If you want to hike the Gorge of Samaria on the Greek island of Crete, you might like to know you'll have someone there who'll look out for you.

There is this old shepherd there, who knows, of course, every guide, and usually he has some cheese, and if you know him well, he can bring some other stuff out as well.

Coming up, a pair of Greek travel experts tell us how traditions remain important on Crete, where you can still look at frescoes that are

4,000 years old. Cruising in Alaska, the attractions, the scenery, and the wildlife.

You've got the water, you've got the green islands, you've got the snow-capped peaks, and then

you've got the wildlife, you've got whales, you've got brown bears, you've got black bears,

you've got wolves. Travel writer Mark Adams reports on how he used the state ferry system

to retrace the historic route of the 1899 harem an expedition.

And a Dutch ecologist explains how life is evolving around us a lot faster than you might expect.

We don't see evolution as something that you can observe in your backyard, but you can,

and it goes fast,

and it happens everywhere.

It's all in the hour ahead on Travel with Rick Steves.

You could call it the first luxury cruise to Alaska, and it had an amazing guest list.

Railroad magnate Edward Harriman invited John Muir, George Bird Grenel, William Dahl,

and other leading scientists,

artists, and thinkers of his day, to sail with him into the often uncharted waters of Alaska

in 1890. He wanted it to be a sort of floating university to explore the wilderness that America

had purchased just a few decades earlier. Its passengers would provide the spark that got America serious about conservation.

Travel writer Mark Adams retraced their journey on the much humbler state ferry system

to see what Alaska's natural history and its people had to teach him today.

He tells us what he found in just a bit on today's Travel with Rick Steves.

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