Day 21 - Again Whitehorse and Vancouver: The Yukon, 2013

Let's deal with the elephant in the room first: is it "the Yukon", or just plain "Yukon"?  In a magazine article on the aeroplane on our way out here there was an interview with Shirley Adamson, lifelong resident of this territory, who was asked the question, 'You’re on the phone to a friend from the Outside. No one from the government is listening. Do you say “Yukon” or “The Yukon”?'  Her answer was, 'I don't care if the government is listening or not, I say "The Yukon".'

Apparently saying "Yukon" is considered so... Outside.

Next a note on the term "sourdough".  Sourdough bread is a type of bread made using a "starter" - basically a pre-fermented product made using naturally occurring yeast - as opposed to bread flour to which yeast is added.  Hardened gold miners knew that trying to make bread with yeast in the cold Yukon winter doesn't work, it had to be made with a sourdough starter which could be kept alive for years, decades even, by feeding it fresh flour.  So people who had survived a Yukon winter came to be known as "sourdoughs", while newcomers to the area were given the derisory name cheechakos, a word meaning "tenderfoot", or in this day and age, a n00b.

Sandra and I, technically, are cheechakos, but I like to think that we're well on our way to becoming sourdoughs.

[A note here about the "sour-toe" cocktail I mentioned at the start of this holiday.  When it became apparent that in these modern days surviving a Yukon winter wasn't as big a deal as it had been, they needed a new way of measuring a person's mettle.  A man called Captain Dick Stevenson came up with the idea of drinking a cocktail in which floated a preserved human toe.  As you drink it, you have to touch the toe with your lips, and hence become a "sour-toe" as opposed to a "sourdough".  I had thought this would be a wonderfully quirky thing to do, until I got to Dawson and saw that a huge number of people, including Holland America parties, were doing it, whereupon it immediately lost its charm and quirkiness.  More information about the cocktail is here.]

We awoke this morning to the sound of rain.  It's only the second time that's happened this holiday, and I didn't begrudge it, because it's always easier to leave a place when it's raining.  Having breakfasted and packed, we loaded Arthur up for the last time and slipped sadly away from our Haines Junction lodgings.  Our first stop was just a few hundred yards up the road, at the Visitor Centre, where we turned in our Yukon passports.  We picked these up in Whitehorse when we first got there, and the idea is that as you go around to the different places of interest in the Yukon, you get them stamped.  If you get ten places stamped, you can enter into a draw to win 2 Troy ounces of gold.  If you get twenty places stamped, the draw is to win 5 Troy ounces.  We got twelve stamps each (I tried to get sneaky extra stamps at places, but Sandra always spotted me).  The woman at the Visitor Centre signed our forms, and then gave us both a little gold (not real gold) Yukon badge.  "Thank you," I said, "I'll treasure this."  And I nearly choked up as I said it, because I will treasure it.

We drove on then, almost two hours to Whitehorse, stopping a couple of times to take pictures of the views, but the scenery out this way isn't quite as staggering as it is coming into Haines Junction: I think we did the loop the right way, anti-clockwise.  Prairie dogs and squirrels ran back and forth across the road at random, as they had when we were driving up to Otter Falls yesterday, playing their own real life version of Frogger.

As we approached Whitehorse the traffic level increased alarmingly.  I'd not actually driven in Whitehorse before, just out of it, but we had a plan to get some sandwiches from The Deli which we'd used when we were here a couple of weeks ago, and eat them by the river.  This meant me  having to navigate traffic lights, multi-lane roads, and yes, even that blasted roundabout near to the hotel we'd stayed in, before we parked up, trembling slightly from nerves, near the S.S. Klondike.

We walked back into the town past our hotel, where there was a marquee set up with stalls inside selling First Nation artefacts.  The whole town seemed to be buzzing, far busier than it had been when we were last here, and far busier than what we've grown used to over the last couple of weeks.  We got our sandwiches and scurried back to a picnic table near to the huge sternwheeler, and ate mostly in silence as dark clouds started to roll in.

Then it was time to say goodbye to Arthur, and we drove him - with intense concentration - through the middle of busy Whitehorse once again, then parked him up at the airport and unloaded him.  2600 km we drove altogether, 1600 miles, much less than in Alberta or BC, but over much harder roads.  And of course with our flights to and from Inuvik, plus travelling up from Vancouver, we've covered much more ground than either of those two holidays.

We checked in to the Air North desk, then had a gruelling four hour wait before our flight back to Vancouver.  We sat in the airport building for a while, me watching a fat woman in a pink tracksuit complaining to someone that her suitcase had got dirty in the hold of the aeroplane.  Complaining and complaining.  There were three officials dealing with her at one point.  I watched her leave the airport building and get on a Holland America coach, still complaining.  I have a view on fat women who go on holiday wearing pink tracksuits which I won't share here.

After a while we went and sat outside in the sun, because the dark clouds had rolled away. The accoutrements of our holiday had been sloughed away one after the other: first our accommodation, so we had nowhere to stay, then our vehicle, so we had no way of going anywhere, and then our belongings, checked in and vanished into the bowels of the airport. We watched the prairie dogs playing Frogger across the airport runway, which is actually a lot safer than on the roads because only about six flights land here per day.  Eventually it was time to board our flight, and we flew back down to Vancouver, catching a glimpse of Mount Logan - the highest mountain in Canada - in the distance, stopping off at Kelowna (where Ogopogo lives) on the way.  We got into Vancouver at about 9:30 pm, people everywhere, so many cars and vans and trucks.  We caught the complimentary coach to our final hotel of this holiday, the Radisson Aiport Hotel, a slick place with credit card door keys, smartly dressed serving staff, beeping confirmations of button presses and where, ironically, a power cut suffered by their internet service provider means this post will go up a day late.  And no one gave me the opportunity to say, "no, this is the end of our holiday, not the start."

We arrived too late for the hotel's restaurant to feed us, so we went out looking for just a burger to fill a hole, but there was nothing of that ilk that we could find: instead, a glut of Chinese restaurants, but we didn't fancy Chinese, so we came back and ordered room service of mac and cheese, and thai noodles.  Also it was dark by 10 pm, and we saw the moon for the first time in three weeks, it feels so... southern.

I don't know how to adequately sum up my feelings about the Yukon.  I've already said I was nervous about this holiday.  I didn't know what to expect.  I thought it might be okay weather, with interesting and quirky places to visit, and I hoped beyond hope to see some amazing sights.  I didn't expect that the most useless item of clothing I bought with me was my thick, heavy coat, and I certainly didn't expect to get a tan, but that's what's happened.  There's no doubt that the good weather has been a bonus, but from what people have told us the only exceptional thing about the weather this year has been the level of the heat, not the amount of sunshine.

I'd wanted to go north, to go further up than Peace River or Prince Rupert, and see what the world looked like from higher up.  I wanted to feel the gravitas of the globe curling away under me, in the same way that I felt it above me when I stood at the southern-most tip of South Africa last year.  I wanted to feel like we were stretching up to reach the top of the world... and in doing so I've found that there are places to go to that are even further, and more unreachable, and possibly more interesting, still to explore.

We've both been stunned by the raw beauty and the unspoilt nature of this part of Canada.  At times you feel like a trespasser, and that the road you are driving along and the vehicle you are in are interlopers - which they are.  I've been stunned over and over by the scenery, and by the people who have been friendly and warm almost to an individual; here at the hotel tonight I went to get some ice, and nodded to a bloke by the lifts, who ignored me.

It's safe to say I've never been anywhere like the Yukon.  I'm no sourdough, I've only seen the place in the summer, but that's been enough.  It feels like it's taken a part of me.

We fly back tomorrow, so, with enormous sadness, this is my last entry.

Thanks for reading.

This is the Yukon, signing off.