Barrow. 27th June.
Barrow, Alaska is the most northern ‘city’ in the Americas. We decided to venture up there for a night.
We got up at stupid o’clock (which was broad daylight) to fly to Barrow, one of the northern most cities in the world. It’s on latitude 71 degrees and is 1000kms north of the Arctic Circle.
We arrived in the middle of summer – to big fat snow flakes falling and the ice pack still in.
Sunshine 24 hours a day with the sun making a loop around the sky. The only difference between 2am and 2pm was that two of the three shops were shut and there were a few less kids playing in the streets.
The population is mainly Inupiat (local Inuit (Eskimo)) people. They are incredibly rich due to oil money and buy many boys toys. 4WDs, snow mobiles, Quad bikes.
There was a whaling festival on and the seal season began that day. Absolutely no objections to indigenous people hunting whales. They are hunted semi traditionally – a team from a small motor boat. They use harpoons but then also shot. The village has a quota – Barrow has a quota of three whales per season. When the first is caught there is a village festival. An individual cannot go hunting. It is a community thing.
It was also the start of seal season, and mast families had gone out and got a seal. The seals are used traditionally. Sarah helped a family prepare a seal they had just caught. They eat the meat, pickle the blubber (by placing it in a sealed jar in the window sill for a few months. Then bread is dipped into it!) and still make boats with the skin. Sarah had the scary job of using an Ulu (traditional knife) to remove the blubber from the skin. A scary task, as she didn’t want to be the one to put a hole in the skin and make it un-usable for a boat.
In the local supermarket you could buy a leg of lamb for $90 (about $15 in other states) or a Quad bike for $9,000 as well as plasma TVs, clothes and beans.
Our hotel was barely a 2 star and cost us $350 for the night ($40 in southern states). But it was next to the best restaurant in town.
We spent a huge amount of time walking around the town. We went to a cultural show and of course joined in the dancing and the blanket toss. The blanket was a traditional one made of seal skins. It weighed around 100kg and took 20 people to do a toss. They tossed people metres into the air. When they do it seriously (and outdoors) they go up around 10 metres!
We had booked a Tundra Tour. Our pick up time was 11pm.
The beaches around Barrow are made up of small pebbles. To drive on it, the tour guide had to let the tyres down to 10psi. They then squash out like tundra tyres. The pebbles were lovely but not so good for Snow Angels!
And all those single shoes that you see on the roadways. They have always fascinated both of us. We think they are Harry otter port keys. Well! We found out where they end up. They get into the waterways and eventually make their way, on currents, to the top of the world – Barrow. There were dozens of thongs and shoes.
The local people live a mixture of modern and traditional lives. They hunt whale and seal. They use motor boats and guns for the hunt. They eat seal blubber that has fermented in a jar in the sun for six weeks. They all have satellite dishes and many cars, yet butcher seals on the front gravel. When the car, quad bike or snow mobile breaks, they buy a new one. We saw a woman in a wolverine skin jacket, complete with the head still attached.
We went on a half day Tundra tour (which started at 9.30pm) and WE SAW A POLAR BEAR! A WILD one! It was fantastic. It was out on the pack ice. We could see it tossing something around. Closer examination revealed it was tossing around a seal. Like a cat with a mouse.
As we were sitting in our safe car, in a restricted area, we spied a lone walker. A person walked out to Point Barrow to see the polar bears. Alert the Darwin Awards committee! We put him in the car and took him back to town. He was not a local. Was an mining engineer up here for a few weeks.
Next morning we walked around town a bit more then flew south. The food in Barrow was appalling so we didn’t eat much.
Barrow was amazing. It was a great contrast of tradition and technology with a mix of money.
Sarah experienced unexpected complications from assisting with the seal butchering…..We were in Barrow for one night, so we only took overnight bags, not suitcases. We left most of our gear in the hire car at the airport. And with cameras, computer, winter coats, boots, scarves etc we didn’t have much room. We didn’t take a second pair of jeans. As we were getting ready to go, we realised that she absolutely reeked of seal blubber. As she was skinning the blubber, much of it had melted and gone into her jeans, her boots, her watch band….and we do believe, into her pores.
A quick raid of the maids trolley allowed her to grab a bottle of disinfectant. After a heavy spraying she smelt like a laundry…..but that was better than dead seal! Hahah.
The flights to Barrow were on ‘combi’ planes. They were half cargo plane, half passenger plane. The front half, directly behind the pilots, was a cargo hold. The airport was busy with helicopters and fork lifts loading and unloading pallets of gear. There are no roads to Barrow. In August the annual barges can get through the ice into Barrow. They carried cars, building equipment, snow mobiles. Everything else the town (and the district) needed comes up on the combis.
The back half of the plane was a normal passenger plane – although there was a flat wall where the pilots should be and no front door. On the flight south we had a treat. Denali (also known as Mt McKinley) was ‘out’. No cloud cover and a beautiful sunny day. This was a rare occurrence so the pilot did two laps in each direction. It was awesome. We were booked in for a joy flight over Denali in two days’ time – at $250 each! This would turn out to be particularly fortuitous. Bonus.
We arrived back in Anchorage, collected our lovely hire car and headed off on our road trip. We hit Wal Mart again, then travelled to Wasilla. Home of Sarah Palin.
We were disappointed to see that like many politicians…she lied, we could not see Russia from there. We drove up into the mountains and gold county. A man was driving on the freeway while working on his laptop. He even had a stand to hold his computer in the optimum position. He would glance at the road then back to typing one handed on the lap top….at 130 kph.
We went to dinner and reminded ourselves why we liked iHop so much. It was a sad fact that our best Alaskan food yet was from a chain. Then back to the B&B we were staying at. We were converts to B&Bs by this stage.
The Barrow flights revealed that we may have had a passport problem. At the B&B we unpacked everything, looking for the said passport. Next morning we unpacked everything again and alas no passport. It was now time to admit that we were caught up in a minor ‘international incident’.
Five busy hours later we had reported the passport to Foreign Affairs and the Police, cancelled our trip to Denali National Park and our joy flight to Denali, made bookings at the consulate and booked new flights and a hotel.
We were quite shattered – we were not getting to Denali National Park, but, in true Burke style, we made the most of it. We could go to the consulate in LA or New York. Gee, that was a hard choice. And as we had booked tickets on the day of travel, they were expensive. First class was only about $100 extra and included luxuries like luggage and movies! So off we went to New York City in the Summer. The glass was half full indeed!
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