We reached the final port of call on this cruise to Alaska aboard Holland America Line Koningsdam and this would be the only opportunity to use tender boats – or water shuttles, as they’re increasingly being called to stop questions about just how tender the boats are – and only one way. We’d been told that a berth alongside in the port would become available in the afternoon but for those who wanted to get ashore early or who, like us, had a shore excursion they needed to get ashore for, the boats would be operating.
Ketchikan is Alaska’s sixth largest city by population size, but when it comes to population sizes in Alaska that doesn’t mean a whole lot. It, like most of the other places we’d visited, would struggle to qualify as a city at all in Europe. The remoteness of everywhere in Alaska and its resources sought after elsewhere also meant that the slow approach to Ketchikan in the morning was one of contrasts between the wonderful landscape views of rolling hills covered in trees and distant mountain tops with peaks of snow on the one hand but also frequent signs of industrialisation on the other. The need to cope with ways to get goods to and from locations such as this in high enough capacity to wait out any travel disruptions because of that general isolation is an understandable one, though, and something our guide was keen to point out later in the day on the excursion we’d take.
It was a strangely noisy slow sail into Ketchikan too with a constant droning that grew as we got nearer to the city. Sea planes were big business and were constantly not just flying in the distance but occasionally passing by our cruise ship too. An unusual experience the first time it happened. There had been excursions for sea plane trips but they were understandably pricey and we’d already spent a small fortune on trips on this Holland America cruise.
The reason why Koningsdam couldn’t dock at Ketchikan in the morning was because three ships had got in before us. Another HAL ship was there as well as two Princess ships in the form of Majestic (which we’ve yet to cruise on) and Royal (which we were familiar with).
While we were waiting for the tender boats to get permission to start heading ashore we could see that some were engaging in what looked like dancing off the starboard side of the ship. It was probably a bit of training, to be fair.
Ketchikan has the world’s largest collection of standing totem poles and in the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll head off to one of the locations in the city on a short excursion to see where totems are carved.