To The Top Of The World

Apologies for the delay with the first update - we got a bit carried away with "hitting the road"! Alaska's been great so far: beautiful countryside with very friendly people and surprisingly dry and hot. Here's more of a blow-by-blow account to date...

Day 0

We arrived in Anchorage after over 20 hours of fairly mundane airport and aeroplane time. We weren't able to sit next to each other on the second flight, but Emily got some 'good chat' from the two Texan brother's who were sat on either side of her. We slept very well that night despite being in a shabby, small tent (ours was still on the back of our bikes) in the back yard of a hostel and it not really getting dark!

Days 1-2

We got up nice and early and mentally prepared ourselves for a frustrating day trying to get the bikes out of customs. As it turned out, the hardest part was walking between the Fedex building and the Customs office a few times in the Alaskan heat (yup, it's 30 C here!) and the bikes were out without any hassles. We were so excited that we started out straight away without even bothering to checkout downtown Anchorage. We made it to a campsite close to Denali National Park, which we looked round the following day. Apparently the park has bear, moose, wolves, caribou and sheep. We saw a beaver.

That evening we drove to Fairbanks in time to drop by the very helpful visitor centre to get all the information we needed about the Dalton Highway and our trip North.

Days 3-4

The epic trip North on the Dalton Highway. This is the bit we'd been warned about, repeatedly – books we've read, people we've chatted to who've done the trip, people on the plane over, and even a friendly truck driver at a gas station just before we left. It's about 500 miles from Fairbanks to Deadhorse (as far as you can drive North), and it's a mix of tarmac, dirt, gravel, mud and slipperiest of all gravelly mud. We've been incredibly grateful for our knobbly front tyres, without which we're sure we wouldn't have managed to keep it shiny side up all the way, judging by some of the fish-tail manoeuvres in the gravel and mud (and gravelly mud). Getting to grips with the terrain wasn't helped by the extra pressure of no fuel stop for the last 240 miles when our tanks generally only get us 200 miles. Economical driving really pays off it seems – on arrival in Deadhorse our bikes are telling us we've still got another 60 miles left! That bodes well for the long desert stretches in Patagonia...

The scenery up here at the top of the world is just breathtaking, especially going into the Brooks Range, after which the trees stop and the land flattens out towards the coast. It would be so nice to be able to sit and enjoy it for a while without being eaten alive by mosquitos... they're absolutely the worst that we've ever encountered anywhere by far – swarming on you within seconds of stopping anywhere. Our hippie non-deet mozzie repellent is having practically no effect and we're both already covered in bites – Emily even managed to get bitten through her motorbike trousers!

Not being able to stop for fear of being bitten to pieces has meant we've arrived in Deadhorse a good few hours early for our 'tour' to the Arctic Ocean, which has given us time to update you on our progress. Once we've done the tour we'll be heading back down the Dalton Highway a bit before camping for the 'night' with the mozzies at the side of the road. We can't really justify the $200 room at the prefab inn in Deadhorse and as there's apparently a big bear outside right now (!) we think we're just as safe quite a few miles away but out on our own...