Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1534780
PINK GRANITE ROCK, LIGHTHOUSE WALK, KILLARNEY Viking Octantis has a Georgian Bay hike from the Canada House lodge where you alight for a good lunch of fried fish to the sound of ballads from a local folksinger. But I ventured out alone along the pine-thick shoreline. This was my first chance to set foot (and bottom) on Canadian shield rock. It is some of the oldest on the planet, melted and cooled and scoured and compressed and tilted for over 4 billion years in some places. Today, the land around the Lakes is a low-lying landscape of flat rock and pine. The rock I sat upon was once buried kilometres deep beneath a mountain the height of Everest, long since eroded away. Not for the only time on the trip, geological time gives you vertigo. SEAT 3, 'JOHN' John is a yellow submarine that travels inside the Viking hangar ready to do some serious science along with other subs in the fleet: Paul, George and Ringo. Our dive was just 18 metres to the floor of Lake Huron. As we touched down gently on the soft silt, it felt more like a moon landing than the phantasmagoric experience the Beatles had in their Yellow Submarine. But it was a first: another thing to tick off the list of 1500 things to do before you're 90. 10 T hose are a few of my Viking Octantis and Great Lakes places. But places are only half the story on a voyage like this. e people you meet and the stories you hear also get laid down in your memory banks to be retrieved and thought about in the years to come. Our new friends wanted to know why we'd chosen the Great Lakes Explorer. Well, (I said) I'm a travel writer who's never less happy than on a tropical beach with nothing to do but fry, swim and drink cocktails: give me the mountains and the coolness any day. My wife, Annie, is a science teacher and a geologist who has a particular passion for Scandinavian design and food. "Sure looks like someone at Viking launched the ship with you in mind!" someone said. at was a very pleasant thought to take home. 8 9 TAN LEATHER CHAIR, THE HIDE The Hide takes a bit of finding. But as soon as I opened the door and realised I'd discovered one of my all- time favourite bars, the dead ends and wrong lifts all became worthwhile. I love good whisky and I love books and photographs of polar regions. This has all of them; and storytelling after dinner. The Hide is a special place on a warm Great Lakes evening. But to sit here after a long Antarctic day with the polar winds whistling outside? That would be a thing. viking.com 73