A College of Wet

Pardon the pun in the title. Not a "College of wit" so much as "wet", but even the wet was hard and cold with more glaciers than you could poke a stick at. I lost track of the number and we were told that there are so many that quite a few do not have names. The big glaciers all have names. All the glaciers on the left hand side of this latest fjord as you enter it, are all named after prestigious women's colleges in the US, and the ones on the right are named after the men's colleges, as they were traditionally known. That is why it is called College Fjord.

The really big one was Harvard, closely followed by Yale. It was pointed out that the team of highly educated scholars who claimed and named the fjord thought it was a jolly jape to exclude Princeton. Ross was incensed. Harvard and Princeton have always maintained a parochial disharmony, but he really resented the exclusion of Princeton with its greater focus on the sciences and where Einstein was. He overcame his annoyance though as we got closer to the Harvard Glacier which is absolutely enormous.

We thought that this glacier would not calve for us. We couldn't be that lucky two days in a row. We watched it for a long time then, as the crowds grew, we went inside to have our dinner. The sun was disappearing and it was really getting cold outside so we congratulated ourselves on our cleverness.

After dinner we went back to our cabin. It was on the port side and the ship was slowly spinning to give everyone a good look of the glacier and we realised we would get a fantastic view from our balcony. We were right. No sooner had we arrived and positioned ourselves than we heard the now familiar cracking, like a gun shot, then the rumbles and roars. The glacier had begun to calve. We snapped some pictures but so much is lost from still photos of ice falling against an icy backdrop. We both pressed the video buttons on our cameras and caught footage of several calvings. Quite spectacular. One of the early ones delivered the biggest iceberg of the day. It was a murky colour but created quite a splash, then wave after wave of ripples before settling in the slush and beginning its journey down the fjord.

But I started today's blog with the end of it, so will go back to the beginning of the day. It was a sailing day with no stopovers, so people began their days slowly. It was also our last full day on board ship so there were disembarkation meetings to take us through the order of tomorrow.

After these were over, we went about looking at things, taking in the vastness of the ocean, chatting with fellow travellers and pretending to go on a bar crawl. There are several bars on board. By the end of today we had been in the Explorers bar, the Crooners Bar, the Calypso Cove Bar and the Wheelhouse Bar (which we nicknamed the Wheelbarrow Bar) but had resisted the Churchill Bar because that was the smokers bar. We missed out on the Bayou Bar but didn't feel we had missed much. They were all pretty much the same, despite decor change, and when you only drink club soda or iced tea there isn't much to say.

It struck us as very odd to see people serving and drinking alcohol as early as 10 am and seeing nothing wrong with it. We didn't see anyone drunk all trip so that was good.

Today we also visited the Wedding Chapel (for the disembarkation meeting) and the Library. The most common practice in the library was jigsaw building and playing card games. There were some readers too. We never once entered the casino which looked dark and sinister. The noise coming out of it was troubling too. We are in Alaska, on the high seas, visiting exotic places and seeing wondrous sites and people were playing bingo.

This afternoon we repacked our bags. We must have them outside our cabin doors by 10 pm so they can be transported off the ship in the early hours, loaded on trucks and taken through Whittier and on to Anchorage which is our next stop. We must put our overnight stuff in backpacks.

Whittier is an odd place and we will only be there a short time. The total population of this town is 187 people and they all live in a single highrise building. This puzzled me at first. Why wouldn't they have separate homes? Well it makes sense to have just one heating system, one set of plumbing and water supply for a town that is really a service centre. It has a school and other essential services such as a grocery store within the building so it is an all purpose building.

According to our guide, it is always cloudy or raining in Whittier. This was so well known, that the military built a base there in WW2 because the Japanese would never be able to attack it because of the weather. The old military facility is now abandoned and after a fire, now derelict. It is only inhabited by bears who appreciate the ready made hibernation places.

There is only one road in Whittier and it is both rail and road: it is a tunnel. Being one lane, they have calculated that every hour the direction of the travel reverses. There is no room for people who are a little bit late. They wait an hour before they can head off.

The fjord we are travelling through at the moment was the site of two great events. The first was in the 1964 when the second largest earthquake ever recorded took place. It disturbed the ground so much that salt water was taken up into the roots of the trees as a result of liquefaction. This killed the trees but left them in their place creating a ghost forest. The town of Valdez disappeared, killing over 30 people.

The second was more recent, when in 1989 the Exxon Valdez ran aground here. Now that I have seen the site I am even more horrified by what happened. Much of this region is pristine wilderness and it is reasonable to believe that much of it has never been trodden on by humans. It is quite inhospitable. The thousands of gallons of crude oil that spilled out into the area critically endangered many animals. Most have now recovered, including the local sea otter which we saw several times. It is about 30 kilos in weight, more hair on its body per centimetre than any other and swims on its back so his hands can use rocks to crack open shellfish for the flesh. Unfortunately one whale species was virtually exterminated. All the females died and only a handful of males now exist. There was one other creature that died out, but I was so caught up in the tragedy of the whales, I didn't catch its name. The site seems now to have overcome the shock and destruction and the waters are teeming with life.

As I sign off, I have to admit that despite getting up several times to look for the Aurora, I did not see it when it came at about 10.30 last night. Tonight I have asked for a call when/if it comes. They have assured me that the call will come if the Aurora does. The likelihood tonight is 6/10. I can't wait!Read more