The water doesn’t LOOK like it’ll kill you, although Dad is quite sure the water on the port side looks colder than that here on the starboard side. I might venture to suggest this signifies a somewhat overactive imagination, because I’m pretty sure it’ll all kill you in a matter of minutes, whichever bit you fall into.

Glaciers to the right of us, glaciers to the left of us, it’s all getting a bit Charge of the Light Brigade, frankly. No matter which way you look, there are glaciers. Big ones, small ones, five in one photo. All named after American colleges, men’s colleges on one side, women’s colleges on the other. Hence College Fjord.

All filling the water with bergies for the otters to swim round. Yes, we have spotted otters, probably American sea otters, which, for the record, are MUCH larger than British otters. Around three times the size. Think medium sized dog, rather than cat sized, as British ones are. If you’re are VERY lucky, you can spot the occasional little head popping out of the water and charging along for a few yards before diving back under. The only way to glimpse them is to look for their wake and then follow it forwards to its point. Most of the time, when you get there, it’ll have already gone back under and all you’re left with is a photo of the wake. Like this.

Luckily the water is so still, it should be fairly easy to spot their wakes. The only complication is that the vibration of the ship, slow as we are now going, causes the bergies to bounce in the water, so that each creates a circular set of ripples of its own.

This, if you’ll pardon the expression, muddies the waters ever so slightly, as most of the ripples are bergies, not otters. Oh well, no one said it would be easy. In addition to which, the bergies here are very dirty indeed, many are completely black, which suggests to me that they are quite fresh and have only recently fallen into the frigid turquoise, and the bouncing up and down actually washes them as we pass.

Once again, we find ourselves at a dead end and after circling for four hours, we have no alternative but to go back out the way we came in.

It is a little sad how quickly you can become used to such beauty. Only hours after arriving, I find myself impatient to go somewhere else, look at something else, be somewhere different, and I consider myself quite a still, contemplative person. I can’t imagine how bored the faster movers and people so impatient to get a dessert they’ll shove you aside in the blink of an eye must be. Yes, it’s beautiful, yes, it’s awe-inspiring, but, you know what? It doesn’t change while you watch it. These things move inches a YEAR and we are here for four hours. We’re not going to see anything change or move. It’s all just as lovely when you leave as when you arrived. I can’t help but feel that most of the growlers that drop bergies into the water are not witnessed by any creature, human or not. There’s simply no one and nothing here. It is all so similar to yesterday. All that is different is the sheer number of glaciers. There’s no wildlife, of course, because we are even further north now and hibernation isn’t over for at least a month. There aren’t even any birds.

At 5.30, I called it quits. I made it as far as the lift lobby before someone told me that someone claimed to have seen a bear. I’m not sure I believe this any more. It seems so unlikely that a bear would be awake this early and there is nothing to eat – no grass, nothing – here, so unless it finds fish that we didn’t, it won’t last long. On the contrary, I have heard people, in their cups, claim to have started false alarms, just to make people run, just to see the reaction. They think it’s funny. I find it hard to find such deliberate cruelty amusing. People are desperate to see the wildlife, this may be the only chance they have in their entire lives to see a whale or a bear in the wild, and I’m quite sure that some of them find the idea of having just missed something very distressing. Whilst the average age on here is significantly lower than on most other long cruises I’ve been on, as I’ve already mentioned, there are still people here for whom such distress could be rather dangerous. I just think it’s unkind. Unnecessarily unkind. There are enough genuine disappointments in life, both big and small, without some idiot with a warped sense of humour inventing new ones for you to add to your collection. I won’t believe there was a bear here today until I see dated photographic proof.

Wow. What a meal we are making of mooring up. Welcome to Whittier. We’re due in at 10pm and we’ve either got a beginner doing the parking or someone is stalling for time, because we have been alongside but several feet out for nearly fifteen minutes now. Arriving the night before anywhere is exciting, because it gives a rare chance to experience the nightlife of a place. We normally arrive in the morning and leave at dusk, on the evening tide, so this is a rare treat. Now all we have to do is wait for them to let us off. How exciting!

You don’t think on a cruise ship. No one does. Well, I hope someone on the Bridge does, but no one else does. What is there to think about?

You plan one day ahead, max.: What We Are Going To Do Tomorrow. That’s it. We rarely write anything down until we part and need to swap email addresses. I don’t write this blog for you. I write it to remind myself how to type, corral words, string a sentence together, plan a paragraph. Planning 24 hours ahead is not thinking. It’s all written down – in the daily newspapery thingy that lists what’s on where and at what time, in the version of the Daily Mail that gives us the news in print around 24 to 36 hours after we’ve seen it on the tv; there are port guides and guide books and excursion books that we read before we left and wrote notes in. There is no need to think. In fact, my family are probably some of the most forward-thinking people on board. We get the menu a day early, so that we can pre-order in case we need something different. The menu is pre-printed as well. But other than that, all thought is still.

The other day I tried to email a friend back in the UK to wish him a happy birthday. But we are eight hours adrift of the UK. Not so complicated, you might think. But I started the email and then my brain froze, like Roadrunner boi-oi-oinging to a standstill, the vibration of intended movement rattling up from his stopped feet t o his still moving head. My mind felt like the seventh dwarf still hi-hoing into the back of the other six who have long since stopped in their tracks. I could almost see the pause symbol flashing before my eyes. Was I eight hours ahead or eight hours behind? If it’s today here, is it today there or tomorrow or yesterday? Surely someone as smart as me should be able to work this out? But try as I might, my brain could not, would not sort it out for me. I even dug out a pen and paper but was dissatisfied and uncertain with the result I got. So I deleted the email, unsent. I sent it today. It will arrive somewhere in the region of two to three days late – I have no idea – but it is definitely late, so it says happy belated birthday. That much I am sure of.

This is how little we think. We lose the ability through lack of use. It’s not as stultifying as trying to communicate with a small child all the time (no offence, parents of small sproglets, but you DO know what I mean) – we have adult conversations about weather and the cost of trips and the best places to see, go, eat, whether the film at the cinema was any good, being blown out of bed in the Blitz and found asleep on the floor, and how much we like Two and a Half Men and wish Charlie would get his act together before Ashton Kutcher makes a right hash of it (we only watch it for the kid’s one liners, anyway, let’s face it) and aren’t P&O AWFULLY badly organised, but there is no actual THOUGHT involved.

When I mentioned at dinner that I am reading Jonathan Franzen’s essay on the future of the American social novel, all I got were blank stares, even from the Americans at the table. No one even pretended to be up to responding. But I purchased this book in San Francisco precisely BECAUSE I could feel my brain atrophying through lack of use, withering away into a soggy, spongy mess of recent pop culture references (someone stopped at my table at dinner to ask me who won American Idol) and 24 hour news (Sky AND BBC, remember), so liquid that it might dribble out of my ears at any moment like a sort of cream of mushroom soup. I don’t even watch American Idol.

Am I a snob? Am I some sort of over-intellectualising freak, who pushes myself to understand on too deep a level and leaves others treading water out of reach? Is thought really so alien a concept when on holiday? At all, for that matter? For what it’s worth, by the way, How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen is not a challenging read. It’s a selection of short essays on different topics, from his father’s Alzheimer’s to the disintegration of the Chicago Postal Service. I don’t need to reach for a dictionary, which has been known when reading Will Self, for example. That’s not to say I don‘t enjoy Will Self, I do – in fact I rather enjoying learning new words from him! But today I felt like a weirdo. Because I was trying to think during a cruise. Silly me.

This is, in fact, bothering me so much that I got out of bed to write this. (I think it’s about eleven o’clock. I went to bed at nine and read til ten.) Where is the line between thinking and over-thinking? Is there one? Is it fixed or mutable? Is it different for cruises than it is for real life? Can you ever over-think? You can clearly under-think (look at the world around you!), so it stands to reason you should be able to over-think, doesn’t it? Granted, every message I saw on Facebook today was about Eurovision, rather than the incident in Tenerife or the implications of the UK spending money we clearly don’t have to bail out Greece, whose currency we do not share, and whose economy is actually growing faster than ours, but Eurovision is about post-modern irony and not getting nul points, so that’s fine. But you’ve got to think sometimes, haven’t you? Haven’t you? Is it possible to go through life without thinking at all?

Of course, while I’m sitting here, I will moisturise my face. Anyone who has ever flown long haul knows what air con does to your skin and mine hasn’t experienced fresh air for 36 hours straight now. I didn’t go outside today. Are you nuts, it was FREEZING?! So the skin on my face, living in an inside cabin (those with balconies can have fresh air all night as long as their bedsocks are up to the job), is so dry you could write on it in pencil right now.

But while I moisturise, I muse. Is thinking a more unusual occupation that I have thus far taken for granted? Is the community on the ship a microcosm of the real world? Is the real world also full of people who simply don’t think about stuff? Ever?*

I find the idea of going through life without thinking a very odd one, but then you read about people who are clearly just wandering through their existence in a state of almost permanent bewilderment, like sheep, so that almost everything that happens is a surprise. It’s not hard to understand where the phrase ‘sheeple’ came from, and even if you’ve never heard it before, you know instantly what it means and who it describes. But are they people that can’t think or won’t think? Is there a difference between Can’t Think and Won’t Think and which is the better state, if any? Can you deliberately choose to not think about things or is it something you are taught or brought up with? What is the appeal in not thinking? Is there an upside? Is ignorance really bliss? Are there really people in the world for whom the warning on the side of Black and Decker drill boxes sold in the USA that reads “Not for oral use” is genuinely useful advice? I define myself via my ability to absorb, re-use and, most importantly, analyse information from the world around me and it frightens me to think that others don’t. Not as much as the concept of losing that ability, myself, but almost.

I don’t have answers to these questions. If I did, they wouldn’t be keeping me awake at night. QED! I am open to suggestions. If you can/want to/are capable of thinking about it, let me know what you… think.

* Sorry, that paragraph sounds a bit Candace Bushnell/Carrie Bradshaw, doesn’t it?! It wasn’t intentional, but after I wrote it, I could hear her!

P&O strike again.

The Cruise Director announced that two guides have come on board and would be giving a narration for three hours in the Crow’s Nest ONLY.

Now this is monumentally stupid, even for P&O, because you can’t get more than a few hundred people in the Crow’s Nest, and that’s standing room only. There are two THOUSAND passengers who want to hear this.

Furthermore, the Belvedere restaurant affords both views and seating down both sides of the ship. Why not pipe the narration in there as well? What about Neptune Pool? The roof is closed, so you wouldn’t be disturbing the wildlife if you let them hear the commentary there as well. That way, you wouldn’t be trying to fit several hundred people into one, albeit large, room. Seriously, am I really the only person on the whole ship who thinks about the PASSENGERS?!

FYI, these pictures are of, I am [reliably?] informed, the Hubbard Glacier, which we are passing on our port side at the moment.

We are here too early in the season. We’re one of the first ships of the year to come up here. The ice is barely melting and the bears are still asleep. Why would they wake until the salmon arrive in July? They’d starve! The ground hasn’t even thawed enough for the grass to grow, so there’s absolutely NOTHING to eat.

We are now so close to the shore that you can see the scoring on the mountainsides where the glaciers have passed. They have carved what can only be called grooves in the granite and have formed astonishingly straight lines.

Glacier ice really is a startlingly bright shade of light blue, almost turquoise at times, but, boy, is it dirty. As it gouges its way down the mountainsides, it picks up everything in its path, so that, by the time it hits the water and starts to float away, it is often quite black and grubby in places. Mum said one piece looked like it had been run over and had tyre marks on it! See? You never thought icebergs would be black, did you?! Although, strictly speaking, these are ‘bergies’, not ‘bergs’. They’re too small. Talking of jargon, ‘growlers’ drop lots of small bits, ‘calving’ is for a large chunk in one go.

The water they fall into is a deep bottle green in colour, and it does look like bottle glass, as there is virtually no wind or current to disturb it, becoming much paler where the sun hits it or our wash disturbs it. The wind is a constant but very light one (light airs, for the more precisely-minded of you), causing millions of tiny ripples on the surface and rendering the whole bay utterly opaque. Even if there were fish, you wouldn’t be able to see them.

The sand on the bottom must be white, because, as we use our thrusters to turn, clouds of sediment are forced to the surface, turning the water an opaque, milky green that is like no other colour I have ever seen. I would put a simile here if I could think of one, I promise, because “milky green” doesn’t help you much. I’ll try and find a photo that does it justice, but don’t hold your breath.

One small triumph for the passenger: I went to Reception the night before last and asked if they could wash the windows while we were in Juneau yesterday. I pointed out that, if we are spending two days just cruising past scenery, it would be nice if we could SEE the scenery. Dad bumped into the Purser and asked the same thing. Well, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the windows in the Belvedere WERE cleaned yesterday. You can see the smears. Power to the people! Hoorah for P&O. See what you can do when you try? Shame we had to ASK you to do it, though.

So other than getting the timings wrong (we arrived at Yakutat Bay three hours EARLIER than advertised) and completely messing up the commentary arrangements, P&O have, despite themselves, managed to give us a very pleasant afternoon moving very slowly through Yakutat Bay, which is a dead end, by the way, taking hundreds of photos of the Hubbard Glacier and the ice field in the water at its base, peering fruitlessly at the shoreline in search of ursine company and commenting to each other on the way the water changes colour. A lot. Not much to keep you occupied for over four hours, you’d think, but you’d be surprised!

As the sun turns its efforts to lifting the remaining mist and the cloud, even more mountains are revealed, white-capped and so far away, the camera can barely make them out. It’s only because the sun is at a lower angle, casting the beginnings of shadows, that some of them can be seen at all. But the peak I photographed when I paused at the beginning of this paragraph is now once again shrouded in mist. Less than ten minutes have passed and it’s gone. If you missed it, you missed it. It’s a nightmare.

The sun is shining full throttle now, but it is still bitingly cold out. Not even I could last more than about a half hour without a coat. It’s THAT cold. There is still virtually no wind, however, which is nice. The sun sets here at about 11pm and rises at about 4.30am, so if I didn’t have an inside cabin, I’d be seriously sleep-deprived by now! Marge was awake at 5am yesterday. She got to see a pod of orcas, but 5am? Really? No, thank you! It does mean that the views are constant. It’s hard to have a nap or go to a talk or even go to the loo, because you might miss something even more breathtaking than the last thing. Thank heavens for the occasional patch of really boring conifer forest, otherwise I’d have wet myself by now! Even in the cabin, I have the television tuned to the mastcam, so that I don’t miss one moment of this amazing landscape, crafted by sheer brute force and so dumbfounding to gaze at. I wish I had the words to describe it to you better. Alaska is making me feel very inarticulate!

Now, at about half four in the afternoon, as we make our way back out of the bay, in a southeasterly direction, rather confusingly, I have to sit and go through the 170 photos I took to find a couple for you that do justice to the beauty of this place. Wish me luck.

More staggering beauty. More snow-capped mountains, seemingly endless conifer forests, shimmering water, seaplanes, helicopters (together known as flightseeing) and magical little wooden towns, isolated and cut off from the world (other than the three cruise ships visiting today).

We went ashore into the capital city of Alaska at about 10am and found a shuttle service which drove us out to the Mendenhall Glacier. There were a lot of people pressure selling and nagging, but they were confined behind booth desks, so it didn’t feel as uncomfortable as other places, where we have been literally chased down the street.

The Mendenhall Glacier moves (surprise, surprise) through the Mendenhall Valley and a viewing centre has been built which affords an impressive view of the pale blue ice. When I walked down to the edge of the lake, a fellow visitor said how sad she felt at how far down the water level now was. When she had come ten years ago, the water level was about half a metre higher, much nearer the road. She blamed global warming, although the glacier itself looked no different to the pictures from the past on show in the visitor’s centre. It’s not moving very fast, that’s for sure. They built the visitor’s centre in 1962, and the glacier looks no closer! In fact it has “retreated” 2.5 miles since 1765, but that includes from the sides as well as the ends. The glacier is 12 miles long, about half a mile across and averages 100 feet high, above the water. It reaches up to 2000 feet deep in places. It is one of over 150 glaciers in the Juneau Ice Field. The reason glacier ice is blue is because of its unique crystalline structure. The blueness is revealed when pieces calve off and fall into the lake. The blue fades as the ice is exposed to the air and the structure alters.

But the statistics tell you nothing about the scale or the beauty or the (tourists permitting) quiet, and I’m not sure even photos do it justice. There is simply no way of communicating the sheer immensity or beauty of a glacier in either words or pictures. It really has to be seen to be believed. Everyone should try to get to a glacier at some point in their lifetime. You don’t HAVE To come all the way to Alaska, although it is wonderful, obviously – there are glaciers in Scandinavia, Iceland and other northerly climes. See a glacier. Put it on The List. You know, The List. We all have one…

We returned to town on the same shuttle bus, and went to lunch at the Red Dog Saloon. The Red Dog Saloon is an icon of Alaska. Dating back to the Gold Rush, and burnt to the ground twice in the intervening years, it has sawdust on the floor (now fire retardant!) and dead animals on the walls (very Alaskan) and guns in cabinets (including one left behind by a Mr W. Earp), a man playing the piano live (proper saloon style!), and some very nice food indeed. Signs suggest that “If our food, drinks and service aren’t up to your standards, please lower your standards”. Can’t fault the logic there… So we paid up, signed the wall and left.

We wandered through town and visited some more non-touristy bits, which were ugly but interesting. Think generic 1970s city centre, but without the concrete brutalism, and you’ll get the drift. Then we flagged down the glacier shuttle as it passed by again and grabbed a lift back to the waterfront. Mum and dad wandered off in search of coffee, while I went up in the cable car (called a tram, here) to the top of Mount Roberts. [Cable cars are trams, funiculars are also trams, but trams are cable cars. It’s ludicrous. And don’t ask me what a streetcar or a trolley bus is.] My friend, Marge, and I took the necessary photos and then wandered around the shop. I had a drink of lemonade and Marge had a coffee and a Juneau Seven Layer Cake. This turned out to contain an astonishing array of ingredients, including various fruits, coconut and icing. I am reliably informed it was delicious. It was certainly crumbly!

Then, on the way back down, we spotted a bald eagle circling, and some people spotted a bear and her cubs, although I didn’t get to see them myself. Back on terra firma, I found mum and dad outside a jewellery shop which was advertising a free whale tail pendant, no purchase required, so we wandered in and relieved them of a couple, with attendant chains for five dollars. Steel, not silver, but, hey, free is free! We then took a leisurely stroll back to the ship, via a few more shops, in time for dinner. After which, I watched the news, to make sure there were no injuries in the Costa Rica earthquake, and then crashed. A more leisurely day tomorrow, thank heavens.

Oh.
My.
God.
I’m in Alaska!

I have tried to sit down to write this piece at least three times. But what do I say? I never dreamt for one moment that I would ever find myself in Alaska. When I watched Due South, and similar shows, on tv in the Eighties, it never occurred to me, for even one iota of a second, that I would ever be here myself. Even when we booked it, it didn’t seem real. But here I am. I’m in Alaska.

I’m on the other side of the world. I’ve been further away from home (we’re only at GMT -8 here and I’ve crossed the date line in the past), but I’ve never FELT this far away before. This is the last wilderness, the most unspoilt place on Earth apart from the Poles. People live here, but they are barely a dot on the landscape. There are no roads – the only access is by air or sea. Leaving Ketchikan, you can see where the road stops and the Tongass National Forest starts. It just stops. From here, you walk, row, paddle or fly (no boat engine noise allowed – we’re not even allowed announcements on deck while we’re here). This is Nature at its most basic and untouched.

Sorry, this is all getting a bit florid. But it’s hard not to wander off into superlatives. This place is amazing. Give me a second to calm down a bit.

This morning, I took a seaplane over the Misty Fjords National Monument.

Now, first things first. Seaplanes are smaller and much more cramped than helicopters, by a long chalk. A De Havilland Beaver (the bush plane of choice around here) has a Pratt & Witney 450 derated engine and seats six if you include the pilot. It is the closest thing I have ever seen to a manual plane (as opposed to an automatic). The pilot was forever winding things and pulling levers. It was quite unnerving, if I’m honest. Slightly more reassuringly, his radar/gps screens were in full colour and seemed to be working just fine.

I sat at the front, next to him, in a very snug three-point seatbelt (everyone else got lap belts). The carpet ended just in front of my seat and if I stretched my feet forward, onto the naked metal floor, the vibration and cold were astonishing. So I didn’t. I kept my feet firmly tucked underneath me, in the warm. The De Havilland Beaver was specifically built to deal with the needs of the Alaskan wilderness postal service (you can load and unload a 50 gallon drum with ease because they changed the shape of the doors, for example.). Our pilot, Bobby, had a malfunctioning CD player, so instead of the pre-recorded tour, we got a personalised one from him, which was lovely.

Taking off was surprisingly bumpy, but that was mainly due to the wash caused by previous take-offs – I think at one point there were about ten seaplanes in the air at the same time. We kangarooed a couple of times before lifting off and heading upwards. It took about half an hour of flying over the Tongass National Forest, which is almost exclusively conifers (red and yellow spruce and hemlock(!)), before we reached the Misty Fjords. On the way there, we bounced around enormously. De Havilland Beavers are small enough to pick up almost every thermal they pass, and I found out that I am apparently quite a nervous flyer – particularly when I keep getting dropped several feet without warning. Heaven only knows where my stomach is now. We left it behind quite early on. I wasn’t ill – no one was – but it was a bit unnerving, and I never felt truly comfortable. Mercifully, there were no thermals over the water.

The Misty Fjords National Monument is a series of natural inlets and waterways that wind between the mountains, carved by glaciers and pockmarked by volcanic plugs. Contrary to expectation, we had an astonishingly bright and sunny and, most importantly, CLEAR day, which meant we could see for miles. We saw waterfalls and islands, sheer granite cliff faces that drop hundreds of feet straight downwards, and snow, lots of snow, but only above about 1800 feet. Some of the lakes were still frozen and some were just beginning to melt.

As regards fauna, we saw a bear – they’re only just coming out of hibernation now, so there weren’t many about – and two bald eagles guarding their nest. There is no logging in the Monument, although the Tongass National Forest bears the scars of authorised logging and we even saw some logs being loaded onto ships for transportation as we returned to base.

We landed in the middle of Rudyerd Bay, with nothing but water for a mile or so in any direction, and climbed out onto the floats for photos. Herewith mine and yes, I am hanging on for dear life. The water was mirror still, but that water was also deathly cold and I had no intention of going into it.

On our return to base, we each received a certificate of our trip, which was a nice touch. By now, the sun had gone in, so I returned to the ship for a thicker coat and then joined mum and dad for the shuttle ride into town.

We walked to Creek Street, which is a road built over a creek (hence the name), so all the houses are on stilts. This used to be the Red Light District and has some unusual historical sights. We then took the Funicular up to Cape Fox Lodge, at the top of the hill/mountain, where we had reserved a table for lunch. They had written it in for yesterday, but they had a table for us just the same. We sat and admired the view until our food came and my lemonade, which here is a rather startling shade of pink.

We watched two of the four cruise ships in town today leave while we had lunch (the Celebrity Infinity followed us out during dinner in the evening). Then it was back down into the town for a little shopping, before returning to the ship at about 3.45. Bob was 4.30, again, because we have quite a way to go to get to Juneau, and we have speed restrictions now. I slept for two hours straight before going to dinner. I couldn’t have been more out cold if you’d hit me over the head with a hammer.

I’m sorry if the above doesn’t really do the place justice. It’s hard to describe the majesty of snow-capped mountains as far as the eye can see in every direction, interspersed with dark green, constantly rippling, almost iridescent water and acre upon acre of densely-packed conifer forest. Sorry, that’s the best I can manage right now. If I come over more poetically inclined, I’ll edit later.

An amusing aside as we came back on board. Our friend, the Head of Security for the ship, had to seize 74 Ulus brought on board by passengers who had purchased them today. An ulu is a form of semi-circular chopping knife with a handle, used in a rocking motion. All blades over about 3 inches are banned as offensive weapons, so every one had to be confiscated and labelled so they can be returned to their purchasers when they disembark. 74 of them.

Well, what do you know? They’ve done it again. Not only did we arrive an hour late (again) but it then took a further two hours to get off the ship.

This is getting beyond a joke. We were supposed to arrive at noon and leave at 9.30, which is surely short enough as it is. We set foot on land at two minutes to three. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to “do” an entire city, particularly when you have to allow half an hour each way for the shuttle bus.

When confronted, yet again, about the fact that there was only one gangplank for passengers (the other was for staff and crew only), the response was “the Americans will only let us have one gangplank”. Really? They care, do they? I doubt it. P&O strike again. And once we got off, they were only loading one shuttle bus at a time, leaving hundreds standing on the quayside. The queue actually doubled back on itself. It was all appalling. Absolutely atrocious.

So, once again, it was all a rush. Well, we had lost a THIRD of our time to incompetence.

We were dropped at Pike Street Market, which was full of some fascinating dross. Then we caught a cab to the Space Needle, which I duly went up, took some photos, ate a beef hot dog, drank some lemonade, used the loos (which were peachy)(not as in the American term for wonderful, I mean the smell. They smelt very strongly of peaches), bought a t-shirt and came back down again(and did something untoward to my neck in in the 41 second lift ride up and down, I think*).

Then we took a cab to the waterfront, Dad having passed the time I was gone picking passing brains as to where to go. We found a lovely (chain) restaurant called Red Robin’s, where we had tea. Mum and dad shared a tiny piece of Mud Pie (see photo) and I had an apple crisp, which was essentially a very sweet oat crumble. We discovered something even better than free refills of lemonade. Free refills of Lite lemonade! Less tooth-achingly sweet and much more refreshing.

We then went for a wander along the waterfront, and were shocked at the amount of begging going on. In London, most rough sleepers are much less visible – I suppose they are moved on during the day, sent to shelters for a meal or whatever. Here, it is much more blatant and, frankly, a bit unnerving. Some were quite creative (see pic), and one guy thought he would get a tip for holding my taxi door open for me. I was, however, too busy checking he hadn’t picked my pockets to fulfil such hopes.

The waterfront would be lovely – pleasant shops, boats, lots of restaurants, even a carousel – were it not for the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a two-tier motorway that runs above the dual carriageway that runs along the front. The noise from the viaduct is absolutely deafening. We couldn’t hear ourselves think and couldn’t converse either, because we simply couldn’t make ourselves heard without stopping walking, leaning into the ear of the other person and yelling at the top of our voices. The local highways people really need to address that, before people start suing for hearing loss caused by repeated exposure. I’m not kidding – it was that loud.

We returned to Red Robin’s for an early supper (most restaurants in Seattle seem to be utterly obsessed with seafood to the exclusion of all else, which is ironic, because their shipping fleets can and export almost everything and the seafood on sale here is actually flown down from Alaska), which limited our choices. Tortilla chips (in a startling array of colours) and guacamole, followed by (or, rather oddly, served at the same time as) Caesar salad for mum, a beef burger for dad and a chicken burger for me. One of the best chicken burgers I have ever eaten. It was so perfect, I was actually very sad when it ended!

By then, it was time to return to the shuttle stop, as we had no idea if we would be able to get on a shuttle bus straight away and mum is paranoid about getting back in time. In the end, we were back on board with an hour to spare, which seems a terrible waste, but you just can’t cut it too fine when there’s a shuttle run involved. Added to which, it allowed mum to have a shower while the ship wasn’t moving, which is always helpful.

I was disappointed to miss Seattle’s public art. Every building project has to allot 1% of the total cost to the provision of public art, which means that Seattle is full of amazing sculptures, some personally donated by Paul Allen and Bill Gates. I got to see virtually none of it.

Apparently, we missed all the excitement on the ship yesterday evening. There was a mass walkout of waiters last night. They marched off the ship and staged a sort of strike on the quayside. There was no first sitting dinner served at all. All we have been told is that it is a dispute over money. Whether it’s about not getting paid overtime for the norovirus, not being paid til Southampton, the rumour that virtually no one who left in Barbados left a tip, or other reasons, is unclear**. What we do know is that the Purser’s wife died unexpectedly(on board) last Friday and so he left and a new Purser has come on in San Francisco, and the first thing he had to deal with was a full-scale mutiny. As the computer says when you swipe your Cruise Card “Welcome on board”.

* I have only noticed since reboarding the ship that my neck is so stiff I can barely move my head.
**My sources have confirmed that it is, indeed, about tipping. As the ship is not registered in the UK, it is not covered by UK employment law, and therefore part of their salaries come, quite legally, from tips. This crew has been on since January, and has done a “world” cruise, a two-weeks in the Med cruise, and now this long one. The tipping was so bad on the worldy that some people only tipped a tenner for three months of service – that’s not even 50p a day. They made more in tips on the two-week Med jaunt than on the two-month worldy. So you can see why they’re a bit peeved! Southampton had promised them an answer about making it up by San Francisco but, as usual, had reneged and provided nothing but silence. So they walked. The Captain promised “no retribution”, so hopefully they will all keep their jobs, but you never know, really, and whatever happens, they won’t tell the passengers.

The gentle roar (it’s too loud to be termed a hiss) of the air conditioning, filtered through the crisp, white cotton of the duvet cover, sounds like running water, rushing through a slightly echoey metal pipe to an unknown destination. There is also a rhythm to it, much like those ceiling fans in hot countries that revolve lazily but also move up and down in an uneven fashion, to create a breeze rather than just move the air around. The unevenness of the gentle pulsing thud sounds like the feet of a runner who trips up just moments from the finish line, but manages, despite losing all pattern and rhythm, to keep his balance and stagger, in a slightly drunken fashion, over the finish line. Lying here in the dark, I can even visualise his almost fall, over and over again, as the white noise of the air con is translated by my semi-conscious brain into patterns it is programmed to seek, even when they are not there. In fact the sound of rushing water is so convincing, I have to lift the duvet away from my ear, to reassure myself that the cabin is not filling with water while I lie tucked up complacently warm and cosy in my bed.

The wardrobes, three of them, single-doored and real wood, albeit with plastic doorhandles, creak reassuringly. Ships should creak. It’s a tradition or an old charter or something* and if it isn’t, it should be. We’ve all seen Hornblower or similar and we know what a ship should sound like at night. Ships should creak. It’s a reassuring sound that says, ‘the ocean may be moving under you, but we can flex and adapt and all will be well’. Well, even if a ship is made of steel and fibre-glass and more steel and plastic and more steel and glass, the wardrobes are still wooden and they creak just as they should, although perhaps more quietly than Nelson or Raleigh would recognise, but then they had whole boats of wood to listen to, I have only wardrobes.

Each of the wardrobes has a shelf inside at the top, just above head height, with a lifejacket on it. The doors when closed all display a small green glow in the dark sticker in the top left-hand corner of the door, so that, should you need a lifejacket in the dark, you can find your way to one. Although this ship has so many lifejackets on it, the ones in the wardrobes are really a last resort.

And all the time the ship moves: up, down, a judder of a motor here, a creak of a wardrobe there, and the hangers tap nervously against the wardrobe doors as if asking to be let out. Um, excuse me, can we come out now please? No, sorry, you’re fixed to the rail, my friends, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.**

All these sounds are constant and repetitive, and combine with the tick of my bedside clock to almost hypnotise me to sleep. Only the sporadic muffled thumps of my neighbours turning in or the footprints of the people in the art gallery above occasionally dropping a painting onto my ceiling as they turn around their stock serve to disturb me.

Tonight I have been lying awake trying to remember how Withnail and I ends. Anyone?

* First Robert Rankin reference of this cruise?
** Sorry.

Fran met us at 10 and we drove out across the Golden Gate Bridge. It is an extraordinary construction achievement. I had no idea it was over a mile long, but, no, it doesn’t sway when you cross it!

We drove through Sausalito and went to Tiburon for brunch at Sam’s, which is a beautiful restaurant in an even more pretty little town, overlooking a marina. We had a delicious meal – mum had a salmon Caesar salad, Fran, Dad and I had burgers. We then shared a nut-free brownie sundae (called a Mondae). We then returned to Sausalito, to have a walk through this (also pretty) little town and take in the beauty of the little town and the houses on the neighbouring hillsides. Mum apparently held a seed in her teeth for a cockatoo to take from her. Rather her than me!

We then returned to San Francisco proper, where we dropped mum and dad at Pier 49 to go and see the seals, while Fran and I caught a ferry to Alcatraz.

Alcatraz is creepy, even in blazing sunshine and the clearest skies San Francisco can ever recall seeing. What it would be like in the fog and the cold and the dark, I can’t begin to imagine. It’s cold, and shadowy and primitive and not a little chilling. The basic nature of the cells, and their absolutely tiny size, causes a genuine shudder, and being somewhat claustrophobic doesn’t help. It is just like you’ve seen on TV, but MUCH smaller in real life. There are a lot of metal stairs, and despite the fact that, outside, the birdsong and the silence of the wind in the trees is quite calming and beautiful, the clanging inside must have been deafening, as every footstep reverberated against the stone walls and glass roof. How to not be permeated by a sense of foreboding and doom, I don’t know. And I could leave at any time!

Then we returned to the mainland and a drink at Pier 39, before the sadness of goodbyes and boarding the ship with 15 minutes to spare. I was so exhausted, there was no way I could change for dinner, so I just went in my jeans and polo shirt. We have two new people at our table. Wayne and Sherri are Americans, doing the SF to Vancouver thing (remember Jones’s Law?). They’ve been to Alaska before and are desperate to do it again. They live in Boulder City, near Vegas, so it’ll make a nice change from the desert for them! Wayne is into golf (nobody’s perfect) and works in construction and they are both very pleasant company. That’s me done. I’m going to bed.

P.S. Today was the first day my sunburn didn’t hurt, so it was obviously the day it started to itch and peel. Stands to reason.

As mentioned, no one leaves the ship until we have all been immigrated. They intend to start very early in the morning, so that our day is not unnecessarily truncated, although the excursions aren’t planned to start until nearly 11am, so they’re not in THAT much of a hurry. We have been instructed to go at 7.15am. This seems awfully early to little me, although those who intend to get up at 5am to watch us go under the Golden Gate won’t mind, I suppose.

Come to think of it, all that will be put back an hour, because the Captain announced last night we wouldn’t be arriving until 6am. So that’s 8.15 for immigration, presumably.

Mercifully, and surprisingly thoughtfully for P&O, they held back one of the hours of clock changes until the last night, so that we can have an hour’s extra sleep by way of compensation.

And yet, to wake me at 6.32am with an announcement telling people NOT to go to immigration yet, seems unnecessarily cruel. This announcement was repeated at 06.53 and again at 07.02 and 07.18, to ensure that everyone who had not been woken by the first one was definitely awake. Not able to go anywhere or do anything, but awake nonetheless.

Dear Lord. We set foot on land at ten to twelve.

I’ll say that again. We arrived at 6am and we got ashore at NOON. I thought I had witnessed the heights of P&O incompetence, but I hadn’t seen anything until today.

Not only were we “immigrated” by 10, so I had time to go back to the cabin and have a nap for an hour and a half, but when they let us off, we were only allowed to use ONE GANGPLANK.

Two thousand frustrated and angry people, who had been waiting to disembark for nearly SIX HOURS, trying to get off a single gangplank. They had two gangplanks in place, but they turned the disabled people who had gone to use it away from the lower one and made them go back up to the upper one, where they were expected to join the back of the queue.

Never in all my born days have I seen such monstrous incompetence. And this was only 2000 passengers, remember. The larger ships have three and a half, four, even five thousand. Just when I think P&O can’t possibly get it any more wrong, they do something like this.

We barged our way in and got ashore to meet our cousin. She took us to first to the Farmer’s Market and then to Gott’s for superb beef hotdogs for lunch. With proper lemonade! With free refills! I love the US!

Then we went to Macy’s and mum bought up most of their Clinique stock, and then we went to Bloomingdales and bought some more. Fran and I popped to the Discount Shoe Warehouse, where I bought two pairs of shoes and Fran got one. Then we stopped for tea (crepes and cakes and cold drinks in the basement food court of the Westfield shopping centre) before going to Nordstroms, where we bought nothing, sadly. It is all designer labels with matching prices. There were some nice Ralph Lauren pyjamas, but I’m not paying 80 dollars for a pair of pjs, no matter how soft they are.

We had intended to have tea in the Cheesecake Factory at the top of Macy’s but they accused mum of queue-jumping so we left and took our custom elsewhere. It was insanely loud and utterly packed, and there was a half hour queue just to get a table. I don’t care how pretty your decor or how good your cake, I’m not queuing for half an hour for the right to sit down, particularly when one of our party walks with a stick.

Fran took us to the Hunan Home Chinese Restaurant for dinner, where we stuffed ourselves on the loveliest Chinese food for a tenner a head. We had egg rolls (fat spring rolls) and mu shu chicken (which I now know to be a stir fry with egg, bamboo shoots and veg rolled into a pancake), followed by asparagus and chicken in black bean sauce, lemon chicken and chicken chow mein. All delicious.

We then headed back to the ship, at the end of a 13-hour day, truly worn out! But I got my second wind, so I texted Fran and she came and got me and we went to a bar in her neighbourhood called Specs. What a dive! It’s clearly a passionately loved local to those in the area, but, personally, I think you can judge how dodgy a place is by the fact that there are no locks on the toilet doors! Specs has a variety of memorabilia on its walls and ceilings. Flags and liferings from old ships, artefacts from African tribes, ivories, rude signs, Victorian photos of naked women, posters from the Second World War, all sorts of stuff, all crap. The drinks were cheap, though, so that was nice.

After we had put the world to rights for a couple of hours, we walked across the street to the City Lights bookshop. This is a bookshop that I think could only exist in San Francisco. It has every book on philosophy, politics, gender, race, psychology, religion, spirituality, history and music and every sub-genre thereof. It is also open 10am to midnight. It was founded in 1953 by Peter Martin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet. How cool is that?! The shopowner was very friendly and very knowledgeable. When I mentioned that I couldn’t find Will Self’s Psychogeography, despite the fact that Walking to Hollywood had pride of place near the till, he said that Psychogeography 1 and 2 had only been released in hardback in the States, and even that was hard to find. He certainly knows his stuff. I bought a Jonathan Franzen I’d been promising myself for a while and then Fran took me back to the ship. Home by half midnight. Better go to bed, I’ve got to be up at half nine!

I have discovered something mysterious. The remote control for the television in my cabin has a Magic Button. Really. It’s clearly labelled. I’ll put up a photo. It doesn’t seem to do anything when I press it, but if someone finds a new country at the back of their wardrobe, it’s probably my fault. Sorry.

San Fran tomorrow. Have emailed the poor cousin who is meeting us to tell her we have no idea when we’ll be allowed off or even where we’ll be moored, so no change there then. US Immigration are due on board at 6.30am, but we won’t be allowed off until every person on board has been “immigrated”, which is always nice.

Went to the shop to look at what was on offer. They have special Alaska anoraks, but they aren’t going on sale until 17th May, AFTER we have visited most of the Alaska places where we would need said anorak! I pointed this out and was told the stock wasn’t coming aboard until Skagway (although I think they mean Whittier, as they were talking about the 16th May). Really not all that bright, P&O, are they?