SPECIAL CRUISE ISSUE : Alaska : An Outsider’s Inside Passage : Two not-so-typical cruise passengers mix bears and bingo--with surprising results

“This would be a good time to bundle up and feel the wind on your face,” the park ranger gently urged over the public-address system as our cruise ship slid into Glacier Bay.

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“This is the most perfect postcard view in southeast Alaska.”

He was right, but many of the Maasdam’s 1,200 passengers had decided to take the Inside Passage literally--by staying inside. The glaciers and mountains were clearly visible from the casino, after all--and from the Jacuzzis and the glass-enclosed swimming pool and the health club and the juice bar and the beauty salon and the buffet tables.

That, my companion Nadja and I discovered on our weeklong trip early last September, is the fabulous and strange combination of traveling by cruise ship in Alaska.

When you lean back into a sofa in a glass-walled lounge, watching whales wave their tails across the sunset in front of your 11-story floating hotel, you’re clearly straddling two very different worlds.

Ah, wilderness. And are they serving the hors d’oeuvres yet in the piano bar?

Our cruise ship in Alaska, along one of the world’s fastest-growing cruise routes, was also our platform for once-in-a-lifetime experiences that seemed to come once a day--or maybe twice.

One day we boarded a helicopter, flew over Juneau’s 1,500-square-mile ice field and landed onto what seemed like the surface of the moon. Our surreal stroll took us across the eerie, jagged Styrofoam-like surface of one glacier and into the deep-blue 40-foot mouth of another.

We paddled kayaks in a dawn rain, spied on families of whales, mountain goats and bald eagles and floated among fresh-carved icebergs.

And somehow we fit it all in between the Dutch Cheese Fondue Demonstration and the Snowball Jackpot Cash Bingo.

We weren’t your classic cruise-ship passengers. Nadja and I, both 31, were a generation behind most of our fellow passengers. (The average age of Holland America’s Alaska cruisers is 54, although the company says that number is dropping to reflect a younger Alaska market overall.) We were too independent--or so we thought--to be comfortable letting someone else prescribe our adventures, and we were nervous about feeling trapped in a vacation not of our own design.

But by the first full day aboard the Maasdam, which started service in October, 1993, we had surrendered happily to the rhythms of shipboard life. There are embarrassing pictures of us that first day, dancing around the empty decks in the cold breeze, giddy from the conflicting senses of decadence and adventure.

And we hadn’t even gotten anywhere yet.

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The round-trip route began in Vancouver, where we walked up the gangway to the strains of “Pretty Woman” played by a string trio. The ship’s public spaces freely mixed neon lights and outsized Venetian glass sculptures with teak trim and nautical motifs--Las Vegas crossed with Nantucket. But our 190-square-foot deluxe room, which cost us $1,599 per person at a discounted rate, was a wonder of design that comfortably included a couch and a desk console--and squeezed in more closets than most hotel rooms.

The highlight was our own veranda. From the 60-square-foot deck, we listened to the ocean waves slapping against the hull at night and drank in the sea air to stay comfortable when we hit rough seas near the end of the trip.

The scenery drew us in gradually as we churned north along the coast of British Columbia and then off the southern tip of Alaska. To our left was the archipelago of nearly 1,000 islands that form the protected waterway known as the Inside Passage. As the ship passed, they appeared as constantly shifting, oil-painting arrangements of lighthouses, pine trees and wooden piers--until the looming mountains and, finally, icy expanses farther north took over. We were surprised by the sense of solitude: Though cruise-ship traffic in the region has doubled in the past five years to nearly 30 ships, we almost never saw another liner except in port.

Along the way we stopped in hardy towns blocked off from the rest of North America by ice-covered mountains. The local rhythms were reminiscent of “Northern Exposure,” with pickup trucks rolling slowly through streets where most of the action came from the changing of traffic signals.

We woke up first in Ketchikan, where we walked past totem poles and along the former bordello district on a canal known as Creek Street.

The next day in Juneau, the only state capital inaccessible by highway, we strolled past bohemian coffee bars and historic saloons and found a dockside dive called Armadillo. It featured black bean-garlic nachos and barbecued sausages--Tex-Mex food on the wrong side of the Canadian border, washed down with smooth Alaskan Amber Ale.

Our last stop, two days later, was Sitka, a former Russian outpost that displays few signs of its heritage among the T-shirt stands near the dock. St. Michael’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral, in the center of town, turned out to be a bare-bones replica of the original, which burned to the ground in 1966--as we discovered after joining the crowd paying a dollar per head to get inside.

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But the real adventures were the shore excursions, over which we had debated and obsessed for weeks. We decided to splurge, spending $500 each for four excursions.

From Ketchikan, we flew through the Misty Fjords National Monument a few miles away. It was our first time in a float plane, our first time threading needles through 3,000-foot ridges and cliffs and our first time landing on a mountain lake.

In Juneau, we passed up a flight to a mountainside salmon bake and were among only 15 passengers to choose the premier “pilot’s choice” helicopter flight. We started off over the Mendenhall Glacier, a huge 100-foot-high ice floe that looked poised to swallow the town, then spun low over glacier after glacier making up the Juneau ice cap, peered down at their jagged peaks and deep crevices before coming in for a landing on the Herbert Glacier.

We climbed out onto an empty frontier of ice, with no sound but the wind and the crunching of our rubber hip boots. Our pilot tossed a stone into one of the crevices, and we listened to the long seconds go by before it finally hit bottom far below. We fanned out across the wide expanse of gray-white sameness, the only color for miles provided by the red helicopter and our multicolored coats. Then we made another surreal stop, under the lip of the glacier’s edge, facing an inky-blue ice cave large enough to swallow the copter.

But the next day, Glacier Bay drove everything else we’d seen out of our minds. We entered the bay before breakfast. For an hour, with the ship’s engines off, we drifted alongside the pillowy white face of Margerie Glacier in silence, until a huge wedge-shaped chunk collapsed into the water in what seemed like slow motion, leaving a fresh cavern. Later, in another area of the 3.3-million-acre national park, we were face to face with another glacier, this one a broad, blue highway of ice leading down to the water, made even more spectacular by the high, ice-coated twin peaks rising in the distance.

It was midafternoon before we realized we’d never had a chance to shower. (After all, the bathroom was virtually the only place on the boat with no view.)

By this time, any minor disappointments of the trip had faded into irrelevance. It was OK that the food on the cruise--despite Holland America’s good reputation--ranged from merely decent to downright disappointing (dry fish and tasteless meat in heavy sauces had diners shaking their heads some nights, although other meals were better, and the elaborate breakfast buffets were always worth loading up on.) It was OK that the entertainment began the first night with a Petula Clark imitator and sank from there to the crew talent show (“Featuring talent from the four corners of the beverage department!”)

We forgave it all. It wasn’t just the landscape we loved, it was the whole shipboard culture.

We loved the nightly delivery of the daily itinerary, even if the last days’ activities began to sound a little desperate. (Box Making? Photographing Dessert?)

We loved the cast of characters, known peculiarly by their first names and functions: Naturalist Tony, always talking about his planes or his cameras or his divorces (and sometimes even about whales); Cruise Director Joe, always dressed as if he were on a yacht; Wahoo, our Filipino breakfast waiter, always exhorting people to cry out “Wahoo” for coffee.

We loved our friends among the passengers, former dinner companions we’d abandoned the first night for a private window table, but whom we kept meeting up with for lunches and drinks and dancing and shipboard gossip. They may have been retirees, but they were the ones who stayed up for late-night gambling and the midnight buffets.

And we loved those once-in-a-lifetime experiences, which continued right through the last afternoon before our morning return to Vancouver. We had decided to try the “mile walk” around a lower deck when we were suddenly joined by a huge school of Dall porpoises, plunging in and out of the Maasdam’s wake on the starboard side.

For nearly an hour, transfixed, we watched them skipping in the boat’s wake. They weren’t on any itinerary. Naturalist Tony didn’t point them out. No hors d’oeuvres were served.

Ah, wilderness. We bundled up and felt the wind in our faces until the sun went down.

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GUIDEBOOK

Inside Scoop on the Inside Passage

Alaska cruises either follow the Inside Passage (round trip from Vancouver) or travel farther north on the so-called glacier route one way between Vancouver and Anchorage. There are about 10 cruise lines and 30 ships to choose from.

My ship, the Maasdam, sails the Mediterranean this summer. But its identical sister ships, the Ryndam and Statendam, each make one-week cruises departing either from Vancouver or Anchorage from mid-May through mid-September. (Alaska passengers will encounter the longest days in June and July, the warmest weather--and most mosquitoes--in July and early August and the best conditions for moving close to glaciers and viewing wildlife at the end of the season.)

Cruise-only, Inside Passage fares on the Ryndam and Statendam range from $1,530 per person, double occupancy, for an inside cabin, to $5,045 for a deluxe veranda suite, but discounts of 25% apply for cruises booked by Feb. 17. Prices don’t include air fare (Holland America charges $410 per person round trip from Los Angeles to Vancouver), port taxes of $125 per person, shore excursions or optional insurance.

For more information, contact a travel agent or Holland America Line; telephone (800) 426-0327.