Last week, our family went for a 7-day cruise to Alaska. The highlight of the trip was a visit to the Hubbard Glacier in southeast Alaska on the Pacific Coast. Hubbard is the largest glacier in North America and is one of the very few which are not receding inspite of Global Warming.
Along the way, we stopped by three small Alaskan towns: Icy Straight Point, Juneau and Ketchikan. Juneau is actually the capital city of Alaska, but it is just a little bigger than a large fishing village here in Canada. It is bounded on one side by high mountains and the other the sea, with no roads connecting to the rest of Alaska and North America.
Our stateroom has a small balcony with a table and two deck chairs. It did not rain during the trip, so we could make good use of the balcony to watch most of the scenery in private. As we headed further and further north towards the glacier, the mountains got more and more beautiful as they got taller and more snow-capped. The most stunning was Mount Fairweather, which was named by Captain Cook in 1778 for encountering similar nice weather we had during the cruise. At 15000 ft, it is about half as high as the Himalayas, but it is a Coastal Mount right next to the open ocean (Himalayas is hundreds of miles inland), so the view was really spectacular.
There was a Naturalist called Milos aboard, giving daily science lectures on sea animals, weather, environment and climate changes etc. As the Cruise Director said, he was the science teacher we wished we had. The other shows, including dances, comedians and magicians, were equally superb.
We did not see any large marine mammals, but on the last day coming back to Vancouver, there was a large family of dolphins following us, jumping and splashing like in aquarium shows. That was the first time I saw dolphins in the wild.
At the Hubbard Glacier our ship was parked at about half a mile for safety. In front of us was a cliff of ice 20 stories high and six miles wide. There was continuous breaking-up of ice falling into the sea (called “calving”), making thunderous noises and bobbing icebergs. The bergs came in three different colors: the blue ones were packed old ice (up to 400 years old) from the middle of the glacier, the white ones were relatively fresh snow from the top of the glacier, and the black ones contained mud scratched from the mountain side as the glacier moved down. The view was breathtaking. It was as beautiful as nature could get.
Then looking back inside the ship, it is a totally different world. The ship had 1800 guests, plus 1000 staff to serve and operate. For the seven day trip, we consumed 2400 dozen eggs, 11100 lbs of potatoes, 3600 lbs of onions, 4000 lbs of Lettuce, 68000 lbs of fresh vegetable, 3000 lbs of chicken, 3700 lbs of tenderloin etc, just to name a few. This was so that food and drinks could be served all day for a total of about 9000 meals a day. It is ironic that a tremendous amount of garbage would need to be generated inside the windows for us human to enjoy the pristine nature outside the windows described above.
To many people, the cruise week was a wonderful life. We could sleep and wake up anytime (no wakeup calls as in a land tour); ate anytime and ate as much as we could. There was no need to wash dishes and to clean the bed and bathroom.
However, from the environmental moral point of view, it was a pretty rotten week of life for us. As the onboard naturalist Milos said in one of his talks,” Perhaps the human race is not destined to survive on this planet. Nature may have to get rid of us in order to rescue the planet”.
Traveller's space 