Alaska, go with the floe

THERE'S a lot to be said for standing on the deck of a cruise ship sipping traditional Dutch pea soup while waiting for an Alaskan glacier to calve in Glacier Bay.

Popular route ... Holland America, one of the big three in the cruise business, has eight ships including the Westerdam, making a total of 159 cruises to Alaska in the northern summer

THERE'S a lot to be said for standing on the deck of a cruise ship sipping traditional Dutch pea soup while waiting for an Alaskan glacier to calve in Glacier Bay.

For the record, the glacier refrained from calving during the couple of hours I stared at it, but it was a fascinating experience, none the less. There it was, a 25-storey wall of blueish ice, 1.6km wide, almost close enough to touch.

That glacier was just one of many seen during a seven-night cruise of the Inside Passage on Holland America's 82,000-tonne Westerdam. Glacier Bay alone has 12, most moving at no more than two metres a day.

Two hundred years ago the present bay was almost entirely blocked by a single glacier more than 1000m thick, 32km wide and 160km long. Nature has never seemed so profound.

To lounge in five-star comfort in such a spectacular environment is very special. Little wonder Alaska cruising is so popular with Australians.

Holland America, one of the big three in the business – Princess and Royal Caribbean are the others – has eight ships making a total of 159 cruises in the northern summer. And the business continues to grow.

The figures are staggering. For instance the 'salmon capital' Ketchikan (population 14,000) gets 900,000 cruise ship passengers each summer, and three or four 80,000-tonners arrive on a single day.

At one of our four ports of call we shuttled out at 1.30pm as another line's equally large ship prepared to take over the parking space.

Once ashore, the options are almost infinite. Go whale-watching, take a helicopter flight to land on a glacier, float plane into the wilderness, kayak along the face of a glacier, watch 25kg salmon leaping up a rivulet on their way to breed. And, if luck is on your side, watch the bears reap their harvest.

And at that end of a day that began with dawn at 4.20am and ended with sunset around 9.30pm, there's the comforting world of free meals, satellite TV, attentive staff, entertainment, and an internet cafe with a view to dream about.

My cruise delivered Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan, and a brief stop at Victoria, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

Sitka is a small town in a world of what might have been. Established by the Russians, it still has the remains of a fort with tsarist eagles emblazoned on the barrels of the cannon overlooking the port.

The Tsar of the time, battered by defeat in the Crimean war, flogged 960,000 square km of land to the Americans in 1867 for a price which added up to a few cents per hectare.

In Sitka, as in other parts of Alaska, there are fading reminders of an unhappier world of US-Russian relations: concrete foundations, scattered through fields, which once held the Distant Early Warning radar systems designed to plot the approach of Russian missiles during the Cold War.

The cruise experience never disappointed. Air fares aside, it delivers enormous value. The location, the comfort, the all-inclusive cover of meals and entertainment. All at a rate five-star hotels couldn't match.

And added to the enjoyment is the appeal of the Alaskan sense of humour. For example, a note on the wall of the Red Dog Saloon in Juneau reads: "When the Indians ran the place there were no taxes, no debt. And women did all the work. And the white man thought he could improve on that!"

Then there was the guide who told us that Juneau's airport was the scene of a world first – a collision between a Boeing 737 and a 5kg salmon. It happened, he said, when a bald eagle lost its grip on the fish which had then struck the windscreen of the plane which had just taken off. According to the guide, the pilot radioed the control tower that his plane had collided with a salmon and he was returning to the airport.

Another said that local hikers were very aware of the need to give bears, particularly grizzlies, a wide berth. "The secret is to make plenty of noise so that the bears can move away," he said. "Our hikers attach bells to their backpacks and walking boots, and some also carry a capsicum spray in case a bear gets too close."

Sounds sensible doesn't it? But then he added that the easiest way to identify grizzly droppings was to look for largish objects containing broken bells and crushed capsicum sprays.

True? You can never be sure in Alaska. But there's no doubting the wonder of the glaciers.

The writer was a guest of the Holland America Line and Air New Zealand.

The Sunday Telegraph