GREENLAND: A TRIP ON THE ISLAND'S LONGEST ROAD AND A STROLL ON THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET

June 17, 2019

It had been a long day, starting with walking to the Ilulissat Icefjord, followed by eating lunch at Restaurant Mamartuk, catching a flight to Kangerlussuaq, and taking a bus to eat at Roklubben Restaurant. 

But Greenland is the land of the midnight sun, at least in June, and that means our day was far from over. We had one more adventure ahead, a trip down Greenland's longest road for an stroll on the Arctic ice sheet. 

We were picked up around 7:30 PM from Roklubben Restaurant by a long-haired, raspy-voiced Dane named Lars. The four-wheel drive vehicle we were expecting was a cargo truck front connected to a gigantic box with windows. The whole thing was perched so high off the ground that we had to use a ladder to get in and out.  It looked like it was part cattle car, part boxcar, and part prison transport vehicle.The only way to communicate between our "compartment" and the cab was with a walkie-talkie, and we learned later on that it was an unreliable form of communication. 

We set out on an 20-mile-long bumpy dirt and gravel road built by Volkswagen in the late 1990s to connect Kangerlussuaq with the inland edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which covers 81% of the island. Remember that no two towns or settlements in the country are connected by a road, and there are only about 100 miles of roads in the whole country, most of them unpaved. (A new airport is cheaper to build than a new road between settlements!) Volkswagen wanted a way to test their vehicles in extreme conditions, including driving on the ice sheet itself, so they decided to build their own road, the longest road in Greenland.

The road to the ice sheet was completed in 2001, but the road on the ice sheet was never built, and the whole project was abandoned in 2006. The government maintains the road--somewhat--and it is used for adventurous tourist trips inland, for hunting trips, and as an economical route to the ice sheet for environmental scientists. 

Luckily, I had enough Dramamine for myself and a few others in the vehicle, which looks quite nice inside, but no padding would be adequate for the bouncing and shifting and swaying. It was as good as any Disneyland ride except it didn't do any loop-de-loops. 

For some reason, I kept thinking of the old Disney movie The Gnome Mobile. 

The drive to the ice sheet took about an hour-and-a-half and included a couple of stops along the way. Our first stop was at the site of a US military plane crash that occurred in 1968. Three of eight planes flying in formation crashed after their pilots bailed out--all safely--during severe weather. This is what is left of one of the planes:

GREENLAND: KANGERLUSSUAQ

 June 17, 2019

We stayed less than 24 hours in Kangerlussuaq, arriving in late afternoon on a Monday and flying out mid-morning on a Tuesday. There isn't a ton of tourist activity drawing people to Kangerlussuaq, but there are only two ways to get out of Ilulissat: fly back to Iceland or fly to Kangerlussuaq, and then fly from there to Copenhagen. Since we had flown in from Iceland, we chose to fly out via Kangerlussuaq.

This may be the only airport in the world with a taxidermied musk ox in the lobby:

I had to look up "Tikilluarit." It's Greenlandic for "Welcome."  Duh.

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.

GREENLAND, ILULISSAT: OUR FINAL FAREWELL TO ILULISSAT

June 17, 2019

On our last morning in Ilulissat, the ten of us took three cabs to the head of a trail, where we met up with Lisa, our Danish guide from the first day, who took us on an eco-tour of the area:

She explained to us that under the thin green layer we could see, most of ground was perpetually frozen, or permafrost.

In the scanty topsoil layer, mosses, flowers, and other plants flourished:

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, 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:

GREENLAND: HOTEL ARCTIC AND WALKING THROUGH ILULISSAT'S "DOWNTOWN"

June 15, 2019

After our midnight sun iceberg cruise, we took the opportunity to sleep in the next morning. At this point we had moved to our second hotel, the Hotel Arctic, which was situated on the outskirts of Ilulissat in an area where there appeared to be some development going on.

Although it was supposed to be the better hotel, we weren't all that impressed. It was pretty basic, and our view of the bay was better in the Hotel Icefiord.

The Danes have definitely left their mark on Greenland's sense of interior design:

It is always fun to run into familiar things in an unfamiliar place:

Well, at least the PICTURES are familiar. Check out the text. Greenlandic words are SO LONG:

GREENLAND: NIGHTTIME ICEBERG CRUISE

June 14, 2019

Land of the Midnight Sun: Any of the world's northern regions above (or close to) the Arctic Circle. (Wikipedia)

"Midnight Sun" refers to the phenomenon on the earth's poles when the sun is visible all night long. Some part of the sun is visible for 24 hours a day in the Arctic Circle from about June 12 until July 1. We were fortunate to be in Greenland at a location over 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle from June 16 until June 20. We left Greenland just one day shy of the summer solstice (June 21), the day with the longest period of daylight in the Northern Hemisphere, but in Greenland, there are 2 1/2 weeks of "longest days," so we didn't miss anything.

The flag of Greenland reminds me of the midnight sun. The top white stripe represents the glaciers and ice cap covering most of the country. The bottom red stripe is the ocean that surrounds the island. The top half of the circle is the sunset (never quite setting into the ocean), and the bottom half of the circle represents the icebergs partially submerged in the ocean.

Taking advantage of the midnight sun, we were picked up for an iceberg viewing trip at 9:45 PM and didn't get back to the hotel until 1:00 or 1:30 AM.

Several years ago we cruised Alaska and went on several glacier sightseeing trips there. The Alaskan glaciers are definitely spectacular, but our Greenland midnight sun cruise was a very different kind of spectacular.

First of all, these two other boats are the only ones we saw the entire night, and most of the time we couldn't see or hear either one of them.

The few times we saw one of the boats, we appreciated the fact that they were not huge, noisy cruise ships jam-packed with tourists.

GREENLAND: ILULISSAT

June 14, 2019

I love the name of the first place we visited in Greenland: Ilulisssat (ill-LOO-li-sat). It rolls off the tongue, much more so than the original name of the village: Jakobshavn (Jacob's Haven), which was the name given to it by the Danes who settled it in 1741. The name Ilulissat is the local word for "iceberg," a very appropriate name as will be shown in future posts.

Ilulissat is the most popular tourist destination in Greenland, and tourism is its principal industry. It sits right next to a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Ilulissat Icefjord, and it has developed a nice infrastructure for tourism.

The first thing that stood out to me about Ilulissat is that there are no straight streets other than one that goes through the center of town. I was sure our driver was lost when we were taken from the airport to our hotel because it seemed we were trapped in an endless weaving around and through town.

We stayed the first night in the Hotel Icefiord, and then moved the second night to a slightly nicer hotel, the Hotel Arctic, because of some complications we had when rearranging the trip because of a cancelled flight. Our view from the Hotel Icefiord was definitely better than our view from the Hotel Arctic:  

A seal skin tacked to the desk in the check-in area is not a customary sight where we are from, but we saw a lot more animal skins during the next few days:

Our room was clean but spare, and the most important item was hanging from a hook in the bathroom:

The second thing I noticed was the ubiquitous icebergs. From our hotel room window, we could see a dozen or so medium-sized icebergs and lots of baby icebergs floating in the bay, complete with sapphire-colored edges that are hard to see in this photo:

FROM ICELAND TO GREENLAND

June 14, 2019

Our next stop on our Grand Northern Adventure was Greenland, conveniently marked in green (of course) below:

At about 840,000 square miles, Greenland is the largest island in the world, almost three times as large as the next largest island, New Guinea. (Of course, Australia is more than three times as large as Greenland, but it is considered a continent, not an island.)

Iceland is a mere 40,000 square miles, so Greenland is twenty-one times larger. But while Greenland has a population of about 56,000 people, Iceland has about 340,000 people, or six times as many.

By comparison, the contiguous 48 states in the US comprise about 3.1 million square miles, which is 3.7 times larger than Greenland. Alaska, perhaps a better comparison, is just over 663,000 square miles, about four-fifths the size of Greenland. In contrast, the population of Alaska is about 737,000 people, about 13 times the population of Greenland, and the population of the 48 contiguous states is about 327 million, almost 6,000 times the population of Greenland.

That's not surprising considering that most of Greenland is inside the Arctic Circle, which doesn't make for great farming or raising of livestock (although it is great for fishing), and which means the summers are very short and the winters are very, very long.

Map from Wikipedia

There are only two cities that offer flights in and out of Greenland: Reykjavik (Iceland) and Copenhagen (Denmark). All other flights to Greenland connect in these two cities. Greenland doesn't get a lot of tourists. I think this chart from Wikipedia showing the number of overnight visitors in 2016 is very interesting.

If you are wondering why so many more visitors come from Denmark than the other Scandinavian countries, it is because Greenland is an autonomous Danish territory, so there are many economic and cultural ties between the two countries. I would think Iceland and Canada, Greenland's closest neighbors, would be sending more tourists, but apparently Greenland doesn't have much appeal for them.

As a side note, this week the news media reported that President Trump is talking about buying Greenland. Having been to Greenland and having seen the national pride of the people and the lifestyle they have chosen, it seems like a preposterous and even offensive idea to me.  I love this tongue-in-cheek response published in the New Yorker a few days ago: "Denmark Offers to Buy U.S."

ICELAND AND GREENLAND, AN OVERVIEW AND A JOURNEY

Every five years my husband, his four law partners, and their spouses take a trip together.  This all started in 2009 when they were celebrating 15 years as a law firm. That year we went to Peru. We had so much fun that we decided to do it again. In 2014, we all traveled to Kenya and Tanzania. That was also a great trip, so we decided to do it one last time.

The five men had a hard time coming up with a destination for their 25th anniversary this year. Most of the couples travel quite a bit, so finding a place no one had been was the first challenge, finding somewhere that everyone wanted to visit was another, and finding a date that would work for everyone was yet another.

The stars all aligned for a trip to Iceland and Greenland, June 9 to 19. I must confess, this wasn't my first choice of a destination. Neither country had ever really been on my bucket list, but Bob was pretty excited about it.

It turned out out to be a really fun trip, partly because I love the people we traveled with, and partly because--okay, I'll admit it--I grew to love the destinations.

Although it seems like the two countries would be very much alike, they definitely are not.

CRITERIA	ICELAND	GREENLAND
SIZE	39,682 square miles (About the size of Kentucky)	836,300 square miles (21 times bigger than Iceland)
POPULATION IN 2019	358,000+	56,672
POPULATION DENSITY	3 people per square kilometer, or 8 people per square mile, making it the least densely populated European country (Compare to Alaska, with 1.3 per square mile, or Wyoming, with 6 per square mile)	.026 people per square kilometer, making it the least densely populated country in the world
LARGEST CITY	Reykjavik (Capital): 128,793	Nuuk (Capital): 17,984
LANGUAGE	Icelandic (North Germanic language descended from Old Norse)	Greenlandic (Eskimo-Aleut language) and Danish (Most citizens are bilingual.)
GOVERNMENT	Semi-colony of Denmark until they achieved Independence in 1918.	Became Danish in 1814 and was fully integrated into Denmark in 1953. Denmark granted Greenland home rule in 1979.
CURRENCY	Icelandic Krona	Danish Krone
GDP	$54,753 per capita	$37,000 per capita
RELIGION	Lutheran	Lutheran
TOURISM	2.2 million tourists in 2017	32,767 tourists in 2016 (and fewer than 3,000 were from the US)
UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITES	2	3

In addition, both countries are pretty far north (requiring winter clothing, even in June, and having 24 hours of continuous daylight while we were there), but most of Greenland is inside the Arctic Circle.