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.