GREENLAND: ILULISSAT TO KANGERLUSSUAQ

June 17, 2019

The last part of our Greenland adventure was in the tiny, tiny, tiny town of Kangerlussuaq, population 540.

As you can kind of see on the map below, Kangerlussauq is at the end of a very deep fjord. The fjord is named . . . you guessed it, Kangerlussauq Fjord. In fact, the word "Kangerlussuaq" means "big fjord" in Icelandic.

Ilulissat and Kangerlussuaq are only about 150 miles apart, but unless you have a dog sled, pretty much the only way to get to Kangerlussauq is by plane. There is no road that connects it to any other town. (There are no roads connecting ANY towns in Greenland. All roads are internal to the towns themselves.)

Which may account for the fact that Kangerlussuaq, with its 500+ inhabitants, is the site of Greenland's largest commercial airport. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense to me either.  

More about Kangerlussuaq later. First I have to tell the story of how we got there. 

We were transported from our hotel to the airport, which was just a few minutes away. Although we didn't realize it at the time, both Bob and Laura, another member of our group, had left things behind. Laura realized her purse was missing as soon as we got to the airport. She figured out that she had left it in the luggage storage room. She sent our taxi driver back to retrieve it, but he never re-materialized and we think he never actually went back to the hotel. (I can't remember how Laura got on the plane. She must have had some type of ID, or maybe they just trusted her.)

Later, while sitting in a restaurant in Kangerlussuaq, Bob realized that his camera was missing. He called Mamartuk Restaurant first, then the hotel. It turned out that he had set it down on the front desk counter while he paid for something. The hotel promised to send Bob's camera with Laura's the purse.

The plane looks fairly big, but it was a propeller plane with just 36 seats.

Before we took off, the pilot came walking down the aisle, greeting everyone in a very friendly way.  Then he stopped at the rear of the plane near where we were all sitting. He said there is a Greenlandic word for someone who smells bad: tipi. Somehow he tied smelling bad to birthdays. He said he was looking for someone who was celebrating a birthday and smelled bad. He stopped at our friend Mike's seat and said, "It's you!" 

The pilot wished Mike a happy birthday and then invited him to come sit in the cockpit with him for the whole flight. (That would never, ever in a million years happen in the United States.) We learned later that the pilot's wife is the owner of the tour company we had been using, and she had helped book the restaurant for Mike's birthday dinner and so knew about his special day and passed on the info to her husband. We also realized later that Bo, our Air Zafari guide, must have known what was about to happen because he was hanging around the airport and laughing.

I took this photo of our wonderful pilot and Mike as we deplaned in Kangerlussuaq. What a nice guy!

I had a window seat and really enjoyed the spectacular view for our 40 minute flight.

Those flappy things in my photo are not bird wings. They are the supposedly unbending steel blades of the propeller:

Of course, I couldn't see them at all as they spun rapidly around, but I started to notice that they showed up in my photos and looked more like rubber than steel.  When I took a video of them, they appeared to be moving in very slow motion:

. . . and when I took a slow-motion video, the blades appeared to be super flexible:

Someone with a physics background, please explain that to me.

Anyway, we flew over the Ilulissat Icefjord and Glacier:

. . . and over the rocky land with its beautiful waterways:

I don't know why the water is three different colors here, but isn't the variety incredible? It reminds me of a child's coloring page:

The sharpness and blur caused by taking a photo through the wet window of the plane makes for some interesting distortion, but the colors of the water--those are authentic:

Beyond the rocky shores, there is always snow and ice, lots of snow and ice:

A forest made of of rivers and streams--nature repeats her artisitic patterns using many different types of media:

And then we see some green, and we know we are getting close to our destination:

Touchdown in Kangerlussuaq--the boonies if ever there were boonies. For now, the airport is one of only two airports in Greenland that can handle large planes, and it is the international hub for Air Greenland.

But wait. While this seems like the boonies, it is substantially closer to New York City than Los Angeles is and just 3 1/2 hours from London. So near, and yet so far.

Remember the left-behind purse and camera? They arrived intact the next morning on a flight from Ilulissat. Gotta love Greenland.