John Brady's Weblog

I managed to watch "Escape to Alaska" on video the other night, which I had taped from Channel 4 the other week. It is an hour long documentary, about Guy Grieve who works in Edinburgh, Scotland, and who wants to experience Alaska.
I was looking forward to it for two reasons: I am interested in the idea of escaping from the modern slave labour of the 9 to 5 corporate work job to reconnect with the natural world; and in Alaska as a remote, unmodernised place which still has many open, wild spaces in it. Overall I found it a weird programme to watch.

I enjoyed the early part where Guy Grieve described why the 9 to 5 in a large city was so soulless, and why he wanted a more direct connection with the world itself, and how he was attracted to and fascinated by Alaska.

Then, of course, he travels to Alaska, and sets about getting established with somewhere to live before the winter sets in, which he wants to experience. And that is when things got really weird, and I ended up questioning whether what I was seeing was really what happened.

First, he arrives in Alaska in late August / early September, with between 4 and 6 weeks before the snows arrive. In this period he has to build his own log cabin, from scratch. This is just too late to turn up and expect to get it all done before the cold spell hits. He should have turned up in July, and become acclimatised and accustomed to Alaska. Why did he leave it so late? Why did he not go out one month earlier? It just does not make any sense at all to go out that late in the season, and that close to the snows arriving.

Then, he meets up with Alaskan people that he has already been in contact with, and who will be helping him out, one way or another. This smacks of quite some prearranging on his part, to contact these people, make these agreements, and arrange access to the land where he is to build a cabin and stay the winter. How these arrangements were made is not explained. Very mysterious. If he had really been in contact with locals, he should have known to come out earlier in the year, as mentioned.

Guy then goes out to the remote area, sets up a tent, and begins cutting down trees in preparation for building his cabin within 4 to 6 weeks. Or rather he doesn't. He cuts down one tree, which falls onto his tent, and has to repair this mess. Instead of getting back to the tree cutting after this, he spends the next 2 weeks simply wandering around the area, with no sense of urgency at all, looking for food supplies, and not cutting down a single tree. This is bizarre behaviour. He knows he has less than 6 weeks before the snows, and just wastes 2 weeks wandering around on his own, without a care in the world.

He is saved when his local contact, Dave if I remember correctly (but I could be wrong), turns up to check on his progress. Within one day Dave has a number of trees cut down, properly, and is showing Guy the correct way to do everything.

At this point, the camera crew that has been with him these past 2 weeks leave. They come back 8 weeks later, after the snows have arrived, and the land is snow covered and the rivers and lakes frozen. Guy is now living in the log cabin, that he has built himself. And it looks impressive too. A well built, single room cabin. But hang on. How did Guy manage to build this to such a high standard when he couldn't even chop down a tree? We are shown early on that Guy is an office worker, who uses a telephone and computer keyboard each day. There is no mention of him having any wood working skills at all. Where did all this ability come from?

I can only conclude that Guy did not build the cabin himself, but instead his local contacts came in and did it for him. Otherwise he would have frozen to death in his tent. The log cabin looked exactly how it should be, with no skewed or leaning walls. All the logs were true and straight, and laid on top of each other, and striped of bark. And all this done by someone who couldn't even chop down a single tree on his own? I don't think so.

I know from reading a few books on Alaska, such as "One Man's Wilderness" by Sam Keith, that an important part of a cabin in Alaska is making it free of air leaks. If there are any major holes, then the heat will leak out and the cold come in - very quickly. And key to minimising the holes is preparing the logs, so that they are straight and true, with flat, even sides that will sit square on each other. There is no way that someone such as Guy, with no previous wood working or cabin building experience, could have built a log cabin like that in 4 weeks, and have made it well insulated enough to withstand an Alaskan winter.

Then someone loans Guy a dog sled team. This is not something done lightly in Alaska, as it takes time and money to feed and train a dog team, and they can be very valuable. No way is someone just going to loan a good dog team to a complete stranger with no prior experience, who wants to look after the dogs many miles away. Again, more signs of behind the scenes work and preparations.

Furthermore, Guy is over 50 miles away from the nearest village. So he is going to have to look after these dogs, and feed them every day. Again, this is a massive risk, letting a working dog team go with a complete stranger, who has to feed them every day to keep them alive. If he gets anything wrong, so far away from help, the dogs will just die. And where does the food for the dogs come from? Clearly a team of six or eight dogs is going to eat a lot more than one man. So where is Guy getting all of this food from, to feed himself and these dogs, each and every day? At various points it is made clear that Guy is not a natural hunter, and has almost no success in shooting or catching anything.

Later on we learn sometime during January / February that Guy has not eaten meat for over a month, and is trying to capture come beaver in a nearby lake. So what has he been living on then? Clearly he has a massive cache of supplies of dried and preserved goods by the cabin, to live on during the winter. And this is what he is living on. During the whole programme we only see him get one grouse like bird and one beaver. So, he was never in desparate circumstances during this self imposed exile. And how did he afford all of these supplies, bought in advance? I know from reading on the web that he was sponsered by a Scottish whisky company. Clearly some of their money was used on these supplies he bought.

It would seem that neither the television company or the whisky sponsor wanted Guy to be seen to fail, so behind the scenes they made sure that everything he needed was provided for.

The television programme came over very much as telling a story of a family man, troubled by the modern world, who needed to reconnect with nature in some way. And off Guy went to Alaska, built his own log cabin, survived all on his own, and came back home a better person for it. Which I do believe to be true.

But I think they left a lot out, such as the sponsorship money, the vast supplies of food stored in a cache by the log cabin, who really built the log cabin, and what else he did during the six month long winter? He didn't seem to achieve anything at all other than staying alive. All in all it felt like someone had promised a meal full of special tastes, but instead delivered something very bland that left you wanting more and wondering what was left out that could have made it much more interesting.

I've bought the book he's written about his adventure - Call of the Wild - so I'll see what other details he gives about what really happened.

During August we were lucky enough to have two holidays away.
While both were very enjoyable in their own way, they could not have been more different in style and experience.

The first was to the Oceania Club in Greece.
This is an all inclusive hotel resort on the Halkidiki pensinsula, in the north east part of the mainland.
The hotel was very new and very good, and the service and food was excellent.
It is a family oriented hotel, and so was full of families with children.
The hotel runs its own kids clubs, to keep the children entertained during the day.
And the weather was hot, which is to be expected.
So the family had a really good, enjoyable holiday.

Although we did not do much - just lie around on sun loungers in the hot sunshine each day, by the pool or beach - it was a very good and relaxing holiday.
As said, the hotel was very good, and the food and service were excellent.
The attitude of all of the hotel staff was excellent - always helpful, asking if there was anything they could do for you, and nothing was too much trouble.
In many respects, it would be difficult to pick real faults with the hotel.
Although not perfect, it lived up to expectations, and generally exceeded them.
Little details, like a sun umbrella for every pair of sun loungers.
This is important when you have children and want to ensure they do not
get too much sun exposure.

The second holiday was to the highlands of Scotland, staying at the Crieff Hydro Hotel, which is just west of Perth.
The hotel advertises itself very much as a family oriented hotel with child friendly facilities.
Initially we were impressed on arrival by the substantial main, old building of the hotel itself. But then things went downhill quickly.

The room we were allocated was essentially in the basement, at the extreme edge of the hotel. We had to walk down flights of stairs and along long corridors, including going past the leisure facilities, to get to our room. It was one of only three at this end of the hotel. Yes, we did have normal windows and an outside view, due to the hotel being sited on a hill. But it didn't stop the feeling of being in the basement and isolated as you negotiated the stairs each and every day.

The room itself was very old and tired, with a very small bathroom (I could reach out and touch both side walls at the same time). And they called this an 'executive family room'. I suppose this was because the main bedroom area was large. But then we discovered dust in the corner, dead flies under the windows, crumbs under the beds, and worst of all - someone else's clothes in one of the drawers! Needless to say we complained like mad to the hotel duty manager.
Although he apologised profusely, all he did was arrange for the room to be cleaned again. "Why wasn't it cleaned properly in the first place?"
He couldn't offer any explanation at all.
He claimed rooms were always cleaned, so this should not have happened.
But the point was it did happen, and they had not cleaned the room properly before giving it to us.

They would not offer us another room, as they said they were full during the main holiday period. They did give us a free bottle of wine with our meal that evening, but that was all. Considering the price I was paying for this executive room, they were making a lot of money off me, and couldn't be bothered to offer a better level of customer service beyond just a verbal apology and fixing something that should never have happened in the first place.

The rest of the hotel was okay, but being family oriented meant lots of screaming children running around the place.
Which is fine to a point, as we were there with our children too. But in an old hotel building with narrow corridors, it did seem crowded some of the time.
And the indoor swimming pool was full of children most of the day too.
Although the facilities offered make quite a long list, the actual quality of them is only just 'okay', and some of them are so far away from the hotel as to not be worth bothering with.

Evening meals were 'interesting'. There are two restaurants. One is more formal, which they try and attract outside customers to, and the other is informal, casual. Children were allowed in both restaurants, which was good.
Perversely the informal restaurant had a worse choice of food on offer for children than the formal restaurant. Yes, we have a 'modern' child who is quite happy eating things like 'chicken nuggets', but not pizza or anything with cheese on it. The only thing he could eat on the informal menu was a baked potato. And the children's menu was fixed, and never changed in this restaurant. As a result we ate in the formal restaurant each night, which did offer a different children's menu each night.

Overall the hotel came out barely okay - I'd give it 5 out of 10, but only because of the number of facilities offered. But the quality of everything is very dubious, there is no concept of customer service at all, the prices are a rip off (read very expensive), and they are spending more money on more child specific facilities in order to charge you even more in the future. If only they could run it like a real hotel, and have a proper house cleaning operation where rooms were checked for cleanliness. Then things might be quite different. But really it felt more like some kind of production line, where they wheel guests in, don't treat them in any special way or care about their experience, and take as much money off them as they can for the right to be there.

I certainly won't be going back there. There is no way I would consider staying at a hotel that fundamentally did not know how to clean its rooms properly (something I consider to be a 'basic' aspect of a hotel), did not check that rooms were cleaned properly before new guests arrived, and had a level of customer service that amounted to "We are sorry, but we aren't going to actually do anything to make up for a wholly inadequate level of service to you".

In spite of all that, we did have a nice holiday. Scotland is a wonderful place, which is why we went there. And that rescued the holiday for us.
Next time we go back to the highlands we shall simply stay in another hotel,
save a lot of money, and have a far better and more pleasant experience.

Now of course, we are all back to the normal work routine again, and the children are back at school. Life carries on ...