Chaos in Ketchikan

 It is the beginning of the season for Alaska Cruise. Some ships just leaving Vancouver and some coming South. It is pretty unclear how this all works but so far we have seen few cruise ships, in Sitka we noticed a bit of a step up with Holland America Eurodam visiting at the same time (and Scenic Eclipse in the harbour).

Nothing prepared us for the chaos of Ketchikan. On arriving at our pier which is about 15 minutes from town, there is a huge ship already on one side of the finger. It is the Norwegian Bliss and holds just over 4,000 passengers.

Heading down the narrow channel towards our berth you can see the tides here are large (about 20 feet)

The location we are berthed at is the site of a defunct pulp processing plant that has been partly demolished. It is a long way from town and not real flash.

The Orion looks like their tender

As our original tour was cancelled last night we are off on a bus this morning to the Potlatch Totem Park to learn all about the local tribes and customs. The ship has arrived late and so the tour starts about 15 mins later than scheduled and today we are scheduled to depart at 2 pm, so everyone must be back on board by 1 pm. Not a great start to the day.

Potlatch Park is expansive and better than expected

Soon after our bus arrives at Potlatch Park our group is allocated a guide and we head off down a path through the trees to explore the world of totem poles. The guide is excellent.

Every totem pole tells a story, and throughout the tour a few poles are highlighted and the legend that goes with it told. Often the story was to explain some natural phenomena, like why salmon run upstream each year.

Most of the stories seem to revolve around women falling in love with whales, eagles or ravens and running off with them.

Bizarrely, in amongst the totem poles is a collection of vintage cars, all in working order.

The native tribes lived in clans, and it was a matriarchal society, so clans were identified by the mothers name and male care  of the children was the duty of the mothers relatives who shared the same clan name, not the father of the child. Each clan lived in a clan house, like the one below with only one entry and exit that was so small you had to stoop down to enter. Only one person at a time could pass through. This was a protection against invasion.

We went inside a replica clan house that had proper doors to meet fire regulations to see what they looked inside, trying to image how a whole clan could live in this house with a large fire burning in a pit in the centre of the house all year round.

Inside the clan house, the railing around the fire pit is an addition to keep tourists from falling in

The clan houses were completely demountable and could be moved from place to place over land or by water. If by water, the large round roof beams were used to make a raft. They were made of a different timber than the rest of the house, it was a variety of birch which has excellent water resistant properties and is very buoyant. Western red cedar was pretty much used to build everything from houses to totem poles.

There are lots of other buildings which we are told are Potlatch Houses. A Potlatch is a large party thrown to demonstrate wealth and provide a venue for meeting future partners. Great esteem came from throwing a Potlatch which was a pretty expensive affair. A little statue on the top of the house showed how many potlatches the owner had thrown, by the number of layers in the hat the statue is wearing.

It is not that clear in this shot, but this guys hat had 3 layers indicating he had thrown 3 potlatches

This totem pole told the story of why the salmon run occurs each year.

Totem pole carving is still a trade and they charge $1,000 to $5,000 per foot of pole carved out od a western red cedar log.

Totem pole carving centre

At the end of the tour, there was the compulsory visit to the gift shop before getting back on the bus to go into town. Or that's what we thought the plan was. Apparently the bus company had decided there wasn't sufficient time to do that and get us back to the ship on time. After a mass revolt and lots of radio communication with bus headquarters, they reluctantly agreed to drive through town and then go on to the ship.

A number of us were still not happy, as our tour clearly said we could be dropped off in town, and catch a shuttle bus back to the ship. After further negotiation they agreed to to this. 

It wasn't until we arrived in town that the reason for all of this concern about shortening excursions etc became apparent. There are 4 huge cruise ships docked right in the centre of town. The smallest is the Eurodam, the others

all much bigger. I roughly worked out there would be around 16,000 cruise ship visitors in town today. The permanent population is 8,500.  The problem becomes very clear, they don't have enough buses.

Nevertheless, we got off te bus and were told that the last shuttle bus leaving town for our berth would be at 12.30pm. It is currently 11 am, so that seems fine.

One of the 4 monsters docked in town

The major tourist attraction in Ketchikan is Creek Street, a row of old wooden buildings built beside and over a creek. It is like a boardwalk perched on piles connecting a street of buildings over Ketchikan Creek.

The building that seems to attract the most attention, is the old brothel

There is not a huge crowd at Creek Street as most of the passengers on the blocks of flats all appear to be racing back to the ships for lunch. The boarding queues are incredible. We decide we should try and get a shuttle back to our ship asap, as delays look guaranteed.

Ketchikan Marina

There isn't much else to see in Ketchikan other than lots of touristy stuff we could do without.

At 11.45am we were back at the spot where the bus driver that dropped us off told us the shuttle back to our ship would leave from. There didn't appear to be too many other people waiting, so we got suspicious and asked a nearby tour operator, and another one, and another one. With 3 different answers we trusted the last one, but had about a 300m walk ahead of us. When we arrived at the spot, it was where the shuttles were leaving from. The queue was about 200m long and snaked along the waterfront. We later discovered in the same queue were people trying to get back on board the Royal Princess.

We eventually bypassed a lot of them and rejoined the queue closer to the departure point for the shuttles. They had obviously mustered up anything on 4 or more wheels to try to speed up the return to our dock, because it soon became apparent that we were sharing the shuttle service with Norwegian Bliss who had almost 6 times the number of passengers we did. 

Ketchikan was operating at well at well above their capacity to cope and the people "organising" transport just had their fingers crossed. A few enterprising locals were offering to take people back to the ship in their cars for a healthy fee.

We ended up back on the ship at just after 1 pm. Most of the shore excursions had been cut short or had bits left out to meet the ships sailing time. There was champagne to greet us when we re boarded and a broadcast apology from the Cruise Director, but surely this was foreseeable.

Departure from the dock was a bit delayed and Norwegian Bliss departed before us. Tomorrow is a day at sea through the inside passage, where we are told there is some great scenery. The following day, we dock in Vancouver and disembark.