There is so much to write about my week in Alaska so before you start you might want to use the bathroom, get a cup of tea, put on your slippers and light a pipe, or whatever you do to get comfortable. Feel free to read it in instalments as if it were serialised in a popular newspaper. Maybe that will even happen one day! Be sure to check out the three photo albums that go with this blog entry.

I'll start my tale in Seattle airport where I caught my flight to Anchorage. I got there very early for my flight so I went to the Chili's Too for some food and beer(s) before my flight boarded. I talked to some nice people at the bar as I watched the olympics and saw the American men's beach volleyball team getting beaten by Latvia. I good-naturedly made fun of this to the barman because I'd said during the match that it would be funny for his team to get beaten by a tiny country with a population of 2.3 million. (I just looked that up, I didn't know it off-hand at the bar.) He had asked where Latvia was, which just about summed it up.

The funniest thing came later on though when the stool next to me was taken up by a middle aged guy who ordered a double Jack Daniel's and a beer. Followed by another double JD, and then a third. He told me he was returning to Alaska to his third wife and young son and he was very happy with them. His phone rang after the third JD and it was obvious that it was his wife. He told her that he was standing in line that very second, with his bag in his hand, and that he had to go because he was boarding right away. Oh, and I believe he added that he loved her. He took a swig of his beer, which he offered to me (and which I turned down since he'd already drunk from it, otherwise I would've been happy to take a free beer) and he left for his gate. I caught the eye of the two guys the other side of him and we just laughed. I thought that kind of thing only happened on cliche-filled sitcoms, and lead me to coin a new saying: life is exactly like fiction if you wait around long enough.

His spot was replaced by a group of four people who turned out to be on my flight and had come in from San Francisco. One of them was a girl who worked in a winery in the tasting room and she wrote down the name and location of it and said if I came along I could get some free tastes. That's the kind of contact I like making!

On my flight I was sat next to a nice older lady who worked as a teacher in Alaska and had spent the last two decades in the state in different places. She had spent several years in a small place north of the Arctic Circle. I was intrigued and fired questions at her. It was the beginning of my Alaskan education as I learned how bizarre the state was. There are very few highways in Alaska and a lot of the towns, like the one she lived in, are only accessible by plane, where the planes act like buses and make several stops as they travel along their route. I know nothing about the guy sitting the other side of me except that he seemed happy enough to let me out to use the bathroom. Somehow on flights I am always sat next to people who act like it's a major inconvenience that during a several hour flight I need to get out to use the bathroom. But this guy even smiled and said 'sure' when I asked to be let out.

I had decided that I didn't want to explore Alaska on my own because it was such an unknown to me so I had booked myself on a Trek America guided trip. That would give me a one week break from having to plan and book everything and than get myself around places. I had also thought there would be a lot more snow everywhere, although a woman I spoke to in the hostel at Glacier Park had demystified that and told me where would be more bare ground.

To give you all a starter guide to Alaska, the population is about 680,000 - nearly half of whom live in Anchorage, it is 20% of the land area of the United States and more than twice the size of Texas and big enough for each head of population to theoretically have 1.2 square miles, it holds the highest point in North America - Mt. McKinley - and loads of other tall mountains and glaciers including one that is larger than the state of Rhode Island.

I had an early start on my first day at 7:30am to get to the meeting point. The trek was seven days long, for those who don't know, consists of a minibus holding the trek leader, who drives, thirteen passengers, and a trailer that holds all the tents, cooking gear and our luggage. We camp every night and take it in turns to cook dinner for everyone. Typically lunches are either eaten at a picnic area if we're driving, or we pack lunches in the morning to eat during the day's activity. Hopefully that gives you an idea of what it's like.

On our first day we did the meet and greet and I volunteered to be one of the two trailer loaders who had to load and unload the trailer at each campsite and in exchange were excused from cooking duties. It worked well because other people pitched in and helped anyway and I managed to avoid cooking altogether. I was good at volunteering, offering my services to the trek leader whenever it looked like I could help, to the point that she almost just started ordering me around towards the end of the week.

We drove up to Denali National Park and, on the second day, did a bus ride out into the park. This sounds simple but the road into the park is unpaved, winding and, as far as we went, over sixty miles long. The idea is that the bus is a tour rather than just a means of transportation. So it took four hours to get the sixty miles out to the second visitor centre. On the way, whenever someone saw an animal they yelled 'stop' and the driver would pull up and we would all get a look at it. In this way on the bus rides out and back I saw a wolf (quite a rare sighting), some caribou, some bears that appeared as dots a long way away to me without binoculars, a bald eagle (also a rare sighting), a fox, cute ground squirrels, some bunnies (a very common sight), and a bear and its cub that were closer and that I could see with the aid of borrowed binoculars.

At the end of the drive we all got out and decided to take a little walk up a hill. The trail turned out to climb 1000 feet to the top of a snow-covered ridge that gave some great views in all directions. The snow was freshly fallen. It is strange to be walking through my first snow of the season in August. But it was cool to make a snow angel!

The central focus, literally and figuratively, of the park is Mt. McKinley that, at 20,320 feet tall is the highest point in North America. The reason is it so impressive is that the base of the mountain is so far down towards sea level. The rise of the mountain is 18,000 feet, which is more than Mt. Everest with a rise of 12,000 feet because the base is so much higher above sea level. We had been told that the mountain is only visible 20-25 percent of the time and we struck it lucky that day because it was totally clear and it did look incredibly impressive. It was hard to comprehend its size because it looked so big and yet it was still 35 miles from where we were standing.

On the third day we were still in the park area, although outside its boundaries, and there were a variety of activities to choose from. I chose to go ATV riding in the morning and it was amazing. I loved it and, if anyone's looking for ideas, I want an ATV for Christmas. In the afternoon I went for a four hour white-water rafting trip. The first two hours were more scenic and the second two hours were more filled with avoiding falling out of the boat. For the second half I volunteered to go in the front row and consequently I got splashed from head to toe several times. The water in the river is from glaciers so it is about 37 degrees (close to freezing) and that was why we were given dry suits to wear and I'm very glad of that! When we were given the chance to jump into the water to see what it was like I politely declined. It was some good rafting though.

The fourth day was an interesting insight into the ruggedness of Alaska. We left the Denali area and went east along the Denali Highway, which turned out to be an unpaved gravel road, strewn with pot-holes. Apparently it was in good condition because it hadn't rained much in the last few days, but that wasn't enough for the bus to escape unscarred. As we went over one pothole a side window literally exploded. We didn't think a rock hit it. We came to a stop and inspected the damage. The window was totally fractured and what wasn't on the road a few yards back was on the few passengers who had been sleeping next to it. No-one was injured from it and we took out what was left of the glass, swept out the bus and covered the gaping hole with a foam sleeping mat until we got to the next campsite where it was replaced with a green tarpaulin, which remained in place through to the end of the trip.

At the next campsite we had the opportunity to go canoeing in the river we were pitched next to. We were taken eight miles upstream and dropped off with canoes. It was another glacially-fed river and was freezing cold to the touch. We had lifevests but no drysuits this time. As I set off with two other people in my canoe we saw the first canoe overturn as it hit a bank. Luckily the boat that had dropped us off was still within range and the guy came back to pick them up and taken them back to the campsite. We felt bad for them but we had our own paddling to concentrate on.

I was paddling up front and after a mile or so we had our coordination sorted out, and even some pretty cool slingshots around corners and frantic paddling to avoid hitting the banks. The main obstacle, however, were sandbars all over the place where it was easy to ground the canoe in the shallowing water. We were fairly good at avoiding the obvious ones and when we did run aground we managed to dislodge ourselves with paddling and careful pushing. The problem came when we hit a big sandbar only a mile or so from the end. The strong current was pushing us into it, thwarting our efforts to put the canoe into reverse and back off it. After a few minutes of getting nowhere fast I decided that since I was now in the middle and not paddling I would get out, get my feet wet and cold and pull the canoe over the sandbar to where it started to deepen and then get back in.

That was a mistake. The guy who dropped us off told us that the water was mostly up to knee-deep with occasional holes where it would be up to our waists if we fell out. It was all going well and I had got the canoe a few metres across the sandbar but then I took a step in the few-inches-deep water and had the same feeling as that you get when you are descending some stairs and think you're at the bottom when there's actually a step to go and you briefly feel like you're falling. In my case though the sandbar abruptly ended and I found myself plunging into bottomless water. I still had hold of the canoe so I only went neck-deep. I instinctively tried to pull myself back in but that action threatened to capsize the whole canoe. So I pulled myself to the back of the canoe hoping to regain solid ground but we'd already drifted away from the sandbar so I had to swim, dragging the canoe, back towards the sandbar. It was freezing cold water and I was only just able to call out to ask my co-canoeists to paddle backwards. I got to the sandbar, pulled the canoe up and jumped back into my position in the middle.

I told them to paddle on and concentrate on not getting stuck again but I was cold to the core and breathing heavily. I could definitely appreciate the advice given to us at rafting the day before when they had said that someone without a drysuit would only last two to five minutes in glacial water. It took a minute or so for me to recover and as the minutes went by I regained my normal composure. I had put on my raincoat and rain trousers at the start in case it had rained when we were out on the water but in this case I believe they acted as a primitive wetsuit, trapping the water that had soaked my clothes underneath and keeping the wind off so that my bodyheat warmed up my clothing and I didn't feel too cold after that.

When we got stuck the next time and someone got out we were careful to drag the canoe slowly and test the depth ahead so as not to repeat the experience. Nothing more tramatic happened to us as completed the distance. Everyone had had problems on their ride and we blamed that on the low water level that created more shallow patches to get stuck on. After a nice hot shower I related my story to the rest of my group in the lodge on-site that served hot drinks and also had a bar. My trek leader thought my story was very funny, to the point that she cried with laughter as I was telling her! I wasn't doing my usual of making something sound funny, I was telling my story straight and emphasising the trauma I had suffered.

In a way, if there was one place for that to happen I'm glad it was at that campsite because the hot showers and lodge were right by where we were pitched and the lodge stayed open serving beer for as long as we were in there spending money, which turned out to be 1:30am. On the opposite side of the river from our tents was a whole load of dog kennels and at suitably scary times during the night they would all start howling in unison.

The next, and final, campsite was the complete opposite of the previous one. We were again pitched next to a river but this time there was no lodge, no hot drinks, no beer, no hot showers, not even running water. The only facilities provided - aside from a very rocky ground to try to sleep on - were a pit toilet and a drinking water tank.

This was in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park on the very eastern side of Alaska, a park that is 25% larger than Switzerland and has taller mountains. The drive into this park had included a sixty mile section of unpaved gravel road. No windows exploded but an RV did drive into us. I had the front passenger seat so I had a good view of it. A small, by American standards, rented RV came around a corner and our driver pulled over as far on our side as possible but the RV didn't make much of an effort to use the remaining foot or two of space on its off-side, nor did it slow down much. As a result there was the sound of 'whack!' and our mirrors collided. We and they pulled over and inspected the damage. Our mirror was bent in, as they're designed to do, and was otherwise fine but the other guy's mirror had smashed. Ha ha! As the Dutch guy from the RV and our trek leader exchanged details everyone in the back of the minibus, who had woken up at the noise of the collision, started discussing the event.

The park is a strange one. Because it was only designated only in 1980 there were a few small towns already inside the boundaries so the National Park Service had to allow these to remain private property. But the people of the central town McCarthy don't want people coming through into their town so when you reach the end of the gravel road it ends at a footbridge and you have to leave your car and walk across. The first night we did that to get to the McCarthy pub to see open mic night. These towns really are tiny, because the people living there have to survive about sixty miles from any kind of small civilisation so they're not that popular.

On our full day there we had a choice between a day's ice climbing on a glacier and a half day glacier walking. Gravity - normally on my side when walking or scrambling down a hill or mountain - is my natural enemy on vertical surfaces so I chose the glacier walk. It started well enough with a shuttle bus taking us from the far side of the footbridge to the small (obviously) former copper mining town of Kennecott, five miles from our campsite. We collected crampons to put onto our shoes when we got to the ice and we walked a trail two miles to get to the glacier's edge. Just before we turned off to go to the glacier we were told there was one last chance to use an outhouse so, while most people waited, I continued on a hundred yards or so towards the outhouse. I turned uphill at the sign and got a few yards up when I heard a rustling in the bushes. I didn't think a person would be in there so I stopped and looked over to where I had heard the sound. And up popped the head of a brown-coloured bear about six yards away from me and looking right back at me.

I have been in bear country in several parks that I have visited on this trip to the US so I had had several opportunities to read the bear advice handed out by the National Park Service. I had clearly failed in Part 1, which is to make lots of noise as you walk along so as not to surprise a bear, and I had skipped to Part 2, which is where you wait for it to leave. I hoped I wouldn't need Part 3, which is what to do if it attacks you. As I stood there a fellow trekker came long the path towards us and I knew I couldn't shout to him because that's against the advice so as soon as he got reasonably close I said in a low, calm voice "there's a bear, don't move".

We were caught in a Mexican stand-off except only the bear was the only one with a gun, metaphorically speaking. The bear looked at me, the other guy, back at me. I tried to keep an eye on it without maintaining eye contact. Then it snorted loudly and took a small step towards me. At that point I no longer needed the outhouse. Sometimes a bear will false charge you, running at you and then stopping short or diverting, so the advice in that situation is to stand your ground. I didn't want to have to make my body obey that advice when it was trying to run like mad the other way.

I prayed to every deity that has ever been believed in, and a few interesting inventions of my own, and one of them must have hit because the bear decided neither of us was very interesting and it wandered off into the bushes. I hoped it wasn't the devil that answered my prayer because I didn't want to be in debt to him. It's not that he's evil, I've just heard that the hours are long and there's no medical cover. I decided I was happy retracing my steps to the group and peeing in a bush on the way. The other guy was braver and couldn't do what he wanted to do in a bush (if you get what I mean) so he carried on the trail to the outhouse doing Part 1 correctly - yelling 'hey bear' loudly all the time. I rejoined the group and recounted my story. I was glad that my trek leader didn't laugh uncontrollably at this one. The other guy made it back alive and we carried on.

After that entertaining diversion the time spent on the glacier was really good. The crampons gave me so much grip on the ice that I felt invincible. We saw a lot of nice looking features and I learned a lot more about glaciers thanks to my almost constant badgering questions to the guide, who was very good at answering everything and putting up with me and really earned her gratuity!

On the walk back on the trail, off the glacier, we saw another bear but this time I was with other people so I didn't feel quite so scared. The bear poked its head out of the bushes on one side of the trail just behind where we had passed and, when we talked loudly at it, it crossed over to the other side. We yelled back to the few people in our group that were lagging a little way behind and after the bear had checked them out it disappeared into the undergrowth. The ice climbing group also saw it when they were coming back off the glacier later that evening.

In the afternoon the hikers and I went on a tour of the former copper mill, which was built around the 1910s and constantly extended as the need arose. It had held up extremely well since it was abandoned in 1938 and, at fourteen stories tall the building is the tallest wooden building in North America. Unfortunately I had had a beer during the time between the hiking and the mill tour and I felt very sleepy so I was unable to badger this second tour guide with any questions at all, which worked well because he was also tired from missing his daily coffee. The tour was quite interesting and the building was impressive considering that it looked from the outside as if it would crumble imminently.

Back at the campsite that evening someone was told that a bear had been seen in the immediate area just ten minute previously. I was done with bear encounters for the trip so it was just as well that it was never seen by us that evening.

Our final day came far too quickly for me and it felt like the previous six days had just happened in the blink of an eye. We spent the day driving back to Anchorage, stopping for some cool group photos that also show the repaired window that exploded so be sure to look at my photos. In the evening in Anchorage I think everybody showered, after two days in the campsite with no showers, and then we all (except one who had to leave that evening) met up for dinner in an actual restaurant with proper chairs, tables, plates, cutlery and someone else cooking for us. Despite my buffalo burger not being very good it was a great final meal, since eight of us were ending out trip that night and only five were continuing on for a second week around the Kenai Peninsula. After dinner we hit a bar, and it didn't hit back. Gradually people left and there were many goodbyes said.

By chance I was staying in the same place as the five continuing trekkers so I had the opportunity to have breakfast with them the next morning. Only one of them made it to the lobby at the appointed meeting time of 7:30am. So the two of us went out to Country Kitchen for a nice hot breakfast, which went some way to shifting the slight hangover I had from the red wine the previous night.

But, just like paved roads in Alaska, all good things must come to an abrupt end, and so it was at 8:30am that the minibus turned up at the hostel and, after some goodbyes, took the remaining five trekkers away from me, leaving me to pack up my stuff and get to Anchorage airport for my lunchtime flight back to Seattle. It was a clear day so from my window seat on the plane I got some spectacular view of the coastline we were flying over, probably in British Columbia by then. And before I knew it I was right back in the same motel by Seattle airport that I had left a week before and it was as if nothing had happened.

The weather for the week was great. We were told that this summer had been unusually cloudy and wet and yet for the week I was there it was sunny and not very rainy. Don't mistake that for good weather - it was still weather that required a sweater and trousers during the day - unless you're particularly hardy - and temperatures fell close to zero at night. It was strange that the days were much longer. At 10pm you could mistake it for 6pm elsewhere and on the night that I was still up after 2am it was dark but there was a definite slight glow from the north where the sun was not quite down enough for it to get pitch black when the skies were clear. That night it did hit freezing at night and I was glad of my new sleeping bag that I had bought in Seattle.

I had a really great time on my Alaskan trip. The group of people I was with were all, without fail, good, fun people. Everybody got on well and everybody pulled their weight with the chores, with no slackers holding the group up all the time. And I'm not just being nice because there's a chance that my fellow trekkers - new friends, really - will read this. (To be honest, I'll be amazed if anyone at all gets to the bottom of this blog entry because it's so long, but hopefully it's gripping enough to keep people reading on.)

I quickly became the entertainer of the group and was instantly famous for my wit, and also for the fact that after midnight my powers failed and I became quiet and unfunny, save for one perfectly timed line each night. As well as the group of trekkers, our trek leader was also very good. She probably bore the brunt of my 'entertainment', especially when I was sat up in the front passenger seat on a long day's drive and hardly slept at all and kept on talking and talking. My helpfulness, particularly on the first day's grocery shop, must have balanced that out and, by the end, she was even making me a cup of tea and fetching me beers from the cooler. Those are signs of a truly great trek leader and definitely not due to the fact that the following day I had to fill in an evaluation form on how well she had done, I'm sure!

Alaska was great and tomorrow I'm off to Hawaii for 15 days. Hopefully I will get more warmth and less bears... and glacial water dunkings... and broken windows... and bad RV drivers.