Ketchikan

It must have been a gentle arrival in Ketchikan. When we got up for an early breakfast, we were already tied up at the dock right in the middle of the town, and hadn't even noticed arriving. Headed off the ship at 7:30am, and walked around the corner to get some tickets to the lumberjack show and cheer on Ian, who gave the lumberjack presentation yesterday, against his nemesis Mike, the man mountain. Kind of worked and kind of didn't. We ended up being seated in the half of the audience that had to cheer for Ian's opponents, but our team ended up winning, so we did better than Ian who, for all his boasting yesterday got whipped.

There were three ships tied up at the piers, and a fourth one arrived at lunchtime. We were by far the smallest of the four, so there must be close to 6000 tourists in the town today, and the season is only just warming up.

The priorities of those going into town are pretty basic. 1 - Coffee, 2 - Wi-fi, 3 - Shopping. Whilst we didn't do any shopping, we certainly didn't buck the status quo with the other two. After the lumberjack show, we headed off to a decent coffee shop, bought some drinks and used the free customer wi-fi to upload our blogs and read our mail. 5000 tourists were all doing the same and, given that the internet onboard the ship is satellite, slow, and costs $50 for a 100 minute block, I can see why.

The important tasks of the day finished, and a postcard to Mandy's class posted (not as easy as it sounds - there isn't a post office in the town - just shows you how pervasive email has become), we headed off to do the town's historic walking trail.

You can tell that we are no longer in Canada. Washrooms are now restrooms, people now walk down the sidewalks with their heads down and walk right through you without batting an eyelid, and step out of shops without looking and then just prop. Canadians walk with their heads up, navigate to avoid colliding, and hold doors behind them for you. In a speech at the Vancouver Winter Olympic's opening, one of the speakers said "We are Canadian. We are polite. We say 'please' and 'thank you' and 'you're welcome' ", and he is right. I'm missing Canada already.

The historic walking trail took us on a winding route through the whole town - both east and west side - probably 5km all up. Ketchikan is a logging village that turned into a fishing village as huge number of salmon spawn in the town's rivers. They call it the salmon capital of the world, and they we so successful at fishing it that they almost wiped the salmon out. But today numbers have recovered, and thousands of salmon will start making the trek upstream to the town's rivers in the next few weeks.

Spent a bit of time exploring the Creek Street area, which is the oldest and best preserved part of town. It's basically a lot of wooden houses built on stilts over the salmon's river, and during the prohibition they delivered illicit liquor via the river to trap doors in the floor of each of the houses. It was also the red light district up until the 50's when they decided that tourists were worth more to the town, and cleaned it up. However, for a time Creek Street was known as the place where both men and salmon came to spawn.

Back on board for a late lunch, and we departed the town at 3pm. Went to the early show featuring the comedian/ventriloquist who was very good, before being seated for dinner in the main dining room with a group of 2 couples our own age all the way from Geelong. Seems that while we were driving our kids to Geelong to play baseball, they were driving their kids to Melbourne to play basketball. Isn't it a strange world. Sat there watching our ship and one of the other ones that was in Ketchikan with us today have a drag race up the passage as the sun set. They were definitely bigger and faster than we were but, as the steward told us with a serious face, their captain isn't as nice as ours.

A bit of time in one of the lounges listening to jazz before heading home to bed.