Tuesday, 4 June 2019
Anchorage, Alaska, USA
Glorious day but the first half is wasted catching up on admin, such is life on the road. Unlike Fairbanks, Anchorage has a number of interesting things to offer the traveller. Anchorage Museum contains a superb collection of Eskimo artefacts and a planetarium, along with an excellent restaurant. Good few hours spent perusing the history of Eskimos (and I use this word as an umbrella term for all the various First Alaskan native tribes such as Inupiat, Inuit, Atahabascan etc), rather than a derogatory term. Having discussed the term with a number of locals, there’s seems to be a varied understanding of what ‘eskimo’ means. Some say it’s now derogatory whilst some say it can be used as a general term as described above. Merely as an observation though, all the drunken ‘hobos’ I see about town are generally ‘eskimo’.
Excellent bus trip around Anchorage and the tour guide is Alaskan but has spent two years volunteering in South Kensington, London. She’s beginning to wonder why she left South Kensington. Captain Cook once sailed up here on an adventure and his statue stands looking out over the Cook Inlet. One house in the suburbs is built underground and a few glass domes only give a hint of what lies beneath. This was an old fashioned method of construction in times gone by to protect against the elements, albeit the ground it’s dug into is permafrost.
Near to the international airport is the world’s largest float plane airport. Given the wide expanse of wilderness and preponderance of lakes, this is the only way to reach many settlements.
At ‘Earthquake Park’, see the effect of the massive 9.4 magnitude Good Friday earthquake in 1964. Anchorage sits astride the Pacific and Atlantic tectonic plates. The earthquake caused the Pacific plate to drop down 25m and the park demonstrates the drop. The car park is on the Atlantic tectonic plate but the adjacent woods are on the Pacific plate below. The 25m drop is immediate and sharp. Amazing to see how clearly defined the plates are.
