We heard this story from a totem carver at the Alaskan Wildlife Sanctuary. Apparently it is a frequently utilized motif in totem poles and the myth is of Tlingit origin:

Long long ago, back when ravens were white, an old tribal chief stole the sun and put it in a box and the entire world was covered with darkness. However, the Raven grew tired of stumbling around in the shadows and went in search of the light. As he came near the house of the old chief, he overheard the chief talking with his daughter, and the Raven learned that the chief kept all the sun of the world locked away in a box. Predictably, he promptly devised a plan to steal the box. The Raven had the ability to turn himself into any living thing, so he transformed himself into a needle from a hemlock tree and landed himself into the river. Every evening, the chief’s daughter would ladle water out of the river to drink and unknowingly drank the Raven. Soon afterwards, she became pregnant and in time gave birth to a son — the Raven in human form. The chief loved his new grandson greatly and indulged his every whim. Eventually, the Raven worked out the sun was being kept hidden in a box, and began begging the chief to give him the box as a toy. When his grandfather refused, Raven began crying and screaming and throwing tantrums and pleading for the box. But the chief refused.

Despondent, the Raven stopped eating and i hurt the old chief to see his grandson like this. After several days, the chief reluctantly gave him the box, with the strict instructions that the boy could play with the box but that he must, must not open it. Raven gave his word that he would not open the box, but he lied to the old chief. Raven immediately changed back to his bird form, and opened the box releasing the sun. When the chief saw this he placed guards to the entrance of the clan house to stop Raven from escaping, so Raven carried the sun up to the smokehole at the top of the clan house, but the sun was too large to fit out the smokehole. Raven pushed and pushed the sun breaking off pieces of light that formed the sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky, until eventually the sun burst out of the smokehole and filled up the earth. Because there were guards at the door to the clan house, Raven was trapped. Eventually he flew out of the smokehole too, where he was covered in soot and coal dust turning him black forevermore.

I’m gonna sleep in at least one of these days… not asking for much, just past 0530 would be nice, especially seeing I’m supposed to be on holidays and all. After yesterday’s hectic effort, I really needed a heatpack as my lower back was not at all happy with me. But for some reason our cabin steward’s supervisor had told us we needed to call Room Service staff to come and take the heatpack to a microwave for me. But when I called, I got nothing, just a call back recording and they never called me back. So I had to harass the cabin steward after all, and by the time I got myself some heat, I was nearly in tears. 🙁 Mostly because it’s so hard to ask for help, let alone ask about four times over for the same assistance. But about half an hour after this confusion, the Manager of Housekeeping came to see me and made arrangements for my heatpack to be picked up every morning by the cabin steward and bought bak to me at 0630. So hopefully it won’t be so hard to get that sorted for the rest of our stay on board… not a great start to the day.

Breakfast was the usual smorgasbord of cooked breakfast goodies – scrambled eggs, fried eggs, hash browns, sausages, bacon, pastries, danishes, breads, bagels, fruits, yoghurts… I could go on and on here. I had a bit of scrambled egg with smoked salmon and some mushrooms, but watched on as my fellow diners went back for huge plate after huge plate piled high with food. I can’t believe how much some people put away. And to think they’ll be back in a few hours to do it again for lunch!

Sea days are usually pretty laid back and cruisey (pun just for you Mr K.) so we pottered around the shops a bit checking out the duty free – everything from awesome designer brand watches for a fraction of the prices back home to Russian diamonds, Indian pashminas, Canadian ammolite jewellery, Austrian Swarovski statuettes and jewellery, ties, cufflinks, souvenirs, clothes, designer handbags. A crazy array of stuff considering you’re on a ship. Far fewer pearls than the ships cruising the Pacific, which was going to be par for the course I guess. Bought Mr K a big chunky men’s watch – and I hope he really likes it because I am going to have to drag it all over North America for the next few weeks, taking up valuable luggage space and all! 😛

I went to a talk on the Glacier Bay National Park that we are going to be cruising through on the weekend that looks so amazing. They showed us heaps of photos taken just last week to tell us what to expect, where the best viewing positions were and what sort of wildlife highlights we might catch if we are lucky: seals, sealions, humpback whales, killer whales, sea otters, bald eagles, puffins and lord knows what else! Hints for new players – sea otters are scared off by camera flashes, so hopefully *that guy* who doesn’t know how to use his camera will turn his damn flash off if we see some. Apparently we have a good chance of catching big families of rafting sea otters, that’s when they all hang onto each other and float. Yeah… rapey rapey sea otters… Mimola, if you are reading this – I have decided it’s quite okay to eat sea otters, they’re not so nice the more you research into them 😛

Other than that I’ve had a relaxing day watching some talks on the ports we are going to, and caught a movie on the tellie while watching the gorgeous view go by outside our balcony (love this balcony room thing!). Tonight is formal night so time to go get gussied up.

Formal night is always a bit of good fun on the cruise ships. Some people will go the full nine yards and wear something that looks like a bridesmaid or mother of the bride type frock, others will wear something really simple and roll out the bling and others, because you have a huge floating international community going on, will turn up in a dress kimono or a elaborately beaded sari! Beautiful outfits everywhere and the men… well, most of them remember to throw in a suit and bring a tie. Then, of course, there is always the traditional champagne waterfall, which I’ve seen about a half dozen times now. So, (even though I shouldn’t) I am willing to admit I’m really only turning up to watch it in the vague hope that the whole thing will come tumbling down! 😀

After dinner we went back to the jeweller so Aunty Mary could pick up her earlier purchase… a fancy new watch that needed a link removed (the guys in the fine jewellery store know us by name already – not a good sign!), and then came back to the stateroom for a cuppa. Just happened to step out of a balcony for a moment and was looking out at the waves (which are now Pacific Ocean blue rather than the brownish ocean we were seeing between Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland) and we saw some whales breeching and throwing themselves around not far off the side of the ship. We were watching them for about ten minutes, when suddenly one jumped out of the water barely 40-50m from us and we realized they were killer whales or orcas! Smooth, black and big white bellies! So cool!

Lovin’ Alaska so far and we haven’t even hit the ground yet! 😀

CRUISING THE ALASKAN PASSAGE! OMG… I literally can’t believe I am here. This is something I have dreamed of since I was in my late teens – probably due to being overdosed on nature documentaries as a kid – and it’s also somewhere I never thought I’d get to with my cactus back. But here I am!

Got up this morning stupidly early – moronic internal body clock has been deciding that 5hrs sleep is plenty since we arrived here actually – and looked out the window to see rain, rain and more rain. 🙁 Not what you really want to see when you are setting off on a holiday of a lifetime! That’s just not on. Spent most of the morning running about figuring out how to print boarding passes, deciding what we needed to throw out and what was coming with us, returning the rental car and squishing shit into suitcases. Called a taxi and got delivered down to the Canada Place Cruise Terminal and was briefly tempted to go to the other cruise ship that was getting ready to depart – the Disney Wonder which had Mickey Mouse ears on it’s logo and was heading down to San Francisco and Los Angeles, but I guess I’ll have to wait for that. 🙂

We have out little cabin with its little balcony and once our luggage arrived (Aunty Mary’s got held up by the guys downstairs… it could have been the cutlery she had on her or the bottle of wine in her suitcase, but we’ll never know because security released it before they made her open it!) and we settled a few things in, we set about learning the lay of the land – or lay of the ship as it might be. We have both cruised on Princess ships before and they tend to have a similar layout, so much so that when we first boarded and saw the decor we both immediately had a sense of ‘coming home’ as everything looked very familiar… from the timber panelling and carpets to the bars and pool decks, the Island Princess everything has a similar lay out to other ships in the Princess fleet that we were familiar with (the Dawn Princess and the Sun Princess). Only this is a smaller ship so there seems to be many more common areas, a few different bars and things that are not on the larger ships but they just don’t accommodate as many. Breakfast will be interesting with the Horizon Deck looking like it seats about half what we have seen in the past.

As the ship started to pull out of Vancouver the weather started to clear, and the rain ceased long enough for us to get up on the top decks and watch the ship pull out of port. Didn’t take long and the bars were thrown open and the Embarkation Party was kicked off by the entertainment staff. Now, I don’t care where you are from, but in my book, a band playing reggae and wait staff walking around offering cocktails with little umbrella drinks in them, does NOT a beach party make when it’s 19 degrees and still drizzling a bit! No matter how hard they tried they couldn’t get many people up and dancing with them and the cocktails weren’t selling so good… perhaps they should have been flogging mulled wine or rum toddy’s or something to warm the cockles. 🙂

We met our cabin steward, Jovie, who I found out has been working for Princess for nine years. It also turns out he worked out of Australia for a while. So we got to chatting and it also turns out that he worked on the Dawn Princess from 2010 to 2012 – the same ship we went on in 2011 for a Christmas Cruise around New Zealand. And wouldn’t you believe it? Jovie was on the Dawn Princess for the Christmas Cruise around New Zealand that year. Proving yet again that it’s a small world after all (*blatant Disney reference there for people playing at home). Such an odd coincidence but anyway there it is.

Tonight’s dinner down in the Provence Dining Room was interesting. We are at a table of six, I am the youngest at the table by about an easy 15-20 years. Two American couples – one from Kansas City, Missouri and the other from Southern California. And one Australian couple from Melbourne… this Aussie woman (wouldn’t you know it, her name is Sheryl) is about as loud, outspoken, brash, ill-educated, uniformed and boorish as they come. She doesn’t let anyone get a word in edgewise and speaks over her poor browbeaten husband all the time, even though he seems lovely enough. She’s anti-immigration, she’s anti-indigenous people, she’s anti-education funding, she’s anti-fucking everything and thinks ‘that woman’ needs to be voted out of office in September ‘because she keeps wasting so much money on things like education’… she actually said that – word for word. Strangely enough they think Campbell Newman is a bit of a disaster for Queensland, but that Abbott will be great for Australia. Made me wonder, are we actually from the same damn country and where is the goddamn KoolAid coming from? It was everything I could do not to yell at her, that if we spent more bloody money on education, then perhaps we’d have less ignorant fucktards travelling the world making Australians looking like backwater yobbos! *deep breath* It’s only a week and we can always get the maitre d’hotel to move us to another table. :S There’s always gotta be one, hasn’t there? Everyone else seemed lovely and had interesting travel stories and career backgrounds to share when noisome Sheryl shut her fucking pie hole long enough to let someone else talk to a minute altogether.

Anyway, had dinner and hightailed it out of there as soon as was decent to do so. Back to our lovely little balcony cabin and looks like it will be an early night here after such a long day. Tomorrow we are all at sea… literally.