GREENLAND: DISKO BAY, DISKO ISLAND, AND ONE MORE FLIGHT OVER THE ILULISSAT GLACIER

June 16, 2019

Have you ever heard of Disko Island? No? Maybe you recognize its Greenlandic name, Qeqertarsuaq ("the big island")?  NO?? At 3,312 square miles, it is barely smaller than Corsica and a little larger than Crete and is the 84th largest island in the world. Eric the Red spent time here in the late 10th century. So why haven't you heard of it?

Well, unlike Corsica and Crete, it's not exactly a tourist destination. Located above the Arctic Circle, the entire island has a population of 1,100, most living in the only town, Qeqertarsuaq. (Yes, the same Icelandic name as the island.) Fewer than 50 people live in the only other settlement, Kangerluk, which can be reached by boat or air but not by road. There is one hotel in Qeqertarsuaq, and supposedly there is also one taxi driver. Since 1906 the University of Copenhagen has had a year-round research facility on the island known as Arctic Station.

Legend says that Disko Island was pulled north by a couple of strong kayakers who used a single strand of a newborn baby's hair for a tow rope. They got stuck in Disko Bay when a witch living in Ilulissat spotted them and put a curse on their efforts.

There may be change ahead for Disko Island. Air Zafari is beginning air tours of Disko Bay and Disko Island (we were one of their first customers on that tour), and locals are exploring the possibilities of amenities such as a ski slope, expanded hiking trips, and a hotel. Ten years from now, Disko Island may be a very different place.

During the evening of the same day that we cruised to Eqi Glacier, Bob and I and our friends Lori and Mark boarded a small plane, flew across Disko Bay, circled around Disko Island, and ended by flying over parts of the polar ice sheet on the mainland that we hadn't seen on our first flight.

Here's our plane. Though I've flown on quite a few now, these little planes still make me nervous:

Up, up, and away--straight over the bay!

GREENLAND: EQI GLACIER

June 16, 2019

At 11:00 AM--an unusually but very welcome late start for our group--we left for one more boat trip, a six- or seven-hour cruise to the Eqi Glacier, known for its vast breadth and frequent calving.

Along the way several members of our group sang versions of the "Theme from Gilligan's Island," and I was introduced to this marvelously campy mash-up version entitled "Stairway to Gilligan's Island." Just think "Arctic isle" instead of "desert isle":

Our boat was a bit smaller than Gilligan's, but it definitely had the Gilligan vibe:

This map shows our course, starting in Ilulissat at the bottom of the map and motoring north through the Ataa Strait to the Eqi Glacier, a distance of about 50 miles:

It took about 1 1/2 hours to get to the glacier, but we did stop along the way at a beautiful waterfall. Note the glassy surface of the sea. The stillness was interrupted only by our own movements and voices and the musical acoustics of the waterfall:

GREENLAND, ILULLISAT: RESTAURANT MAMARTUT

June 2019

My husband likes to eat, and he especially likes local cuisine with a touch of weird. When he researched dining options in Greenland, Restaurant Mamartut showed up as #1 on a TripAdvisor list. The website notes that "The fishes are from the local fish factory and the sea mammals come almost daily from the ice fjord located closeby. Apart from this, they also have a small vegetables and herbs garden."

He was so excited about going there that he planned for TWO visits.

Our first was dinner on June 17, just before our flight over the Ilulissat ice fjord and Greenland ice sheet.

We opted for something frequently recommended by the reviewers on TripAdvisor, the tapas plate:

Here we are waiting for our food:

It was worth the wait. What an incredible assortment! I liked just about everything on the plate with the exception of the mattaq.

GREENLAND, ILULISSAT: FLYING OVER THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET

June 15, 2019

After dinner, so around 9:00 PM, John, Susan, Bob, and I were picked up by two guys from AirZafari for a "flightseeing" tour of the Ilulissat glacier and the Greenland ice sheet. (I'm telling you, no one sleeps in Greenland during the summer!)

I just learned the difference between an ice cap and an ice sheet from greenfacts.org:
"An ice cap is a dome-shaped mass of glacier ice that spreads out in all directions; usually larger than an ice field but less than 50,000 km². An ice sheet is a dome-shaped mass of glacier ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km², such as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets."

The Greenland ice sheet is 1,710,000 km² (or 660,200 m² - three times the size of Texas) and is the second largest ice body in the world, right behind the Antarctic ice sheet.

Nice to know.

We boarded a six-seater plane, the two pilots in front, Bob and John in the middle . . .

and Susan and I in back:

About 80% of Greenland is covered by ice and snow, and the remaining 20% seems to be mostly rocks:

It's beautiful, but it doesn't look particularly habitable:

. . . unless you are a bird:

GREENLAND, ILULISSAT: DAYTIME ICEBERG CRUISE

June 15, 2019

Do you think I'm done with icebergs and glaciers? Not even close. We spent four days in Greenland, and every day involved at least one, and sometimes two, trips to view icebergs and/or glaciers. (It's not like there are big museums or cathedrals in Greenland. What there is is a lot of snow and ice.) I have a lot more pictures of icebergs and glaciers that I'm going to be posting. It's going to be hard to convince anyone that every day was a new experience, a new way of seeing what seemed to be essentially the same thing but was not the same thing at all. And yet, that is exactly what our experience was. We never did feel like we had overdosed on ice and snow. We are not likely to ever return to Greenland, so we had to take in as much as we could.

On our second day in Ilulissat, although we had been on a nighttime glacier cruise the previous evening, we took another daytime glacier cruise. We headed off after our walk through Ilulissat and our lackluster lunch. There was no luster lacking out on the sea:

We had a different guide than we'd had the night before, and he reinforced many of the same facts about icebergs that our previous guide had shared with us, and even though we had heard and seen it all before, it was still a jaw-dropping experience: