Having a whale of a time in Alaska ...

A SEAL drifts by on an ice floe, basking peacefully on his back in the warmth of the evening sun. Above, aboard the P&O liner Regal Princess, I am ending my day contentedly with the help of a little ice, too, though mine is in a glass.

I am outward bound from Vancouver for the fabled land billed in the brochure as The Last Frontier - Alaska.

It is an awesome wilderness which, with the harsh and unforgiving winter past, is vibrant with animal, bird and insect life.

It is vibrant, too, on the floating, 70,000-ton palace of pleasure that is the Regal Princess.

The service aboard is that of a top-class hotel - discreet and understated, without a trace of stuffiness; there are too many Americans for the mood to be anything other than informal.

Terrific food flows non-stop from the galley. Between meals you can enjoy exciting shows, music, dancing, a casino, a cinema, a high- tech gym, swimming pool and an on-deck Jacuzzi in which to relax - drink in hand.

And when the Regal Princess drops anchor in remote little harbours there's always an adventure at hand.

You can fly in a bush-pilot's floatplane over glaciers, visit a log-cabin lodge in the woods and dine on salmon baked outdoors over an alder wood fire, take a safari through the Denali national park with its moose, caribou, herds of wild sheep, wolf packs and grizzly bears - even run whitewater rapids by raft if that's your taste.

I struck it rich at the Little El Dorado gold camp outside Fairbanks - a working mine where you can pan for pay dirt"in a mountain creek in the old-fashioned way.

You keep what you find, and any doubts I had were washed downstream when I found a real nugget. Not big enough for me to give up the day job - it weighed in at 110 dollars - but for a minute or two I felt the grip of the fever that sparked the Klondyke gold rush.

Next, I explored the Kenai Fjords National Park - a world crammed with wildlife.

Kittiwakes, oystercatchers, cormorants, shearwaters, storm petrels all crowded the tree-capped islands and rocky outcrops. Horned puffins, in such numbers they seemed like vast rafts from a distance, rose and fell in the swell.

A school of killer whales surged by - and then the greatest of thrills, a mighty humpback whale surfaced.

It rolled slowly beneath the waters again and vanished, more awesome and mysterious than an atomic submarine.

Then it was on to the Home of the North Wind. That's what the old Indian word Skagway means. But for almost a century it has also meant the stampede for gold.

The little harbour became a rip-roaring boom town overnight. They called it the toughest place on Earth. It was the launch-pad for the prospectors heading for the Klondike. There were so many of them that the infamous Trail of "98, ground out over the mountain passes by the shuffling feet of men and their mules and ponies, is worn into the rocks.We climbed through sheer gorges and over cascading torrents in a painless way, however - aboard a vintage parlour car of the White Pass And Yukon, the narrow-gauge railway born of the gold rush. The views were spectacular.

Skagway, with its boardwalks and unashamed fakery, is now little more than a stage set for the endless re-telling for tourists of its lurid past. Disney would do it better. The best part is the old trail out to the White Pass summit - and they can't fake that.

But not everything is blissful in this lovely land. There's one hazard you have to learn to live with come summer, and that's the biting insects - a small price to pay for an experience of a lifetime.

FACTFILE

P&O Princess Cruises (0171 800 2468) nine-night Majesty Of Alaska cruise starts at pounds 1,595. Includes free flights to and from any regional UK airport to Gatwick or Heathrow, plus overnight hotel stay prior to departure; scheduled flights to and from the ship, all meals, entertainment on board the ship and port taxes. Add-on tours start at pounds 295 p.p.

Copyright 1996 MGN LTD
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