The Great Lakes. Even its name conjures something vast and brooding. Yet my first encounter with a region that spans the US-Canada border showed it to be far from what I'd imagined. Its waters slid between a rich caramel and a deep turquoise colour, while chalky-white rocks dusted the shoreline. The landscape, like the sun, felt almost subtropical – it couldn't have been any more perfect. In spite of this, I was about to leave it all behind as I squeezed inside a metal hatch that clanked shut above me, blocking out the surface world.
Inside the submarine, my Welsh helmsman, Aled, was in charge. The control panel lit up in front of him in a way that I had always imagined one might: like a cross between a supercomputer and some kind of electronic whack-a-mole. With a few flicks he equalised the pressure and we descended gently to the bottom of Lake Huron – one of the shallower lakes in the region but still deeper than 200 metres in places.
Beneath the water's surface, the tropical overtones faded. There are shipwrecks to be found in this area, but not here; and as I peered out of the window during my ten-minute ‘voyage’, I saw little other than the swill of sediment and a few minnows. Yet it set the tone for a trip where I would find myself exploring the Lakes region in ways few others had.
“In the corner of our hangar was a filtration system designed to measure and report on the intrusion of microplastics into the lakes”
I had signed up to be among the first people aboard Viking's newest cruise ship as it embarked on its inaugural tour of the Great Lakes. Here lie some of the largest bodies of fresh water on the planet; places where the cognitive difference between ‘lake’ and ‘sea’ disappears as quickly as the shoreline. And while taking a ship built to withstand Antarctic seas might seem like overkill, this was far more than just a quick jaunt. Taken together, the combined shorelines of lakes Michigan, Huron, Superior, Erie and Ontario stretch for over 15,000km. Their shared water basin is larger, rising from Lake Michigan like a modernist boutique hotel with a Polar Class 6 hull, I could only smile.
