After picking up the hire car from Anchorage Airport we headed off down the Kenai Peninsula (pronounced 'Keen Eye') for a town called Homer. This was a very scenic 4hr drive. Thursday was our rainy, foggy day for the week (happens a lot in Alaska!!). So we spent the day catching up on sleep and touring the town. The hightlight of the day was a trip to the Salty Dawg Saloon, out on the Homer Spit where the fishing boats come in. The character of this place has to be seen to be believed - low wooden ceilings, wood chips on the floor and fisherman in hip boots telling yarns. The walls and ceiling are plastered with dollar bills where visitors sign them and pin them up. I only had one beer, but it was the local Homer Brewery product and it came in a pint sized stubbie (a true pint size 600ml+). View image of the Salty Dawg!!

Friday saw the arrival of the much anticipated Fly In Bear Viewing Trip. Thankfully the weather had imroved and the sun was breaking through. We arrived at the dock early in the morning. Our plane for the day was a DeHavilland Otter float plane built in 1960 which spent the first 10 years of its life in the RAAF!! We were headed across the Cook Inlet to Katmai National Park. We were warned that the wind was very strong the other side of the inlet and to expect a bumpy ride. Which we got! Yippee!! We landed on one of the bigger lakes in the back country and parked the plane about 30 metres from shore. Which meant we had to wade through ice cold thigh deep water to the shore. It was here that I quickly discovered much to my dismay :-) that my hip boots leaked.... both of them! Once ashore and suited up against the biting cold wind, we set off in search of brown bears. There was something strange here though, a funny smell... it took me a while but then I realised what it was - clean fresh air!!!!

We hiked quite a few miles across amazingly soft tundra and waded through numerous fast flowing streams full of the most amazing red coloured salmon which were 175miles upstream from where they left the ocean. Each stream was a chance to replenish the ice cold water in my boots??? Woohoo What we hiked across!!

Our bear experience came in the form of a young female who we viewed from a distance strolling across the tundra towards the stream we were near. We sat down in a group to see what she would do. She responded by coming into the stream near us and fishing for salmon. For a good half hour she was in our view, no more than 50 metres away. As she moved away she would have come within 20 metres of the group. It was quite an experience to see a truly wild brown bear (probably close to 500lb) catching salmon that close to us.
Our bear experience...

The rest of the day saw us hiking more along bear tracks where evidence of fresh salmon kills were everywhere. The paw prints that we saw were huge. These were big animals! Unfortunately? we had no more close encounters. We did however see 3 male cubs and a mother and cub playfully running through the tundra a couple of hundred metres away.
Three days earlier they had seen 24 bears in the same area - I guess that's the risk of wildlife tours!
We then headed back to the plane for yet another chance to fill my boots with ice cold water for the hour flight back! The lake we landed on.
The scenery during the flight was incredible - volcanoes, glaciers, high mountain country lakes, coastal streams etc..... Our view from plane (Note here: the colour of the water was a close match to my feet by this time!!!)

The next day after my feet had returned to their normal colour we left Homer for the 180 mile drive to Seward. The drive provided magnifcent views of the volcanoes, Mt. Iliamna and Mt. Redoubt. We stopped at a place called Cooper Landing for lunch which is located on the amazing turquoise green Kenai Lake and River. We arrived into Seward around 4.30pm. The travellers and scenery