In a state with few roads, small airstrips become Alaska’s highways.  Photo by Gene Korte

Above that imaginary line called the Arctic Circle the Alaskan wilderness is home to hundreds of miles of lakes and rivers, mountains and forests, but few people.

Airstrips are the only highways up here and the long winters demand resilience. The school in the village of Anaktuvuk Pass, for instance, doesn’t close unless the temperature falls below minus 50 degrees. And in tiny Bettles, our second stop inside the Arctic Circle, an old single-engine floatplane is available to drop travelers into the bush for weeks.

ANAKTUVUK PASS, POPULATION 340

On a sunny Indian summer day we flew into this friendly village on an all-day excursion from Fairbanks. Located 150 miles south of the Arctic Ocean near the Gates of the Arctic National Park, it is the last remaining settlement of the Nunamiut, the inland Inupiat Eskimos. The only sign of civilization that we saw on our flight was the silver colored Alaskan oil pipeline that was installed in the late 1970s. It appears as a double stripe from the air, one line is the pipe and the other is the maintenance road.

For thousands of years the Inupiat Eskimos were nomadic, moving seasonally following the caribou herds. In the mid-20th century a few families gathered in this place to create a new home, and today the village prospers in part because of their portion of Alaska’s oil revenue.

When the tribe first arrived, they came by dog sled. Now they hunt caribou — the herd is estimated to number half a million — on snowmobiles and ATVs. And, though they have more food choices now, caribou is still part of the daily diet for most locals.

The Eskimos’ first dwellings here were sod houses. Now families live in durable heated homes. The town has a water treatment plant, electricity, sewer system, health clinic, police and fire stations, a grocery store, a Presbyterian Church, a U.S. Post Office, even a museum. The Simon Paneak Memorial Museum, http://www.co.north-slope.ak.us/nsb/55.htm, tells the story of these Eskimos. And in a little museum shop residents sell carvings and the caribou skin masks for which the village is widely known.

In the summer months there’s a small restaurant where it’s ESPN all the time, and the cheeseburgers are as tasty as they are down in the lower 48. An estimated 40 percent of the village has access to the internet in their homes, and probably everyone has Dish TV. No alcohol is available in this village and its ban is strictly enforced.

When we arrived, it was sunny and in the 40s. By midday it was well into the 70s and we heard some grumbling about the heat. The village had already experienced cold weather and frost earlier in August and this heat wave was unexpected. The winters, arriving soon, are very cold and the thermometer will stay below zero for months.

There are no roads into or out of Anaktuvuk Pass. Aside from the food (game, fish, wild strawberries and cranberries in a brief season) gathered by the tribe, every item in this town is flown in. During the course of our day here about a dozen planes landed, including small single-engine planes — mostly for hunters — and even a 1940’s era war bird, a C46. Called Dumbo, it flies into air shows in the lower 48, but it landed several times here delivering fuel oil to the village.

Our day trip to Anaktuvuk Pass is a tour offered by Warbelow’s Air Ventures, Inc., http://www.warbelows.com, based at the Fairbanks International Airport. For more information about the people who settled in Anaktuvuk Pass along with mid-20th-century photos of them, read “Nunamiut, Among Alaska’s Inland Eskimos” by Helge Ingstad (The Countryman Press, 1954). In a recent edition it has a new introduction by the former curator of the Anaktuvuk Pass museum.

BETTLES, POPULATION 12

Hunters, fishermen, backpackers and those in search of the Northern Lights come to Bettles, the smallest town in Alaska, for the wilderness experience of the far north. A dozen Japanese visitors, on the hunt for that magnificent light show, the aurora borealis, arrived the days we were here.

The Bettles Lodge, http://www.bettleslodge.com, is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. Built in the late 1940’s it’s a laidback, casual lodge with good food and conversation, wireless internet and a half-dozen guest rooms reminiscent of what hotel rooms looked like in those old Western movies. A newer building, the Aurora Lodge, has bigger rooms with their own toilets and shower/tubs. And like Anaktuvuk Pass, Bettles has a busy airstrip.

On our last day inside the Arctic Circle, we walked down a dusty road to the Bettles Post Office where a hunter was mailing home caribou horns that he found while in the bush. The postmistress helped him wrap the packages and sent them on their way. Despite their size, the total was only $28 parcel post.

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© 2011-2014  Diana and Gene Korte

Bodega Bay is one of the many scenic stops on the 76-mile Pacific coastline of Sonoma County in northern California. Photo by Gene Korte

Located 30 miles north of San Francisco and next door to the Napa Valley, this area is home to more than 400 wineries, fine Northern California cuisine — flavorful, local, often organic — and miles of dramatic Pacific coastline.

In mid-December, the leaves are just turning colors, temps are in the high 60s and the sky is sunny. And that’s the winter forecast every year, with a tad bit of rain added for variety. Fortunately for visitors, this is also the off-season. So there’s a lot of scenery in and around vineyards, bargains in its many restaurants and small hotels and not much traffic, (www.sonomacounty.com).

For those travelers who come to do more than wine and dine, there are bike and hiking trails, golf courses and state parks, including Jack London State Historic Park (www.jacklondonpark.com), named for one of California’s most famous writers.

For art of a different kind, visit the sculptures on Florence Avenue in Sebastopol. They are one-of-a-kind treasures. It’s there you’ll find the whimsical creations of Patrick Amiot. It seemed every house on that street had one of the sculptures in its front yard. As we turned the corner onto Florence, we had one of those “oh look” moments and suspect many other visitors do, too. See an interview with the artist at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN0neVpHSO0/

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The Carnton Plantation house in Franklin, Tennesseet,  as seen here from the McGavock Cemetery, was witness to one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.      Photo by Gene Korte     

In the waning light of a November 1864 evening, it’s said that the Union soldiers sang hymns while Confederate bands played “Dixie.” Over five hours amidst the cannon booms and cavalry advances, the firing of tens of thousands of muskets and bloody hand-to-hand combat, 9,200 soldiers would lay wounded.

During the last months of the war, the Battle of Franklin, located 16 miles from Nashville, was not the largest fought, but it was the bloodiest. Nearly 50,000 soldiers from 17 states both North and South – three of these contributed soldiers to both sides – met on the battlefield.

As casualties mounted, nearby Carnton Plantation was commandeered as a field hospital. Four of the six Confederate generals who died in this conflict spent their last moments on the porch. The wounded were mostly soldiers from the South, but both they and Union soldiers ended up side by side on the floors of every room, where surgeries and amputations went on nearly round the clock. Carnton Plantation, which has been open to visitors since 1978, still has blood permanently staining the wooden floors.

Carrie McGavock was the mistress of Carnton Plantation at the time of the battle. She and her husband, John, reburied nearly 1,500 of the dead a few years later on their own property, once the owner of the original gravesite announced plans to plow under the burial place of the war dead.

Carrie devoted much of her life to tending these graves, often accompanied by her lifelong friend, Mariah, once a slave and later a free woman. Carrie, who had buried three of her own young children in nearby graves, walked through the cemetery daily, carrying her Book of the Dead. In it was a list of the names, regiments and home states of most of the soldiers who are still buried in the cemetery at Carnton Plantation, known now as the McGavock Confederate Cemetery. To this day, it’s still the largest Confederate cemetery anywhere. A solemn place, the cemetery remains living history, lest we forget, and the gate is always open.

Local Franklin author Robert Hicks memorialized Carrie McGavock and the Carnton Plantation in his novel, “The Widow of the South. ”  Go here for our interview with the author, http://www.prx.org/p/95379.

According to Hicks, Carrie was always known as the Widow of the South in the years after the Civil War. And many newspapers, the New York Times among them, published her obituary in 1905 when she died at age 76. Long a supporter of Carnton Plantation and a member of its board of directors, Hicks works with Franklin’s Charge, www.franklinscharge.com, a group dedicated to reclaiming this Civil War battlefield in its entirety. The American Battlefield Protection Program has called this endeavor “the largest battlefield reclamation in North American history.”

Carnton Plantation, http://www.carnton.org, and the Carter House, http://www.carter-house.org, a farmhouse at the time of the Battle of Franklin, are both open year-round.  The “Battle of Franklin: Five Hours in the Valley of Death” is a 70-minute documentary, http://www.wideawakefilms.com.

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© 2012-2014  Diana and Gene Korte

The Bay of Islands is in New Zealand’s sub-tropical far north. This is the view there from the front porch of the luxurious Kimberley Lodge that overlooks the town of  Russell.    Photo by Gene Korte

New Zealand, a green and lush neighbor to the southeast of Australia in the Pacific Ocean, is long and narrow like California, though it’s divided into two main islands and is overall smaller than the Golden State. To illustrate, at least in part, why New Zealand with its moderate climate and thousands of miles of uncrowded coastline attracts so many visitors and wannabe immigrants, its population is 2 million versus California’s 35 million.

We  traveled from the top of the North Island in the Bay of Islands, near where the British and the native Maori signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 down to Queenstown in the South Island. We visited four distinctive areas of the country in eight days. We flew over New Zealand’s interior on our way down south, sometimes crisscrossing from east to west and back again. We saw miles and miles of empty coastline and vast verdant forests with the wispy clouds that looked like the Middle-earth in the “Lord of the Rings” movies. And that’s one of the reasons we came to New Zealand — to see this new South Pacific Hollywood.

MOVIE-MAKING KIWI STYLE

While “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy is perhaps the best known of the recent movies made in New Zealand, recent additions are Tom Cruise’s “The Last Samurai” and “Whale Rider,” both filmed on the North Island and released in 2003.

Greeted in New Plymouth in the Taranaki region by a traditional Maori welcome, Cruise is a big hero here. He and his movie crew who did the filming in early 2003 brought in millions of dollars to the area and were good neighbors as well.

New Zealand was chosen as the site for the story that takes place in Japan in the 1870s, because Mount Taranaki looks like Japan’s Mount Fuji, the weather is pleasant, and it’s not crowded. Many Kiwis, as the New Zealanders call themselves, benefited from the Hollywood influx — homeowners who rented their houses to crew members, the car dealer who leased 262 Toyota RAV4s for the crew and hotels that were totally booked for months. The extra business even trickled down to Frances Rogers in nearby Waitara who raises dozens of varieties of peppers from the cool to the very hot. She said she provided a number of boxes of peppers for the movie crew.

We were in New Plymouth toward the end of the filming, while some sets were still intact. By cutting through someone’s yard (the person we were with said it was okay) and standing on the railroad tracks, we could see the Japanese village by the harbor. And in a valley outside of town, we viewed another Japanese village that was covered in “snow” on a warm early fall day. In addition to closeness to mountains, this area is on the coast and attracts surfers as well.

RIDING IN XENA’S CHARIOT AND TOURING THE `LORD OF THE RINGS’ FILM SITES IN QUEENSTOWN

Even before the number of movies increased, two long-running American TV programs — “Xena, Warrior Princess” and “Hercules” — were filmed on Bethell’s Beach near Auckland. Now you can go there and perhaps ride in a horse-drawn chariot with Xena’s stunt double. As the number of movies increase, so does the tourist interest. Ian Brodie’s “The Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook” is New Zealand’s fastest-selling book. With the guidebook in hand, visitors can explore the locations by car, jetboat, kayak, four-wheel drive, helicopter and on foot.

Queenstown in the South Island is the adventure capital of New Zealand. The first commercial bungee jump was here. We suspect locals climb the Remarkables — the local mountain range most often seen in the “Lord of the Rings” movies –for lunch. And people pay good money to skim over shallow creeks with only inches to spare at 50 miles per hour in a 12-passenger boat powered by a 350 Chevy V-8 engine. We did that. It’s called jetboating, the kind of boat ride where you hang on to your hat and clutch the heated bar with your other hand. Our ride on the Dart River took us into regions near the filming of “Amon Hen.” For those of you who have seen the movies, that’s where Merry and Pippin were captured by the Orcs near the end of the first movie, “The Fellowship of the Ring.” On a Nomad Safaris trip, we went through Arrowtown, near Queenstown, to see yet another scene from this movie. Our driver put the Land Rover into low and drove us well into the creek-like Arrow River to the spot where, according to Brodie, “The Nazgul charged as Arwen ferried Frodo across the river on Asfaloth, her Elven steed.” Looking at both scenes takes a little imagination, as special effects makes movie scenes much grander than the real thing.

NEW ZEALAND’S LUXURIOUS LODGES

High-end boutique resorts are called lodges in New Zealand. Our travels took us to four of them in addition to Auckland’s Hilton Hotel, which is shaped like a ship, on Prince’s Wharf. The surroundings, service and dining at all of these great lodges was superb, and they each offered a variety of wines predominantly from New Zealand. The capacity for each lodge is about 10 guests, and every location was a stunning one-of-a-kind place.

The Boatshed is a lodge on Waiheke Island that overlooks the bay, a weekend-in-the-country ferry ride away from Auckland. Among its suites is the out-of-the-way Lighthouse, a favorite with honeymooners. Waiheke Island is home to a number of vineyards including Stonyridge, whose LaRose Cabernet is the most expensive wine in New Zealand.

The Bay of Islands is in New Zealand’s sub-tropical far north and home to a lodge with history and another that’s reached only by ferry. The Orongo Bay Homestead on 17 acres is the home of the first U.S. consulate in New Zealand and dates back to the 1860s. Fully restored with period furniture, it’s the only certified organic lodge in New Zealand. The nearby luxurious Kimberly Lodge overlooks the town of Russell with astounding views of the Bay of Islands. Chef Virginia Holloway offers a popular cooking class that takes guests out of the kitchen to the seashore to gather mussels from the rocks, for starters.

Outside of Queenstown is a lodge called Punatapu or Sacred Waters, as it’s known in Maori. The most unusual feature of any lodge that we saw is Punutapu’s Artist in Residence program. The well-known Kiwi artist John Bevan Ford is there currently. The artist lives in a house up the hill from the lodge quarters and invites guests to his sunny studio where he demonstrates and discusses how he does his work. He also joins in at some of the meals in the lodge and adds an interesting perspective for travelers lucky enough to stay there.

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

GETTING THERE

Air New Zealand, Web page: http://www.airnewzealand.com, or (800) 369-6867. Rated among the world’s finest international airlines by travel magazine readers, ANZ offers more direct flights to the South Pacific than any other carrier, including 17 non-stop flights a week from Los Angeles to Auckland. ANZ’s South Pacific Airpass, when combined with an international ticket, allows two to 10 stopovers to destinations in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, the Cook Islands, Tahiti, Samoa and Tonga.

Special to The Denver Post  http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_0002569878

© 2005-2014  Diana and Gene Korte

Aitutaki locals, some say the best dancers in this part of the world, perform in Rarotonga.         Photo by Gene Korte

This Polynesian paradise of more than a dozen islands was settled about 1,500 years ago, according to local oral history. In pre-missionary days, like most of their
neighbors in this part of the world, the islanders practiced cannibalism. Today most of the inhabitants are practicing Methodists.

The British Captain Cook, the namesake for the Cooks, traveled in the South Pacific several times in the 18th century, though he didn’t see as much of this island group as the mutineers on the Bounty did. Their last stop before taking off for Pitcairn Island was in the Cooks.

Aitutaki (pronounced eye-too-tock-ee), one of the main islands, is an atoll surrounded by a 27-mile, movie quality turquoise lagoon. While there, we attended the annual dance contest held at Prince Edward Hall. It was a family affair with what seemed like most of the population crowded in for an exciting night of pounding drums and shouted encouragement from the audience for the young dancers on stage. Each contestant had to perform certain prescribed movements, much like the exacting steps in an ice-skating competition.

Cook Islanders, Aitutakians in particular, usually win South Pacific dance contests. We can guess why. In the same way that families in alpine areas around the world produce fine skiers, these islanders teach their children from toddlers on up how to dance. They move their bodies with skill and speed, isolating and wiggling this group of muscles and then that group, in amazing ways.

While watching dancers at the Rarotongan Beach Resort one night, a man sitting at the next table turned to his wife and asked, ‘‘Is that possible? Can the human body do that?’’ In this part of the world, indeed, it can.

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© 2011  Diana and Gene Korte

For more information, go to http://www.cookislands.travel/USA.