The Soul Train

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Alaska isn't called the last frontier for nothing buddy.

To prove it I hopped on the train from Anchorage to Fairbanks, a grizzled by-gone gold-rush fever city inside the arctic circle and one hell of a ways north. Alaska Railroad was my transporter, keeping everything old school with a nostalgic steam train and the trimmed moustaches of ridiculously overdressed staff.

"AAAaaaall aboOOOARD!"

 Nicely donned in my typical tourist 'Alaska' t-shirt i was ready to take in the rugged wilderness splayed out on a comfy leather seat; the pains of travelling cheap.

We set off.

This journey was brought to me in cinematic high definition real-ness. 

Military wastelands of rusting tanks and broken down B-52 bomber planes littered the city outskirts- a ghost's reminder to Alaska's cold war military importance as a rich oil-filled country, rubbing pale icy shoulders with Mother Russia.  Then all was snow and pine and mountain gliding on the horizon. Fresh tracks of the wild-things.   A crazy Texan was constantly running around hyped up by the landscape and the wildlife and his first ever ride on a train. It pissed me off at first but gradually grew to have a big effect on everyone. After a while we were all jumping about shouting 'Moose!' and 'Bear!' and scurrying to the open windows with cameras and film. More often than not it turned out to be a moose shaped rock or a bear shaped moose but it was still good for a laugh. 

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  The passengers were few and limited in scope, mostly American's with a motor palace RV home waiting for them at either end of the railway track. Some spanish. A Russian or two, probably secret spies on a vacation.

  If you weren't a man here you were a very masculine woman. Deep in conversation with a rarely like-minded traveller it turned out he had done his reasearch on this issue and that men outweighed women in Alaska 13-1. Those aren't good numbers for the young and single. You'd have to be very lucky to get lucky out here...

Although the weather was good, and that was lucky.

The snowy mountains sat on their haunches to better see this melancholic metallic snake writhing at their feet; a belly full of trespassers with loud and tacky shirts.

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The sights were subliminally sublime, looking up into the wizened faces of white peaks that could smoosh you with their awesomeness or down into the yawning mouth of an icy ravine that could swallow you with a frosty tongued hunger as we slid across open plains of white splashes against a blue sky or hugged close to a cliff that dropped down into the craggy eons of my soul and the thawing streams of my chi in the warm sun of an Alaskan spring.

Meanwhile the Americans experienced their own inner oddesey watching VCR re-runs of CSI crime scene investigations in the dining cart. Seriously now...