Travelling the Alaskan Ferries
Most of the coast of South East Alaska is not connected by
any road network to the rest of North America, so it’s only by ship or air you
can get there and travel around. Nearly all the people who visit south east
Alaska (that’s the narrow strip of coast-line pointing down to B.C., Canada) do
so on a cruise-ship, but the alternative is to travel on the Alaskan ferries.
The advantage of travel by ferry is that you can spend more time in each port
to have a good look around, and decide where and when you want to travel. (Most
cruise-ships visit each port for just a few hours). Planning a ferry trip does need a bit more
work before you go, as ferries travel in an intermittent fashion and you will
need to find accommodation in each port.
Alaska is a U.S. state, so while Vancouver is physically closer,
it is easiest to get to S.E. Alaska from San Francisco or even Los Angeles. There
are regular flights to several towns in south east Alaska, although we actually
travelled through Vancouver, and then to Whitehorse in Canada’s Yukon province
so we could take the tourist bus and train from Whitehorse to Skagway over the
White Pass. http://www.wpyr.com/skagwaywhitehorsetrainbusviafraser.html. This is a great half day trip and runs from mid-May to
September. We then travelled the ferries over the following fortnight.
While we travelled together as two couples, which lowered
some accommodation and rental car costs, it’s just as easy to travel as a
twosome or even a single. Probably if there had just been two of us, we would
have stayed more in hotels than rental places, but the independence and
location of the rentals was really worthwhile. It is possible to travel without
any pre-bookings but be aware that the tourist season in Alaska is relatively
short, so demand for accommodation may be high when you want to travel, and
that some ferry terminals are several kilometres from the towns. It does pay to
have some action plan in advance of your arrival.
Reading about the area before we started booking included
the usual travel guides from the local library and the internet. If you intend
to travel up to Anchorage and beyond, it’s worthwhile getting a copy of “Milepost”
which is a large travel book published each year and is available from the Amazon website.
We decided to travel in late May and early June. S.E. Alaska
is a wet place (a bit like our South Island west coast but even wetter!), and
the northern spring and early summer is the drier period, especially when
compared with the usually wetter autumn months. We actually had great weather,
with most daily temperatures hitting the high teens with little rain. Large
cruise-ships also go to many of the ferry ports from May to September and can
increase the population of small towns like Skagway from its resident 800 to
over 9000 while they are in port. Skagway, Juneau and Ketchikan attract most of
the cruise-ships, and their schedules are available on line at http://www.claalaska.com/schedules.html. We wanted to avoid the
crowds if possible, and our out of town accommodation in Juneau and Ketchikan
helped us to do that. Many shops and tourist enterprises close down outside the
cruise-ship season, so if you want to do the occasional day trip you really
have to visit in the cruise-ship season.
The Alaskan ferries are small ships about the size of the
Cook Strait ferries in New Zealand, although there are some large and fast
catamarans. You can check them all out on the Alaskan ferry website,
http://www.dot.state.ak.us/amhs. This
is the website where you can check timetables, and make your bookings, and it
is very user friendly. The following could be of some help:
- Ferry schedules are compiled for either summer or winter. The summer schedules (May to September, the times when you are most likely to want to visit) are released the previous November. The schedule does seem to closely follow that of the previous year, with the ferries still departing a port on the same day of the particular week in the following year.
- If you are visiting the inside passage in S.E. Alaska, download a PDF copy of the SE General schedule to plan your trip. (Schedules to other Alaskan ports are also available on this website). Travel times between ports vary from a few hours, to overnight trips or even longer if travelling through several potential stops.
- We booked in advance (once they receive payment, they email forms to print which are then exchanged for proper tickets at any port station) but all of our voyages in May or early June had plenty of room. The travel tickets allow you to travel inside on comfortable recliner seats, or outside in an open solarium under roof heaters on plastic seats. All the ships have comfortable cabins, which can also be pre-booked, and we booked one for an overnight trip so we could sleep in comfort, and also for a long day trip in case we needed it.
- The cabins have private facilities, but there are also plenty of showers available on board if you want them. Some passengers travel all the way to and from Bellingham, near Seattle, to get up to Alaska, and not all of them book a cabin. Some even travel on the rear deck, sleeping inside their own tents. Because it’s a sheltered inland waterway, you can leave your seasick pills at home.
- All the ferries, including the catamarans, carry cars, RVs and trucks so you can take your transport with you. However we decided to hire rental cars in Juneau and Ketchikan, particularly as our accommodation in those places was well out of town, and just walk or hire bikes in the other smaller towns. Rental car prices are similar to those in New Zealand. Juneau has the largest roading network, but even there you can travel from one road end to the other within an hour. The rental car companies we used were: http://juneaucarrentals.com/ and http://www.akcarrental.com/ in Ketchikan.
- Cheap food is available in on all the ferries (and as the servers are government employees there is no tipping!), but apart from the occasional salad most of the food is fairly greasy. We took our own lunches on the day trips.
- The ferries travel all day and night, with just an hour or so in each port, so it’s hard to avoid early morning starts. Our ferry from Juneau to Wrangell left at 5am, and we arranged with the rental car company to leave their car at the ferry wharf. With good planning you should be able to avoid night travel, unless you have longer voyages. Day travel (and there are 19 hours of daylight in this part of the world during summer) allows you to see both the passing scenery, as the ferries frequently pass through narrow passages that are too small for the larger cruise-ships, and also the many marine mammals such as humpback whales, orca, sealions and seals, all of which we saw close-up from the ferries.
- Useful fare reductions are available to the over 65s, and you don’t need to be a US citizen to get the discount. (Many other places also have prices cheaper for seniors). Just apply when you buy your tickets on-line, or even at the port ticket offices.
- We initially wanted to travel from south to north, but the schedules worked best for us in the opposite direction. It doesn’t really matter, just make sure that you start and end in a port with either an airport or with land access to the outside world. Air fares are cheapest when booked early.
We stayed in a variety of accommodation; the Sojourn Hostel
in Skagway, Trierschield Apartments in the centre of Sitka, seaside houses in
Juneau and Ketchikan and Zimovia BnB in Wrangell. We enjoyed them all and often
had first choice of accommodation by trying to book five months in advance,
although some accommodation providers were slow to reply to emails. (That was
probably a reflection of the somewhat laid-back attitude to living in Alaska). We
used a variety of internet sources to find accommodation. Each town has several
internet sites to assist with accommodation, which were more useful this time
than the Trip Advisor or Airbnb sites we usually use. The short term rental
accommodation that we booked seemed particularly limited in some towns.
Prices in Alaska, for both food and accommodation, are
higher than other places in the States as most of the food, apart from fish and
a few vegetables, is imported from the more southern states. The fish,
especially halibut and salmon, is excellent, but like New Zealand fish isn’t
particularly cheap. Good supermarkets in the larger towns were out of the
centre of town, so having a car was useful, but convenience stores could be
found in most places. Like elsewhere in the world, ATM machines are plentiful
in all the towns. All towns have restaurants and take away places (fancy a
moose hotdog?).
Some photos from our trip are available elsewhere on our
blog: http://twoandasuitcase.blogspot.co.nz
John Potter
23 June 2014
