Roaming Tales

This is the third part of guest blogger Roger Norum’s four-part series on driving Alaska’s Dalton Highway, or Haul Road, with his father.

The Dalton is the gateway to the most remote regions of the interior and northern parts of Alaska and offers a rare glimpse of America’s Arctic – an opportunity to imagine what gold prospectors first saw when they flooded into the Klondike and Brooks Range over a century ago in search of golden riches.

Invariably, a disproportionate amount of the state’s population has arrived from somewhere else. The average Alaskan tends to be very, very outdoorsy. Jillian Simpson, for example, is a tall, striking ex-Bostonian who arrived in Alaska 11 years ago for a vacation and never left. The day I meet Jillian, who is now head of overseas marketing for the Alaska State Tourist Board, she is happening on her way out of the office for a weekend hike with friends to camp on the banks of the Arctic Ocean.

But it’s not that the average Alaskan happens to be interested in the outdoors; it’s that you have to be outdoorsy to get around.

Even for outdoorsy types, though, walking around on Alaskan tundra for any period of time can be extremely exhausting. The land in much of Northern Alaska is riddled with tussocks, fibrous stems and leaves of cotton grass and sedges that wobble and crack as you step on them, making twisted ankles and wet socks commonplace.

Not that driving here is any cakewalk. Vehicles kick up thick clouds of dust and mud, rocks occasionally flash into windshields and potholes that could easily take out an axle mandate a lot of deft manoeuvring at the wheel. Visibility is rarely more than a pipe dream. Many of the more rugged parts of The Dalton are groomed on a daily basis by maintenance crews, who wet the road down into a slurry, mow and shave it with Caterpillars and then add calcium chloride to enable the road to retain moisture and keep it from disintegrating into dust.

Nor is life made any more sustainable by the masses of bugs that can descend on northern Alaska at any time of the day, commando-strength no-see-ums that despite their magnitude deterred few of the thousands of soldiers and common folk who came here to build the state’s major roads in the last century. Before these civilians signed on, their employment contracts required the admonition, “Mosquitoes, flies and gnats will not only be annoying but will cause bodily harm.”

Still, bodily harm notwithstanding, there can be no better time to explore Alaska than summer. Come mid-August, the brown, greys and rich greens of willows, birch and bearberries turn a brilliant crimson and goldenrod, as the coats of ptarmigan and snowshoe hare morph from brown to white; only the evergreen spruce maintains its colour.

In the forested reaches, grizzlies and black bears putter about the rivers and lakes, while on the plains caribou find shade under the pipeline when they’re not fraternising with shag-carpeted musk oxen. An ugly, hefty beast with the face of a cow, the form of a bison and the furry coat of a English sheep dog, the musk ox is taxonomically a goat. It looks horrifically prehistoric – an animatronic fossil of a mammal that should have died out millennia ago along with the woolly mammoth. Though staunchly herbivorous, they can easily take out their predators – grizzlies and wolves – by trampling them to death.

As we trundle along the southern reaches of the highway, Norm calls out through the Ford’s makeshift loudspeaker system, “Does anybody remember what a tree looks like?” He’s right. We are in Alaska, the most forested state in the nation, but I haven’t seen a single conifer since we’ve arrived. South of Coldfoot, if the side of the highway isn’t completely barren, it’s lined with miles of burned stubby, half-naked black spruce trees that look ripe for another lightning fire. One fire four years back decimated 500,000 acres in this area; plains of naked, ashen-coloured stalks of dead spruce that stretch towards the heavens. “Mother Nature puts them out when Mother Nature is ready,” Norm advises. It’s all part of the ecological cycle: fires remove dying spruce, readying the soil for fireweed, then spawn willow, aspen and birch, followed by an undercover of moss and lastly the growth of new, healthy spruce. This whole process, which takes several years, is a natural renewal that is one of nature’s most productive cycle of habitat regeneration and maintenance.

Read part 1 and part 2 of Roger’s journey here, and stay tuned for the next installment tomorrow.

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This is part 2 of Roger Norum’s four-part guest post on his road trip through Alaska with his father.

Driving in Alaska is an experience amplified by the extended summer hours of near-Arctic daylight, an unsettling phenomenon that deceives the senses: driving without headlamps at 10pm; a glowing red sunset at midnight; waking up to a “dawn” chorus of birdsong at 3am.

Behind us sprawls the Brooks Range, an alpine landscape that would look less out of place on the moon: rifted moguls of deep brown crags, pillowy hunks of ice that cling to and blanket the rock and families of Dall sheep and moose that wander glacial hills and trudge along S-shaped rivers. Everywhere are the taciturn landscapes of northern Finland and western Mongolia. In fact when seismic geologists first arrived here in the 1950s, they surveyed the landscape and saw one thing: Iran. They saw strong similarities in the anticline, the syncline and the way the hills delicately roll. Suspicion led to hunch led to a short drilling exploration in 1967 that led to the discovery of bazillions of barrels of petroleum buried beneath the sea: the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay.

The Dalton, you see, was not built for you and me. It was slapped down by private oil companies over five months in 1974 to enable transport vehicles hauling supplies and machinery for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, the US oil industry’s petroleum aqueduct. Costing some $8 billion to build, the pipeline is still the only way to get crude oil from the ocean to the transport tankers waiting in Valdez. Still, Prudhoe Bay oil is very, very crude – saturated with sulphurs – so raw, in fact, that many refineries dread having to process shipments of Alaskan oil, and many won’t even accept it. Yet the oil produced here accounts for a whopping 20% of US oil production.

Aside from the odd caribou, who feed on the lichen that grows here, visitors driving the Dalton are accompanied by a single, lone travelling companion: the pipeline. A massive steel tube that groans its way south along the tundra for over 800 miles and crosses more than as many rivers and streams. About 50 miles south of Deadhorse, the pipeline re-emerges from the permafrost, where it remains mostly above ground for 420 miles until it reaches southern Alaska. The frigid temperatures outside (–90°F [-67°C] in the winter) and scalding temperature of the oil inside (140°F [60°C]) mean that the 48-inch diameter pipe had to be constructed to be able to expand and contract accordion-like without breaking.

There are no towns or villages along the 414-mile stretch of The Dalton and, by God, there’s nothing that ever comes close to a city. The half dozen settlements up here have been established to accommodate the traffic of lorries transporting heavy industrial objects north and a few bewildered tourists – European and American middle-aged couples who want to keep on trucking after driving the much-mythologised Alcan Highway through British Columbia and the Yukon. Service stops up here are little more than oversized gift shops offering excessively large selections of moose-related trinkets, corny bumper stickers and wicked expensive liquor. Along the route, we pass a handful of what I came to call “inconvenience stores” for their criminal prices (A transport koan rhetorically asks: If you, the proprietor of a roadside shop, charge me $23.60 for a six-pack of beer at a roadside shop, and I beat the crap out of you for attempted highway robbery, will anyone hear your pain?).

Read part 1 of Roger’s journey here, and stay tuned for the next installment tomorrow.

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Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has brought Alaska to the headlines - suddenly everyone is talking about ice fishing and helicopter hunting. But what is the 49th state really like?

Travel writer Roger Norum, a native New Yorker based in Oxford, England, has written a four-part account of his road trip along Alaska’s Dalton Highway, or Haul Road, with his dad, especially for Roaming Tales.

“Skeeters!” The ex-marine next to me is flailing about, arms in the air, his choky, smoker’s cry resonating across the campground. “Goddamn skeeters!” His cinnamon neck flushed to a deep scarlet, he is swatting away at a lone, thirsty mosquito – Alaska’s state bird – that has fixed upon him for a noontime snack. Eventually, the man gives up, abandons his food outside on the picnic table, cowers into his motorhome and fastens the door shut.

It’s summer, but the ground outside is a desolate, unforgiving permafrost frozen several feet thick. Just ahead of us, outside the campground, the wily antlers of a caribou steer slowly towards a herd of mangy, stubby musk ox. In the distance, a silver mass of steel tubing snakes its way in and out of the ground, shooting off over the frozen land towards the horizon. This morning I woke up in a town called Deadhorse; tonight I will sleep in one called Coldfoot. It all feels very much like the end of the world. And, geo-politically speaking at least, it is.

I’ve come to Alaska to drive the Dalton Highway, the most isolated road in North America. In a car-smitten continent of service-stop strip malls and turnpike Wal-Marts, the Dalton, or Haul Road, is a curiosity: the quintessential barren-wilderness thoroughfare. From Deadhorse to Fairbanks, the asphalt, gravel and dirt road hurtles, plunges and tears through Arctic mountain ranges, empty tundra and stretches of boreal forest charred to a crisp from fire. Extreme weather conditions and the perennial freezing and thawing of the land cause the road to billow and swell in many places, creating chuckholes, ripples and washboard humps that make for roller-coaster driving. Rental cars are contractually barred from a long list of Alaskan roads, the Dalton being first on the list. But our trusty Ford E350 XLT Super Duty van – powered by a menacing 5.4-liter Triton V-8 – is tackling the rutted mountain roads with a vengeance.

Norm, our jovial guide, speaks with the deadpan tenor of a character out of Northern Exposure. A 55-year-old transplant from Minneapolis, Norm blew into to Alaska 33 years ago to work on planning the highway and now, retired and filled with an infective energy, he leads tours along it. Norm seems like an everyday, run-of-the-mill, middle-class guy – except for quirks such as owning two airplanes (a seaplane and a skiplane) and a massive power boat and regularly coming out with ludicrous lines such as, “…and this one is the only bear I ever shot with a gun other than my handgun” [emphasis mine], when, for example, flipping through photos of a recent to the Alaskan bush.

But then Alaska is just the kind of place where the average Joe is more likely to own an airplane than a car or a bicycle. “You just can’t get to most places,” [emphasis his], Norm explains when wonder aloud why you’d own three vehicles, none of which will ever work on blacktop.

For many, Alaska is an ideal. With its Scandinavian climate, Himalayan landscape and small-town disposition, it is all that’s left of America’s Wild Wild North. Though voted in by Congress as the 49th state of the union 50 years ago, parts of it are so different from the rest of the United States that at times the territory almost exists as a separate nation. When Alaskans travel to other states, they either head “Outside”, to “the lower 48″ or, occasionally, to “America”. When parking in the winter, they plug their cars into power outlets to protect the engines from hypothermia. The day we arrive, the front page of the Anchorage Daily News declares “Dog Wins in Tussle with Bear.” Highway culture is different here, too: truckers are polite and drivers slow down to let others pass but road signs are punched through with bullet holes – souvenirs of wild, shotgun-giddy nights.

Stay tuned tomorrow and all this week for the next installment in Roger’s Alaskan journey.

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This is a guest post from Stephen from Manzanilloblog. Stephen describes himself and his wife Tiffani as “chronic travellers”, who’ve recently made the leap and left the US to live in beautiful Manzanillo, Mexico. They are loving the experience so far and started the blog to share their discoveries, adventures, and hard earned lessons with the world. In this post he shares some of the bloody history behind the beautiful beaches.

I’m sitting on the beach watching the waves peel and crash; the ocean looks glassy. The sea-scented air feels refreshing, and the sun radiates a warmth that is more than skin deep. Children and their parents are playing in the white wash, giggling as each crashing wave seems to catch them by surprise. Grandparents look on from under umbrellas, shouting warnings, laughing and complaining to one another. “We didn’t have waves in my day… these kids don’t know how good they have it…” It’s peaceful and beautiful; almost paradise.

It’s hard to believe this lovely place has such a bloody past. History in Mexico is a record of one ferocious conquest after another. In the 16th century, not far from where I’m sitting now, Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés built a port in Santiago, retired here, cut down all the old growth Manzanillo trees, for which the area was named, and built an armada to bring his greedy conquest to the the Philippines. He and his kind destroyed an ancient culture in search of gold and in the name of God. Cortes and his conquistadors crucified thousands of Indians, watching them slowly roast at the stake after oiling their feet so they would burn better.

Yet the Spanish were not the first to commit horrible crimes here. For hundreds of years before the arrival of Europeans, the Aztecs slaughtered thousands every year to appease their gods and ward off catastrophe. In one week they offered 20,000 hearts of murdered slaves to their gods. Entire towns and cities were wiped out. They painted their famous pyramids yearly in the fresh blood of their victims. You don’t hear about that on the tourist tours.

In Cortés’ wake came a regime of cruel dictators who enslaved and oppressed on a mass scale. These dictators created a caste system, rating the worth of the natives; they ground the people down under their well-polished heels. Failed attempts at uprising led to revolution in 1910. Even now there is a brutal war going on against the drug lords of Mexico; decapitations, assassinations, and mass executions are in the news every day.

We are told never to forget the holocaust, so that it may never be repeated. But it seems the holocaust was one instance in a long line of heart-wrenching atrocities that man has committed against each other. Mexico’s story is not unique; nearly every nation in the world has a bloodstained past. It seems to be the human way.  What will it take to rouse our collective consciences?

The atrocities of history are dulled and forgotten with time like so many sand castles and footprints in the surf. It’s the crimson sunset that tells humanity’s true history. Can the tides of time wash all of that away?

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This is a guest post from Roger Norum, a travel journalist and cultural anthropologist based in Oxford. He writes regularly for British and American travel magazines and newspapers, and is a frequent author for Rough Guides. Roger is leading a four-day-long travel writing seminar in western Norway with Creative Escapes. He will teach similar writing courses in France and Morocco in the fall. Visit www.creative-escapes.co.uk for more information.

It was Yeats, if I’m not mistaken, who once waxed romantically, “I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.” Yeats, who taught at Oxford after World War One, was very familiar with the sandstone Gothic spires and quiet streets of this most graceful, ravishing and operatic of cities. Now that the banks of the Thames once again at ante-diluvian levels and student life in full bloom, lazy spring Sundays are perfect for taking in all the romance of the world’s most magical university city.

Thanks to daylight savings time, the Oxford sun now rises around 7am, making an early morning jog through the sprawling Port Meadows the perfect wake-me-up. You’ll run along the pebbled bank of the Isis, a Thames tributary, passing canal houseboats, thatched whitewashed villages and elderly tweed-clad locals puttering about the town allotments – small patches of public gardening space handed out to whomever wants to tend them.

9am The only souls singing on a Sunday are the talented, radiant few who make up the Christ Church Cathedral’s mixed choir. After the non-denominational service, stroll about the manicured grounds of Christ Church, one the university’s oldest colleges and known best for inspiring the characters in Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll taught maths here).

11am A late brunch at the Covered Market is as good an introduction to student life as any. Snag a corner seat, order up a rich breakfast of beans, toast and greasy English bacon and watch as the colorful cornucopia of local student life streams in: posh, well-coiffed Brits rubs shoulders with the swarthy sons of Emirate sheikhs and ascotted Erasmus students.

1pm Hop aboard a red double-decker bus for a tour of the university colleges and departments. Cheesy and formulaic? Maybe. But in just two hours you’ll have covered what on foot would have taken weeks and will command more local history than most Oxford dons.

3pm Head down Cornmarket, the city’s central pedestrian walkway, towards some proper High Street window shopping (most shops are closed on Sundays), then get lost among Oxford’s narrow, cobbled medieval alleyways, sandwiched between buildings built of glimmering local sandstone. Nip around to Brasenose Lane off Turl Street to take in Bodleian Library and the adjacent Radcliffe Camera, two gorgeous Gothic buildings. But you need to be a student to see inside (the lengthy application for entrance to the university can be picked up a few blocks away at Wellington Square).

4:30pm Oxford’s most famous local lagers, ales and bitters flow freely on Sundays, and a drawn out weekend afternoon pub crawl among the city’s age-old pubs is a local tradition for would-be academics and locals alike. Pop in at the King’s Arms to eavesdrop on the latest college gossip and ogle would-be Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners sipping on Addlestone’s, a local cider that tastes so close to freshly squeezed apple juice that you’ll barely realise it’s 8% alcohol.

5:45pm Dodge the students pedaling giddily about the quiet, leafy streets of North Oxford on your way to the Gardners Arms on Plantation Road, one of the city’s best spots for classic intellectual ambience. If it’s cold enough out, they might just light the stone fireplace. The pub is the site of Oxford’s best known vegetarian restaurant – last order taken at 6pm on Sundays.

8:30 Post cibum (Latin for ‘after the meal’), what better way to test your knowledge against local smart alecs than flaunting your wits at the Gardners Arms’ weekly pub quiz. To keep your intellectual powers at their peak, order a Reverend James, a Welsh pale ale popular with local theology students.

10:15pm Stop in just in time for last call at the Eagle and Child, a short walk away and Oxford’s second oldest pub. Perch yourself in the same seat where J.R.R. Tolkien met for years every Sunday with colleague C.S. Lewis. The pint of choice here: Wadworth, a hoppy wheat beer that goes down surprisingly smoothly with very little bitter aftertaste.

11pm Return to your creaky wooden canopied bed at the Bridgeox Bed and Breakfast, a tiny inn run by a family that has occupied the building for over 600 years running.

Photographs by Caitlin Fitzsimmons

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This is a guest post by Natasha Judd, a New Zealand writer, traveller and self-described web geek, currently living in London. Her first novel Lessons to Learn, which deals with the challenges and culture shock faced by a Kiwi English language teacher in Korea, was published by Cape Catley in 2007. Natasha also runs the writing resource website WebStuff4Writers.com. Here she shares the tale of her recent birthday weekend - a surprise trip to Bath with her husband.

Normally, I’m a bit obsessive about our holiday planning. I can agonise for days about where we’re going to go, what we’re going to do, where we’re going to stay: checking the local tourism websites, reading reviews, comparing prices and breakfast menus. So, when my husband said that he was going to take me away for my birthday this year – that all I needed to organise was a day off work on 21 January – I didn’t know what to expect.

On the Saturday morning, I definitely didn’t expect the car, hired from streetcar for three days, but it certainly made a nice change from the crowded buses and trains that are our day-to-day transportation here in London. In a car, you can take alternative routes, you can stop in Reading for lunch in a pub. If you’re my husband, you can drive west in perfect confidence that my total ignorance of UK geography means that I have absolutely no idea where we’re going.

We ended up in High Littleton, a small village on the outskirts of Bath. My husband had hired one of the Greyfield Farm Cottages – a perfect place for a winter weekend retreat, with both a log fire and a jacuzzi to keep us warm. As I flicked through the guest book in the lounge, what I noticed was the number of repeat visitors, people who returned to these self-catering cottages year after year, or came back for special occasions in their life. It hardly surprised me. From the cider and chocolates when we arrived to the complimentary Thermae Spa voucher, the Greyfield Farm Cottages oozed a vibe of relaxation and escape (and if that wasn’t your intention, there was also an on-site gym).

Sunday was our history of Bath day, with museums and historic restaurants and walking tours. You certainly get the feeling that Bath has been a significant area for quite a while when you walk around the Roman Bath Museum. In the second century AD, the conquering Romans were already coming here to bathe, throw their offerings into the Sacred Spring, and to worship at the temple of the goddess Sulis Minerva. Much later, in the early 1800s, Bath was home to one of the UK’s most famous writers, Jane Austen. Two hundred years later, Miss Austen is still making her presence known, courtesy of Jane Austen walking tours (which my husband had downloaded onto our iPods from the Visit Bath website) and the Jane Austen Centre.

When it was the centre of Bath Society, Jane Austen may have been an occasional visitor to the Pump Room. Today, it’s more a gathering place for tourists. We sampled glasses of the Bath spring water – said in the past to cure a whole range of ills – but on the whole, I preferred my hot chocolate. Dinner that night was at Sally Lunn’s House, the oldest residence in Bath and the home of the Sally Lunn Bun. The famous buns were a central part of our meals, acting almost as a second plate.

On Monday, after a breakfast of local bacon and eggs, we checked out of our cottage and drove back into Bath. An exhausting morning of shopping and spending in Bath’s stores and markets was followed by a couple of hours of relaxation in the Thermae Bath Spa. Outside the wind was blowing a gale, but that only mattered when we were trying to get in and out of the roof-top pool.

So we didn’t have great weather. It rained on our walking tour. It was cold. But then again, it was January, it’s the UK, and on that point at least I wasn’t surprised. I’ve been told that in summer Bath is crowded with tourists and that you have to queue for an hour to get into attractions like the Roman Bath Museum. So, for those looking for a romantic winter weekend holiday, I do recommend Bath.

I didn’t know where we were going for my birthday. I’d had a few vague theories, none of them correct. Our long weekend in Bath was better than I could have imagined, and my lovely husband gets lots of points for that.

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