, and keep well away from the whales if possible – and seeing whales wasn’t guaranteed because you just can’t get them to agree to anything. But the boat captains talked to each other and if there were whales around then they would head to those locations, and there had been plenty of sightings recently so we should be okay.

The boat itself was ideal for sightseeing. When it was travelling at any speed there were seats inside for people to sit on but once it slowed down or was stationary the windows could be opened and folded back overhead offering uninterrupted viewing and complete exposure to the elements without any glass in the way. Furthermore, it was possible to get out front and out back onto small platform areas. There was never any trouble getting a good view of what was going on for anyone aboard.

Prior to this Alaskan cruise on Koningsdam we’d checked out videos of people also visiting the area and had seen some people we knew travelling a few months earlier in the season and just managing to spot a whale spout in the distance in torrential rain conditions which had been ultimately disappointing for them, so we’d set our expectations low so as not to be too upset if it happened to us. As it would turn out we’d have better weather and far more luck this bit later in the year.

If you’ve read about our arrival at Juneau then you might know that we’d been pleasantly surprised to see a bald eagle near the ship. During our hike we’d then seen a few more flying around and on the drive to the marina there had been more sitting on lamp posts. Then as we were cruising slowly out to the more open water where we’d hopefully spot some whales our captain slowed to point out more bald eagles sitting on the shore. Spotting bald eagles was not a problem, it was turning out, but that’s not what we were in the boat to see.

And it was very soon after that we got the heads up from the captain again that there were whales ahead. She didn’t need to get on the radio to ask where they were as the congregation of boats gave that away. We held our distance, as per the rules, but it was more than good enough to see humpback whales coming up, breathing out, then the whale flukes flicking out as they went back under. You possibly already know this but it’s the underside of the whale flukes – their tails – that are used to identify the individuals and each boat had a book of images of those tail patterns to match to. My wife actually managed to get a good enough photo on her phone to allow our guide to match it in the book and show everyone on our boat. The humpback whale’s name was Razorback, in case you’re interested.

Had that been our only or closest encounter then we’d still have been ecstatic to have seen the whales in these conditions but it would get better. Much better. Not long afterwards a smaller group of whales surfaced closer to our boat. Yes, the rules say stay away from the whales, but the whales don’t follow the rules in reverse.

We’d seen far more than we’d expected already and started to track from a distance another group that were heading down near one bit of coastline.

And then the birds that had been following along in the air over the whales started to circle and our guide and captain told us that this was a good sign we were about to see something we really hadn’t thought we’d see at all: bubble-net feeding.

Moments later we watched in utter amazement and incredible joy as the water’s surface suddenly became a mass of surfacing black bodies with wide open mouths gulping down fish that had been corralled into a pen of bubbles for consumption. Black bodies on the water became frothing, foaming white as the whales churned the area up then dove under the surface once again. The pictures don’t do it justice. Video wouldn’t do it justice. This was an emotional, uplifting, truly astonishing experience that you need to see in person.

After it was deemed there was little likelihood of seeing more of the bubble-net feeding frenzy our boat started to head off but then our captain had to suddenly stop the engine. A few whales had decided to cross right in front of us in this Alaskan waterway and it turns out that they have right of way. We were absolutely not disappointed in the slightest to get an even closer look at these magnificent creatures, but not as excited as our captain when one of the humpback whales had a poo and shot it into the air as it was submerging. Apparently, it’s a rare thing to see so she got on the radio to boast about it to other captains.

It was time to start heading back to shore for us now but that didn’t mean there weren’t more sights to see. A few more distant humpback whales were spotted and then we tracked a mother and calf for a little while; the different sizes in the humps breaking the water’s surface were very noticeable, as was the size of the spouts of air.

The sun was getting low and for a while cast the Alaskan landscape in a golden glow.

Finally, we circled a buoy for a little while where there were seals gathered. Had we not seen the whales then the seals would’ve been the stars of the trip, but after you’ve seen humpback whales surfacing nearby, bubble-net feeding, and flinging poo in the air then seals need to be a little more interesting than “sleeping on a buoy” to win the day. They were still great, of course.

An amazing excursion in Alaska, I’m sure you’ll agree.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series it’s the start of a new day in a new port and an excursion in Skagway that starts with the White Pass scenic railway trip.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.