THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS

This rugged and ravishing destination is best experienced from the comfort of a Ponant ship

2020-11-09 -

Sailing out of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy in Russia’s Far East, I’d never seen a blue whale. I still haven’t. Sensed one? Certainly – close enough to touch, though shrouded in a fog so thick it swallowed your breath. I heard her, too: an explosion of wet air, epic as it was sudden, like a giant snorkel being cleared.

A few minutes earlier, the captain of French cruise line Ponant’s Le Soléal had alerted us to the whale’s presence over the PA system. The ship almost lists as we slow to a stop and a couple of hundred passengers step collectively onto balconies, into a pea-souper that veils anything beyond the rail.

There is no mistaking the whale’s presence, however, even before it’s confirmed by a sound like a vast tarpaulin flapping. For whole minutes we laze there companionably, a few hundred humans, a 142-metre ship and a female blue whale almost a fifth of its size.

My Moby Dick moment turns out to be just the first in a welter of such encounters on our 13-day cruise of the Aleutian Islands, billed by Ponant as a “fabulous sea journey… along the Pacific Ring of Fire” – specifically, the necklace of volcanoes and islands at its northern

tip, between Russia’s Kamchatkan and America’s Alaskan peninsulas. And there are indeed plenty of volcanoes. But they quickly become a backdrop to the trip’s real revelation: the wildlife encountered at every turn.

Into the wild

By the time we fetch up in the Alaskan capital of Juneau almost a fortnight after leaving Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, we are almost punch-drunk with whales – killer, sei, fin, sperm, minke and humpback – and bears, courting, fighting and even feeding on washed-up whales. There are dolphins, porpoises, pods of seals and colonies of sea lions. All of which are, in turn, dwarfed by an embarrassment of birdlife, from albatross and terns to puffins and owls, clouds of kittiwakes and great murmurations of auklets shifting across a blank sky as if by algorithm.

Even the majestic bald eagles become as common as pigeons when we get to the proto-Russian Dutch Harbor: perching on every streetlight; brawling on the onion domes of the 19th-century Holy Ascension Orthodox Church. That abundance initially seems at odds with the eerily empty, monochromatic land and seascape we encounter. In fact, both are products of the same forces, not least the cold, nutrient-and-plankton-rich currents that flow across the Aleutian shelf. From the depths to the sky above, and the dark-sand shores on which we land, everything we see is one vast food chain in action.

Those landings, too, give the wildlife a run for its money as a highlight, from Adak Island – a lowering mix of Milford Sound and the Scottish Highlands, where we hike for four hours across a sprung floor of peat – to Atka, where we come across a B-24 Liberator bomber that crash-landed in 1942, now rotting elegantly in a field of green.

From gun turrets to hideouts, remnants of World War II battles abound – as do those of earlier eras. Walking along the green slopes of Unga Island, above small black coves, among the ruins of a wooden village that was home to more than

300 people a century ago, is an entirely otherworldly experience. Today, all that remains are drifts of bleached palings, like piano keys; a wooden church, collapsed to its knees, spire still aloft, as a tiny Arctic fox darts among the footings.

Those ghostscapes are mesmerising. And each makes you happier than ever to climb back aboard the entirely living Le Soléal, with its warm cream-and-wood interiors and elegant main dining room, where you watch the sea go by while dining on beautifully balanced fourcourse meals, with a particular emphasis on French classics.

French sensibilities

Ponant is famed for the ‘French touch’ it brings to cruising. But the line’s DNA isn’t just French – it’s Breton. While it’s now part of French billionaire François-Henri Pinault’s private family company Groupe Artémis – which also controls Christie’s, Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga – it still takes its seafaring, or ‘navigation’ as it calls it in French, seriously, as befits a company founded by Breton mariners. The bridge remains open throughout our voyage, as we jettison the itinerary to observe a whale or duck into an inlet because the weather’s good.

The two worlds – onboard luxury and extreme wildlife – collide on our last night, just before the captain’s farewell drinks, when a party of whales is spotted. Everyone immediately emerges on deck in their finery to find orca, humpback and sperm whales lolling around the ship, flocks of albatross and gulls circling their heads like blowflies.

For half an hour, we watch them revolving around us in the never-ending evening that is Alaska in summer. Only when our eyes are so gorged that every wave becomes another back about to break the surface do we finally go in, to find the champagne has been cooling its heels and is now ready to be poured.

Travel file

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