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.

SEWARD, ALASKA: KENAI FJORDS NATIONAL PARK

After spending a couple of days in Homer, we headed north, then east, then south towards Seward, a distance of about 170 miles

Traveling in Alaska in any way but on a cruise ship requires stamina. Distances are long, but the sights are worth the journey.

Seward is a cute little town of only 2,500 people. It was named after William Seward, U.S. Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, who is famous for orchestrating "Seward's Folly," the best land purchase the U.S. ever made other than the Louisiana Purchase. It was William Seward who negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, adding over a half million square miles to the United States. The price was $7.2 million, or about two cents an acre. (The Louisiana Purchase was almost three cents per acre 64 years earlier.)

Seward is a fun little town and, like so many of its Alaskan counterparts, if full of quirky "art," some of which once again reflects Alaskans' bizarre passion for ice cream:

The flowers all over Alaska were stunning. With such a short growing season, how do they manage this?

We had booked an 8.5-hour Kenai Fjords Cruise leaving out of Seward at 9:00 AM, so we made our way to the docks . . . 

. . . and boarded the Melissa Ann, a boat for 150 people. Luckily, there were just 34 passengers and 3 crew aboard:

 

NORWAY: AURLANDFJORD

At the end of our ride on the Flam Railway was the beautiful and truly magnificent Aurlandfjord. Our group hopped on a little cruising boat and started on our next adventure.

We had a very friendly escort for much of our journey:

Where the cliffs didn't drop straight down into the water, there were lush green valleys with scattered homes and buildings.  I had to wonder where the residents of these homes shop--no Costco or Target in sight--and what is it like in winter?

But the really spectacular part of this mini-cruise was the waterfalls.  I think we snapped about 500 pictures of one waterfall after another, from long thin streams of water to torrential cataracts.  It was pretty hard not to post them all, but I'm not sure this blog has enough memory, so here is just a sampling:

  Sometimes they even came in triplicate:

It was hard work being surrounded by such a magnificent, glorious landscape, but we found our ways to deal with it:

After three hours or so on the boat, we reluctantly disembarked and climbed onto our bus for the long ride back to Oslo. That vista wasn't too shabby either:

I think in the short time we were there, we really came to love the beautiful mountains and fjords of Norway: