Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Due to the magic of the Jones Act, it would be illegal for a German-built ship such as the magnificent Norwegian Joy to do an Alaska cruise from Seattle and stop only at U.S. ports, even if operated by a U.S.-based cruise line and staffed with an American crew. One perverse consequence of the Act is, therefore, that U.S. law requires all of the passengers to be unloaded at a Canadian port and spend their money in Canada rather than in the U.S. for at least one day. This turns the trip into an international one, which can legally be run in a foreign-made ship.

Victoria, British Columbia, is getting enormously rich as a conseqeunce of this 1920 law. We stopped there at the end of May 2026.

Walking toward town, Fishermen’s Wharf:

We summoned an Uber for the 30-minute drive to Butchart Gardens, created circa 1906 by the wife of a cement baron in his former limestone quarry and run today by the family.

There’s something for everyone here, including fountains, totem poles, restaurants, a carousel, etc.

The shocking price of $44/adult ($31 in USD; 10 years of supercharged immigration, more carefully selected for skills and education than immigrants to the U.S., has made the Canadian economy so strong that the exchange rate vs. the USD has collapsed) doesn’t keep the place from being crowded on a sunny Sunday. They sell a membership to locals and the gardens are dog-friendly so maybe that’s part of it, but most of the visitors seemed to be tourists. It was challenging at times to get through the rose garden.

It all started with a Japanese garden in 1906:

Why is it virtually impossible to buy stone lanterns in the U.S.? Here are some beautiful ones, including an unusual one that is made, perhaps, from concrete logs?

I asked ChatGPT “Why aren’t Japanese-style stone lanterns made in China and shipped to U.S. garden stores by container/truck and then sold at a reasonable cost?” Our AI overlord says that the wholesale cost in China might be around $100, but…(1) containers are weight-limited, (2) “Breakage and missing parts are a killer”, (3) the port-to-store or port-to-house shipping is going to be expensive for a heavy object, 4) #tariffs #blameTrump, (5) stone lanterns don’t sell fast enough for a garden center, (6) Americans are tasteless and will accept a cast concrete or “cast stone” substitute.

Japanese Style in North Carolina seems to bring in the real deal for $1,000-$2,500, but they weigh 300-650 lbs. and then shipping is ruinous on top of that.

Maybe Optimus can learn to make stone lanterns?

I don’t dream of the winter that makes these rhododendrons and Japanese maples possible, but they are beautiful in spring!

Inspiration:

What do you get when you mix some of the New Canadians’ food traditions with Legacy Canada? Butter chicken poutine ($26 in fake money):

Artur, an immigrant from Turkey, had taken us out to the gardens. Wasim, an immigrant from northern India, brought us back to downtown Victoria.

The fountain across from the British Columbia Parliament Buildings celebrates the provinces and territories of Canada, which won its independence without a traitorous rebellion, unlike some countries…

We didn’t invest in the guided tour of the provincial parliament since, among other things, the idea of the capital not being in Vancouver seems ridiculous.

The Empress, a railroad-built hotel, is reached by walking past a statute of Emily Carr, a Canadian artist and writer unknown to Americans. She is the perfect inspiration for today’s immigration enthusiasts since she never got married or had children (though she had a dog Billie and a pet monkey Woo). Certainly she’s been replaced many times over!

At the opposite edge of the hotel’s block:

A passion for history required that we visit Rogers’ Chocolates, founded in 1885 by a man born in Massachusetts. This particular store dates to 1903.

Next stop: Munro’s Books.

Readers can perhaps guess that I headed straight for the children’s section.

Back in the adult area:

Of course, the staff was masked as well as allergic to cinnamon (see above):

The historic Chinatown surely has some great food, but we’d already stocked up on poutine at the garden.

Puzzle Lab was our favorite store. Laser cutting the “jigsaw” wooden puzzles enables them to cost a fraction of what a Stave costs (What would I do if Elizabeth Warren would follow through on her promise to steal Elon Musk’s $1 trillion and then give it to me (the second part isn’t included in her promise, but it seems only fair)? Order a bunch of Stave puzzles, which are perhaps $3,500 each.).

As part of an outdoor visitor orientation map, the government-run museum acknowledges that it is on stolen land:

Thanks to the miracle of spectacular immigration-fueled population growth, the city will be approving the replacement of an unsightly light-hogging single-family home with a beautiful 6-story apartment building:

At the extreme western end of the Trans-Canada Highway, there is a Mile 0 sign and a poignant statue of Terry Fox who tried to push through his cancer and run the entire distance. He died at 22. “Dreams are made possible if you try.” Well, I guess that’s true when you consider what happens to those who don’t try.

Then a walk back to the ship with views of the Olympic Mountains across the water, most famously traversed by enricher Ahmed Ressam in 1999.

Was ChatGPT helpful in planning this stop?

With 8 AM–6 PM, don’t burn the day on Butchart Gardens unless you particularly want gardens; it is farther from the cruise port. For your family, I’d walk from Ogden Point along the breakwater/Dallas Road waterfront to Beacon Hill Park, then continue to the Inner Harbour, Parliament buildings, and back. Victoria Trails describes Ogden Point Breakwater as a walk near the cruise terminal with harbor and Strait views. Independent cruise guides estimate the Empress/Inner Harbour area at about 1.5 miles from the cruise dock, so this is very doable as a half-day walk.

No. Butchart Gardens is a work of genius. Downtown Victoria is reasonably nice, but crowded with tourists and not filled with important architecture. Buying 3 lbs. of chocolate at Rogers’ and then reading through a stack of 2SLGBTQQIA+ books at Munro’s would be delightful, but doesn’t fill an entire day. ChatGPT frightened us further in a follow-up by saying that we wouldn’t be able to get an Uber back from Butchart. We got one within about 3 minutes (Wasim was dropping someone else off).

Related:

• a tale of my 1993 visit to Victoria

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We stopped into Ketchikan, Alaska, our last port in the Great Land. The first thing I found was the MV Malaspina, an Alaska Marine Highway ferry launched in 1963 that I took in 1993. She’s a Jones Act survivor that remained in service through 2022. Her sister ship, MV Matanuska, was launched in 1962 and remains in service! Malaspina is used as seasonal housing now:

A former paper mill at the Ward Cove cruise facility has been turned into a massive souvenir mall:

Downtown was mobbed, as you might expect from 19,000 cruise ship passengers being unloaded into a town of about 8,000.

What used to happen on Creek Street (above right)?

Tired of cruise ship food? Here’s the line for lunch at 11:17 am. Keep in mind that all 19,000 tourists have been on unlimited 6 meals per day plus 24-hour room service.

Commercial fishing boats with the real money-makers behind them:

Walking for 20 minutes to the Totem Heritage Center, run by the city, gets one away from most of the cuise ship crowd. The museum reminds us that Native Americans are natural stewards and protectors of the environment from the rapacious white man. Curiously, when I was in Alaska in 1993 the clearcut forests on Native Corporation land was pointed out as a contrast to the National Forest, in which white administrators wouldn’t permit clearcutting.

There was quite a bit of fragmentation in the “late nineteenth century”:

White do-gooders today want young Native Alaskans to invest a huge amount of time and energy in learning their ancestral languages, now of no practical value:

I asked a local native what he thought about this. “It would be a lot better to learn Spanish or Chinese,” he said, “after learning English. Or maybe Arabic.” He pointed out that things were simpler in his youth when the white man wanted Indians to learn English and white culture. “There are so many immigrants from India, China, Vietnam, Latin America, the Middle East, and God knows where else that, in addition to our native culture we have to learn about languages, religions, and cultures from 10 or 15 different countries just to get through a day in the U.S.”

Speaking of keeping traditions alive, the local salmon hatchery is still closed for coronapanic:

A short walk down a creek passes by the Trail of Tears, updated for the 21st century: Married Man’s Trail.

The second facility for the city museum welcomes visitors with a land acknowledgement and pilots with an E6-B.

The local bookstore is next door and is ready in case a Black or indigenous (Palestinian?) 2SLGBTQQIA+ customer comes in:

Meanwhile, the store features a work by John Muir, a renowned racist (“advocated for white supremacy and promoting the race through eugenics, which called for forced sterilization of Black people and other minority groups”) who founded an anti-immigrant organization (“From 1989 – 1996, the Sierra Club had a national policy to greatly limit immigration”).

The kindness section of town: “Saving one cat will not change the world, but for that one cat … the world will change forever.” (Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever, might adjust this slightly…)

The main shopping drag isn’t a bad place to prepare for Christmas:

It also works for hunting and gun nuts:

Back to our ship for the 1.5-day trip to Victoria, British Columbia:

What had ChatGPT recommended?

Norwegian uses Ward Cove, not the downtown Ketchikan docks. Ward Cove says the complimentary shuttle runs between Ward Cove and downtown Berth IV and takes about 20 minutes each way.

Do not assume Rainbird Trail is available. The Ketchikan Gateway Borough says Rainbird Trail is indefinitely closed because of the August 2024 landslide.

For a forest walk, I’d look at Ward Lake / Frog Pond instead. Ward Lake Trail is described as a mostly flat lake-circumference trail, wide gravel, with bridges over Ward Creek. AllTrails lists Ward Lake as a 1.5-mile loop near Ward Cove, generally easy, about 44 minutes. That means you could combine: Ward Cove → Ward Lake/Frog Pond area → shuttle downtown → Creek Street/totems → ship

This was useless advice. The trailhead suggested by ChatGPT is a 3-mile walk from the cruise dock along a main road and there aren’t rental cars available at Ward Cove. As it happens, the rest of the family enjoyed a fishing excursion in a 6-passenger boat (plus the captain’s two Australian shepherds). It was too early for salmon, but they caught some rockfish and then had a bbq on an island. I didn’t join because it would have been much sitting in an uncomfortable boat (spoiled by the Norwegian Joy!).

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Where did the Huna Tlingit Indians forced by Climate Change to evacuate Glacier Bay circa 1800 end up? Just across Icy Strait in Hoonah. Right next to their town, after salmon canning became unprofitable, they set up a theme park for cruise ships called “Icy Strait Point”:

What did our AI cruise director suggest?

Icy Strait Point has a built-for-cruise feel, but it is also one of the better places for whale watching or kayaking because the tour boats don’t have to spend a lot of time just reaching wildlife areas. The port’s official site emphasizes the old salmon cannery setting and excursions tied to the natural setting and local history.

For a no-excursion plan, do the Icy Strait Point Nature Trail, beach, cannery area, and maybe walk/ride into Hoonah. The Nature Trail is short—about 1.1 miles, easy, roughly 0.5–1 hour—so it won’t satisfy your “couple of hours in forest” goal by itself. If you want a more substantial activity here, this is a good port for a guided wilderness hike, kayak, or whale-watch rather than improvising deep woods, partly because Chichagof Island is serious bear country.

Here’s the overview map:

We bought tickets from the ship for the Sky Peak gondola, which rises 1,600′, and arrived in the middle of a cloud for a bilingual talk by a tribal elder (not Elizabeth Warren):

Was waiting in line for the gondola worth it? 100 percent! Where better to practice outdoor masking than on top of a mountain in Alaska?

Remember to have your coffee before getting off the ship. The line for the shack at the top of the gondola wasn’t pretty:

The trail to a long boardwalk carried some warnings:

Who wouldn’t be happy to be out in the fresh air with a 12-gauge shotgun? One of these guys was from Indiana(!) and now makes his year-round home in Hoonah:

Were the guns necessary? The guides/guards said that the bears were all down closer to the water because there was an ample food supply down there during the late May time of our visit. The bear-free boardwalk:

The weather cleared when we got back to the top of the gondola:

There was a 30-minute line to get onto a free gondola that saves a 20-minute walk into Hoonah:

Hoonah with multiple ships in port is at least as crowded as Manhattan and with comparable restaurant waiting times.

Instead of waiting in the line, we hoofed it back to our ship and ate lunch on board.

I enjoyed seeing Serenade of the Seas, the Royal Caribbean ship that was home for me and mom on my very first ocean cruise (Baltic 2016). She’s also a product of Meyer Werft.

For fans of the costs of government regulation, a Jones Act Alaskan Marine Highway ferry, M/V Hubbard. She was built in Alaska and took 17 years from being “envisioned” to completion, i.e., enough time for the Chinese to build a few cities and associated shipyards for Neopanamax container carriers. The cost might have been as high as $100 million, including crew quarters that were added, for this Ketchikan-built 5,000-ton vessel that carries 53 cars. With her sister ship, in other words, the cost was higher than what our Chinese brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters charge to build a Neopanamax container ship of 15,000 TEU capacity and 135,000 gross tons. Do the Chinese need 17 years? ChatGPT says closer to 1 year, though this can stretch to 3-4 years depending on the shipyard’s backlog.

If we returned to Icy Strait Point we’d book a whale watch.

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