My Travels: Alaska Part I
I have no literary talent whatsoever, just a lifetime of strange stuff, some not so pleasant, some unexpectedly delightful.
I have lived in USA for about forty years. I visited many states, some numerous times over the years. Memories fade, photos get lost. I reveal my thoughts, my vices , and my personal life contemporaneously in these blogs. I will only use limited amounts of profanity, and will post no pics of naked or semi-naked women !! Everything else here is real and honest.
ALASKA: Of course this one comes first! During my years at USA, I could never afford to go to Alaska. Did not have the time or the money. I watched in awe all the travel videos, the magnificent mountains, the icebergs, the wildlife.
My last years as a professor in the university of Kansas were depressing, to say the least. Fortunately I was offered a job at an university in Kazakhstan, of all places, that I accepted in 2014. Suddenly, my financial problems were gone, I actually became relatively affluent!!
Every year, I started taking long vacations during the summer months. By 2017, I had enough money to splurge. I could not go to Alaska and drive through the state by myself. It is a huge state, I will have to drive alone several thousand miles to visit the sights. I opted for an eight day cruise. Went all in, a deluxe cabin with a balcony all for myself. Cost a ton of money but I could finally afford it.
I went from Almaty to Frankfurt. Rested there for two nights. Unlike other cities is Germany, Frankfurt is brand new, most of it anyway. I found it to be rather boring. You get some German flavor near the train station – there were lots of streetside cafes and bars. I stayed in a hotel near the station. German food was disappointing, but I had the best baby squid in my life at a Turkish place near the train station. A little bit of herbs and some butter, and it was heavenly!
I took a sightseeing tour mainly through modern Frankfurt, all steel and glass
A terrible cough ensued , aggravated by my smoking which stayed with me for months to come. I was Ok for the seven hour flight to NYC, but really miserable on the five hour flight to Seattle from NY.
Next morning I boarded the Celebrity Solstice. The ship is huge, more than a thousand passengers , six floors. Almost everyone was paired up, mainly senior citizens. There were a few couples on honeymoon or on fun trips. Most were white Americans, with a smattering of rich Mexican families taking family vacations. The passengers were old and mostly fat, the crew came from different parts of the world and were very lively.
The restaurants had formal seating, but it was pointless for a single person to sit down for a meal. I chose the buffet and what a great choice it was! Unlike the cruise I took way back in 1990 in Florida, food choices have become spectacular in international cruises! There were numerous food stations in the buffet – continental food, American food, salads, chinese food, Japanese food, Mexican food, Indian food, Middle Eastern food – and of course Indian food was being cooked by Indian chefs, Chinese food by Chinese chefs and so on! It was essentially a food heaven! I had fun mixing and matching, like beef stroganoff with naan bread, oxtail soup with chinese noodles – you get the idea. I should have taken more pics, but here is one fourth of the dessert station for your perusal. In case you are not satisfied, there were fifteen kinds of icecream right next to it. I suggest if you go on these cruises, fast for one month prior to departure! Everything in the buffet was free except alcohol.
Breakfast was healthy (haha), I had three types of fish every morning – salmon, herring and mackerel, along with rolls. The amount fish I scarfed down every morning will probably cost about $25 in US restaurants. I finished off with puri and sabji of course!
This was my breakfast every morning. Did not go for eggs and pancakes
My cabin was fantastic. Every morning I woke up to something like this
Oh yes, it was cold! A few degrees above freezing even in June! And constant rain, and heavy winds! The swimming pool on the top deck was closed, the second deck had an unheated covered swimming area, that’s where one of the few smoking sections were. In order to smoke, we had to wear a winter coat and brave some chilly wind! The third deck had a small heated swimming area, that was packed with people at all times.
As I said before, the ship was huge – filled up with lounges and restaurants and gift shops everywhere. The cruise line makes extra money by selling specialty drinks and beverages all over the ship. I did not fall for that except an occasional beer. On the third day, the sun came out and the top deck was open, it was still cold. I succumbed to having a huge crab fest that cost some extra money.
As you can see, the crab leg was huge, about the size of my arm, and there were crab cakes and crab chowder and hush puppies and some bread – everything was soaked with butter – that was an ordeal for my poor arteries. They used no spices whatsoever, my Indian soul craved some masala on the beautiful crab meat!
The top deck is practically empty because it was cold. I was one the brave souls to try the crab fest.
Oh yes, I was lonely as hell, like for most of my life. I was probably the only single person on the boat with about a thousand people! I managed to speak with some people in the smoking area. Many were senior citizens, some were continuously drunk with blurred speech and meaningless jabber. There was the bald fat guy carrying a big bottle of vodka with his wife in tow, there were several elderly ladies with the ever present cocktails in their hands. The lives they led were rather depressing. With enough money to their names, and the children grown, they did not have anything to keep them intellectually alive. They drifted from one cruise to another, drinking, eating and just hanging around. There were some middle aged men who appeared to be interesting ,but they were taking smoke breaks away from their families – they did not talk much.
On the ship, internet did not work very well, my internet package was a waste of money. Phone calls were expensive even with the package deals offered. It was surprising to see some people constantly talking on the phone spending hundreds of dollars for conversations that I think did not involve lucrative business deals !
The crew consisted of young people, some very attractive, from all over the world. I had fun startling the Indian guys with my Hindi (most people think I am Hispanic ), and startling the East Europeans with my poor Russian that I learned in Kazakhstan. Once, I got into a singing lounge which had a smattering of old overweight retirees. A striking blonde in a gorgeous outfit was sitting on a stool in the middle, obviously she was going to sing a little later. As I entered she smiled at me which I thought initially was just an artificial greeting smile. But no, she was giving me the eyelash batting seductive deal !! I looked behind me, there was no one! Apparently I was the only decent looking man in the room (which really is sad). I went up and talked to her. She was a country music singer from Georgia, possibly famous in her own circle. Her voice was melodic, I listened to her for a while. Later I saw her in the buffet because the crew members also dined there. I was tempted but she was way way above my league, and I was prudent enough not to make a fool of myself!
Romance on an Alaska cruise is unlikely, I heard that if you want to party hard, you need to go to Caribbean short cruises. There were teenage girls presumably granddaughters of senior citizens, all attractive young women were with partners, and there were spinsters roaming about in groups that I did not care for at all. There was actually an Emergency Room nurse that I met, she said she gets stressed out form working with trauma patients, and takes a cruise every couple of years to smoke and drink heavily. She was kind of attractive, but appeared to be looking for a serious relationship. I had a mistress in Kazakhstan (until 2019) who I think is stunning, I was not into the nurse at all. In any case, I was not looking for romance on this ship.
I met three young men from a rich Mexican family that was taking a family vacation. Two were brothers and the other one was the husband of their sister. I hung out with them whenever I could. Their pics will come later.
The highlight of the trip was on the fourth day where the ship went inside a fjord barely wide enough for the ship to sail through. This was the famous Inside Passage! There were towering snow covered mountains right next to the ship and glaciers and waterfalls. Everyone was on the deck, transfixed by the scenery. A charming Southern lady took some photos of me.
Photos of the fjord:
This is it for now. Part 2 is coming up covering the ports of call
Many more Alaska photos and video on Flickr
It has been expertly written and produced a bit of culture and, ofcourse, travel tips.
Thank you Amitabha, I will write more soon
“The swimming pool on the top deck was closed, the second deck had an uncovered swimming area …. one of the few smoking sections…we had to wear a winter coat and brave some chilly wind… The third deck had a small heated swimming area, that was packed with people at all times”
This is one of the few sections where “we” shows up. It does so as a miraculous sense of community between the few smokers on a cold morning, brought together in a place by their passion— passion in more than one way. The need to suffer through pleasure, pushed back into themselves both by the cold and by the jouissance of the ritual. I cannot imagine extended conversations, only a shared silence and the actual effort of smoking offering respite both from the need to socialize and ignore.
This dialectic between speaking and not speaking, looking in from outside till inside is crowded out and the only place that remains is the outside. This sustains the life moving through the narrative.
“The top deck is practically empty because it was cold. I was one of the brave souls to try the crab fest”
There is something strangely humorous about the crab fest. On one hand the pilgrimage to the crab fest (with the two fellow pilgrims not exactly company but further windows into the open) and on the other the strange debauchery of the crab, an “accursed share” (Bataille). A solstice ritual to celebrate a sunny morning. The crab leg is measured by the size of the arm and then the abundance of meat, the excess of fat as if in a sinister exchange for the money, the absence of any spices whatsoever. If around the swimming pool the flesh had appeared at its most rarefied (even in Hades, souls can tell things apart by smell said Heraclitus according to someone else), at the crab fest ritual the meat or the flesh appears in its most honest, most unworkable aspect. Here is what you paid for. Here is your flesh. While I am sure no such construction was intended, I am tempted to read the crab fest as one of the defining moments of the narrative. Bringing together the beauty of a sunny day long pined for and the colorless taste of being.
On a less somber note, the three views from your cabin also follow a mood progression from an abstract beauty to the seal pups—so with the conversations, so with the detailed observation of your fellow travelers and their conversations and varying degrees of loquaciousness. Always this movement from outside to the inside and finding the inside crowded to the point of being pushed out into the open.
Perhaps I have harped too much on certain aspects of your experience than others. What I have not spoken about are the memories and stirrings that you describe so well. I have also not spoken about the power and sheer pleasure of making choices and decisions in terms of food, in terms of travel, in terms of socializing that show up throughout the article. The sense of having been intimate, the observation of others around you in varying throes of isolation or intimacy, the curious pleasure of your own memories creating an aloofness toward desiring the “kind of attractive” but not one of a kind nurse (refusing both the charm of her beauty and her role as a caregiver) in the present, and the photo of your mistress and you segueing into other brilliant life-affirming aspects of your experience.
I could have spoken at length about those aspects as well perhaps. But in retrospect, I went to the buffet with my own desires.
Dear AD, i have never met you but your dad is a good friend of mine from a long time ago. I am honored to read your well thought out comments on my blog. Your intellect, insight, erudition and mastery over the English language are all overwhelming. I appreciate all the points you made. The smoking diatribe and your analysis of my own desires were spot on. You may have played around too much with the crab fest, it was only a very big Alaskan crab , I had never tasted one before. But ” Bringing together the beauty of a sunny day long pined for and the colorless taste of being” made me think about my own life, so maybe you have a point.
Yes, the buffet was fabulous. My mistress in Kazakhstan was not too bad either. I had to segue her in hahaha!
Again I very much appreciate it and wish you success in your writing and other endeavors.
Please take care of senior AD, a good man, and read my blogs when you have free time. Ciao – Uncle GB