The Great White North

Hello all,

As you may have read in one of John's earlier blogs, my travel plans have again changed. An opportunity arose to go with Chelsea and some of her family and friends to the Yukon Territory of Canada for a wedding, and later to Alaska for a bit of a vacation. After looking at flights to Whitehorse and finding them to be very expensive (1000 dollars for a return domestic flight!) I decided to just book the flight home and drive up there with some of Chelsea's friends, who had bought a van just for this trip. A vehicle we affectionately refer to as the Angry Beaver, because its previous owners were two lesbians. The road from Winnipeg to Whitehorse (actually Haines Junction, a small town) is almost 4000 km and took nearly 36 hours to drive across 4 provinces and one territory. The Angry Beaver has four captains chairs and a bench seat across the back, which became my bed every night as the others camped out in provincial parks or wherever we stopped for the night. I became good mates with all of my travel companions, who now refer to me as Auz-Man. We saw lots of Canadian wildlife while on the road including a couple of moose, two baby grizzly bears, long horn sheep, caribou, a black bear, some beavers and a bison.

On the second night we came to a mountain range to camp for the night and the next day we put on our hiking shoes and decided to conquer Stone Mountain.

On the third night we came across a confused looking woman by the side of the road and her six-year-old daughter with her thumb out. Their car had broken down and we gave them a lift to the next town, which made 9 in the van. The little girl was very much lacking a father figure and seemed to be especially attached to me and liked to beat me with her furry stuffed raccoon named Tart.

Once in Haines Junction we met up with everyone else who had flown up and spent the first few days in the boat fishing or sitting around the campfire with a beer. The wedding was on Saturday, I didn't really know too many people but it was good to have a beer (singular of course) and a boogie with Chelsea and her family & friends.

Geoff (the guy who got married) is a cop (Mountie) kind of like our federal police. Him and his police buddies love to go white water rafting on the Tatshenshini river near Haines Junction. So that's where we all headed on Monday. There were about 35 of us, looking mighty hot in our wetsuits too. The trip actually started in British Columbia on the Blanchard river and later onto the Tatshenshini for a total of 23 km. The Tat is a glacial fed river and it is COLD, in some parts getting up to class 5 rapids, 6 being the highest possible. I was just expecting to ride down the river all day but our guide Mike, who we thought was the best one out of all the rafts, had more adventure in mind. He would take us into the rapids sideways and always try to flip us out of the boat or purposely hang us up on rocks and wait for other rafts to try and bump us off. But we were kings of the rock and made all of the other boats flip over! On one occasion there were no longer orders being yelled at us so we looked back in time to see Mike doing a back-flip off the tail-end of our raft, leaving us without a guide as he swam to get back in.
Not only did we have the rapids and paddling to contend with but the other rafters jumping from boat to boat spear-tackling each other into the water, which our guides encouraged. It was a good idea until you fell in and remembered that the water flows from a glacier. All in all it was an awesome experience.

The next day drove 3 and a half hours to the state of Alaska to look around a couple of little towns. At the Canadian/Alaskan border I was within an inch of being cavity searched because I don't think they'd ever seen an Australian before. We went to a town called Skagway and then took a ferry across to Haines, both very basic fishing and tourism towns, not much to report here but I got to tick another state off my American list.

In five days I'm catcing up with John in Germany to continue our round the world trip. I think even though it was a shame leaving Germany during the world cup, I don't regret coming to Canada. Looking forward to having a beer and a chat with him. By the way it was also my quarter-century birthday the other day.

Be excellent to each other,
Kristian

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