My ride back through the tunnel to Girdwood was an interesting one. Picture the scene: it’s a baking hot day, I’m wearing my shorts and t-shirt and I’ve just walked about 5 miles to the tunnel entrance carrying over twenty kilos of gear. So I’m pretty sweaty. Then add to the picture the fact that it’s now been twelve long days since I last had a shower, twelve days since I properly washed my clothes- my one pair of now-muddy trousers, one pair of shorts and four t-shirts- and twelve days since I slept anywhere that wasn’t in my tent in a forest surrounded by moss and soil. In short, I’ve never been dirtier in my life.
I had intended, when I arrived at the area outside the tunnel, to change out of my sweaty t-shirt, which even to my own nose smelled pretty awful, but I didn’t have time. The single-lane tunnel was about to close from my direction and I immediately got a ride with the last guy who made it through the tunnel before the hour-long wait for the next opening. So there I found myself, sitting in the front seat of his brand-new, very expensive pick-up truck as we drove slowly through the dimly-lit tunnel, sweating all over the seat and feeling very conscious of quite how bad I smelled.
Talk was a little awkward at first but eventually we got going. He told me he had been the manager of a restaurant in Anchorage for the last forty years and had just driven down to Whittier to check his shrimp pots, which were unfortunately empty because an octopus had got in and eaten them all. He asked a bunch of questions about me and I told him how I’d saved up my money so that I could spent a while travelling before I had any real commitments tying me down to any place. As he pulled into a parking space at the gas station in Girdwood, a few miles past the end of the tunnel, he turned and looked straight at me.
“You know,” he said, “I envy you. I had the opportunity to travel like you’re doing when I finished college but some friends of mine were starting a restaurant and convinced me to go and help them. I told myself I’d make time for travelling later on. Now it’s been forty years and I still haven’t taken that trip.” He shook me by the hand, wished me good luck as I pulled my bag from the back of his truck, and then drove off towards his restaurant in Anchorage.
I changed my shirt, bought myself a cinnamon cookie the size of my face from the bakery beside the gas station and hitched a ride a couple of miles along the road leading into the centre of Girdwood to charge my dying phone in the library. Then I hitched back out of Girdwood again and stood beside the road going south on the main highway. I didn’t really know where I was going but I put my thumb out and before long was picked up by a father and son in a pick-up truck.
“Where are you headed?” I asked the son as he moved stuff around in the back to make room for my bag.
“We’re going to Seward,” he said.
“Cool,” I said, and got in.
The drive to Seward took an hour or so through some nice mountain scenery. The father and son lived right in the centre of town, not far from the waterfront, and they offered to drive me round some of the downtown campsites to find a spot I liked. This turned into a bit of an awkward endeavour because the campsites sucked so hard that I didn’t want to stay in any of them. There were hundreds and hundreds of people crammed into these park-like grassy spaces with noisy, generator-running RVs as far as you could see in every direction. It felt like the whole of Alaska had suddenly converged in this little town and overrun the place. After several days on my own in the woods, it was overwhelming and horrendous and I wanted to turn around and leave immediately. So I did.
“Could you just drop me back on the highway, please?” I asked the son. I went into a nearby grocery store to buy some supplies and then stood by the side of the road with my thumb out, barely an hour after I’d first driven into town. It was 9pm but it was also the longest day of the year and I was in Alaska, so I didn’t have to worry about running out of light. Forty-five minutes later, I got a ride with some guys from Seward driving out to a summer solstice party in Moose Pass, a tiny settlement half an hour back where I’d just come from. They were going to camp out beside a lake and invited me to join them. We set up our tents and walked a mile to the other side of the lake where a couple of hundred people were crowded into a log cabin dancing to an Alaskan bluegrass band called Blackwater Railroad Company, who I’d eventually go on to see twice more later on in the summer.
The show was totally awesome, they played for hours and the crowd danced so exuberantly that we broke the floor of the cabin. It was a crazy experience: the wooden floorboards bucked and warped with everyone jumping up and down so that it felt like being on a bouncy castle, just a bouncy castle made of wood. After the show I went to the local bar with some people I’d met until we got kicked out at 3am, still in broad daylight. Then I wandered back to my tent (who knows where the guys I got a ride with ended up?) and fell asleep.
This is the only picture you’re getting to accompany this post because it’s the only one I took. Sorry about that.
Total distance hitchhiked: 2,465 km.
Total number of rides: 20.
Distance from Nabesna: 634 km.