GREENLAND – PART 2 

After two full days ashore in Qaqortoq and Qassiarsuk, the Captain sailed the Fridtjof Nansen into a fjord called Qaqertarsuup, the first time an HX ship had gone there. We boarded the zodiacs on a perfect morning, bright, sunny and dead calm, and were treated to a very special experience, getting up close and personal with icebergs and a glacier. We spent an hour sailing back and forth among the bergs and bergy bits and made it to within a few hundred meters of the face of the glacier.

In the afternoon, the Nansen sailed into another uncharted fjord where the expedition crew had found a place for us to land. We walked from the shore up to the foot of a glacier and then … it was my chance to take a polar dip and I was not about to waste it! According to my "Polar Plunge Certificate", the water temperature was 1.2 C but the air temperature was a balmy 12 C so I got myself good and wet. One runs out of superlatives to describe a day like today. The photos tell the story better than words can.

Day 5 of our Greenland adventure took us to the abandoned mining village of Ivittuut, one of the few places in the world known to have naturally occurring cryolite, once an important agent in the production of aluminum. The Ivittuut mining operations were a major factor in the American occupation of Greenland during World War II. The American Navy founded a base nearby to protect the highly strategic cryolite quarry. The mine operated from 1859 to 1987 and was abandoned when a process was developed to synthesize cryolite at a much-reduced cost.

We went ashore early in the afternoon and took a five-kilometer hike through the town and up into the hills. There was no trail to follow, so we scrambled over low-growing willow and along a dry, rock-strewn streambed. It was tough going, and I was glad to hit the gravel streets in Ivittuut when we got back. 

We did see three species of animals I’d never seen before: muskox, reindeer and the magnificent white-tailed eagle, Europe’s largest bird of prey. The musk ox was grazing on grass growing in the town but was chased away by the guides. We saw it again later making its way along a hillside. The reindeer, what looked like a mother and calf, were grazing in the valley between the town and the hillside. 

Our guides always carry rifles to be used only as a last resort in the event of a dangerous encounter with a polar bear. The one atop the rock is acting as a sentinel and each of the hike leaders carried a rifle as well.

I saw something in Ivittuut I didn’t expect to see above 60 degrees N latitude: decent-sized trees. The ones shown in the photo are a species of European larch and were growing to about 15 feet in height; nearly was a spruce about 20 feet high. We were told that they were probably brought here by miners and managed to thrive in a few sheltered spots. With the climate warming as it is, Greenlanders living in the southwest may one day see trees established in a few places.

Day 6 involved an exploration of Ikka Fjord by zodiac. It’s best known for the presence of hundreds of pillars of the mineral ikaite, which was named after the fjord, and is found in formations not known to exist elsewhere. The ikaite tufa pillars of the fjord rise from the bottom and are located in a "garden" where highly alkaline freshwater seeps into the bottom of the fjord and interacts with the cold seawater to form what are essentially stalagmites. While sailing on the zodiacs and the Nansen, we saw dozens of musk oxen feeding on nearby hillsides, some of them solitary males, others in small groups of females with calves. I copied the photo below from the internet but it's a very good representation of musk oxen like the ones we saw along fjords wherever we sailed.

Life onboard has a certain rhythm to it. There are lectures to attend, workshops in the science center for those interested, a small gym, a spa, a pool, a couple of big hot tubs, and three restaurants. Each one of our expedition guides has a particular area of expertise: birds, whales, geology, history, photography, Greenlandic culture, etc. One is a storyteller/historian with an extensive knowledge of the Vikings and a Masters Degree in Theatre. The guides deliver the lectures, decide where we’ll go and what we’ll do on a particular day, and they’re the ones that pilot the zodiacs, lead the walks and carry the rifles.

A feature of expedition cruising with HX that we love is not knowing where we’ll be or what we’ll do on a particular day until the evening before or the morning of. For most of the days, our program showed simply “exploration day”. Decisions are made by the ship’s Captain and the Chief Expedition Guide based on weather and ice conditions. On the afternoon I went for a dip at “Nansen Beach”, two guides spent the morning looking for a landing spot while the others toured us through icebergs and up to the face of a glacier. Our landing that day had never been used by guests from a cruise ship and we may have been the first humans to set foot and swim there.

On Day 7, we sailed into the fjord called Kvanefjord and began with a shore landing and hike up to several burial sites from the Thule Inuit period, likely some 500 years old. They stood on a point of land giving a panoramic view in both directions as well as the glacier at the head of the fjord. I remarked to Elva that I wouldn’t mind having my ashes buried there when the time comes but my wish fell on deaf ears. The photo below shows three graves in the foreground running diagonally from left to right. After that, we took a spin around the fjord to get a better look at the glacier. We finished the day with a Greenlandic-themed five-course dinner, our best since we boarded the Nansen.

After three days of not seeing a Greenlander, our visit to Paamiut was a welcome change. The small town is visited by some 30,000 tourists annually, almost all of them arriving by cruise ship, and the locals turned out to make us feel welcome. We walked most of the streets on a cold morning, took in a karaoke performance by a young man in the community hall, and visited the local museum and church. Prices for staples in the two grocery stores were eye-watering!

I tried to imagine what it must be like to live in Paamiut, caught between the old ways and the modern world, and wondered how small communities like this will face the future. It’s in places like these that you realize just how important the Danish-supported social system is and how difficult it would be to maintain a standard of living which offers free education and health care if Greenland were to become an independent country.

Sailing out of Paamiut harbour, I saw this grounded trawler, a sad reminder of the heyday of the cod fishery during the period from the 1950s to the collapse of the stocks due to overfishing in the early 1990s. The town’s population rise to as high as 4,000 during the boom years but is now struggling to maintain a stable 1,200.

On our last full day aboard the Nansen, we visited the abandoned settlement known as either Kangerluarsoruseq in Greenlandic, Færingehavn in Faroese, or by its commercial name, Nordafor. Having preferred to spend the day in the capitaI city, Nuuk, I can’t say we were that excited about a trek through a second ghost town, but we did our best to enjoy outdoor time on a nice day touring this photogenic industrial archaeology site. It is yet another example of Arctic industrial boom-and-bust and post-colonial European economic development. We were told that as many as 1,000 people worked in the settlement at its peak but that it never lived up to the promise of employment for Greenlanders. This experience helps explain why the locals don’t and probably never will trust outsiders’ advice on how to develop their economy.

We took a too-short city bus tour of Nuuk and got a glimpse of downtown. It's a city on the move, with construction everywhere and a brand-new international airport.

On the way back to Reykjavik, we flew over the massive Greenland Ice Cap and I took this photo from the plane. The ice sheet itself is in the top right of the photo, and a glacier runs from top right to bottom left, emptying into the ocean

Tomorrow, we hope to make it back home, ready for all that an Island summer has to offer. A few closing comments on my experience:

1. HX Explorations offers a top-notch adventure cruise experience. We knew this from our earlier journey with them in 2022, from Tromso, Norway, to Lisbon. The Nansen is much bigger than the ship we sailed on that first time, the Spitzbergen, and therefore has much more to offer onboard.
2. The guides were, as expected, knowledgeable, experienced and very helpful. We watched the crew expertly handle a gentleman confined to a wheelchair, and they made sure he was able to participate in every activity, including wet zodiac landings. It’s obvious that they’ve been highly trained and that the company only hires the best.
3. I got to see Viking sites, bucket list for me, and to meet Greenlanders where they live, and I got a small taste of what it must be like to live on the edge. I’ve always been fascinated by people who choose to live and manage to thrive in harsh environments, and Greenland was no exception.
4. As for the weather, it could not have been better. During the 10 days we spent on land, the temperature ranged from 4 to 14 C. There were only 2 cloudy days, and we never felt a drop of rain. Except for a few waves as we rounded Cape Farewell, seas were calm.
5. No one mentioned the elephants in the room, which I found kind of disappointing. I did ask our local Greenlandic guide, a woman in her early 30s, whether she thought she’d see an independent Greenland in her lifetime, and she answered hesitantly: “Maybe…” Her explanation was long and well reasoned. As for the other elephant, President Donald J. Trump, it was as if he doesn’t exist. People here have more important things to think about, I suppose. And that’s as it should be.

 

GREENLAND – PART 1 

It took us 21 hours to get from Charlottetown to downtown Reykjavik. We’d been to Iceland’s capital once before in 2022 on a cruise with Princess. On that occasion, the ship was docked in the city for a full day, and we’d rented a car to drive the Golden Circle, taking in three of the island’s signature attractions. This time, we had three hours to kill before boarding the MS Fridtjof Nansen, and we spent it strolling around old Reykjavik on what one local told us was a very fine day for early June. We sipped on coffee and tea on a courtyard overlooking a nice square and winced a bit when the bill arrived: $20.47 Canadian!

The population of Iceland is about 400,000 with Reykjavik being home to about 140,000. We walked up to Reykjavik’s most famous landmark, the towering Lutheran church called the Hallgrimskirkja. The statue out front of Leif Erickson was donated by the United States of America to mark the thousandth anniversary of the first meeting of Iceland’s Parliament in the year 930, making it one of the world’s longest running parliaments. Historians believe the first settlement in Iceland was in Reykjavik in 874 by a Norwegian chieftain named Ingolfr Arnason.

In Grade 5, I moved from la petite école to la grande école in my native village of Wellington and there discovered two subjects new to me, history and geography. I was fascinated by both. We learned that Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in 1492. But we also heard of the Norse sagas, those that spoke of Erik the Red and his son Leif Ericson, also called “Leif the Lucky”. I couldn't help imagining that the Norse sagas were true and, in the early 1960s, when archaeologists discovered the remains of a Norse settlement in L’Anse-Aux-Meadows, they did become very real and changed our view of how Europeans first came to know what is now Canada.

The Fridtjof Nansen is an expedition-class cruise ship with a passenger capacity of 650, and she spends most of her time in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Only 283 guests were onboard. Not long after our cruise ends, she’s scheduled to cross the Northwest Passage from east to west, head down the east coast of the Pacific and spend our fall and winter months running back and forth between South America and Antarctica. The Nansen is one of the nicer vessels we’ve been on and our room, the cheapest on the ship, is quite a step up from what we’re used to.

Our first full day aboard a new ship involves an orientation to our new surroundings, adjusting to the time change and lack of sleep, getting used to the pitch and roll of the ship, and taking in as much information as we can about experiences the cruise has to offer. The first two were sea days spent sailing across the Denmark Strait on generally calm seas before we rounded the southern tip of Greenland, Cape Farewell.

While the southwest part of the island is suitable for limited farming, 81% of Greenland is covered by an ice sheet the thickness of which averages more than 1.5 kilometers. To put that into perspective, if the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, sea levels around the world would rise by about 7.5 meters or 24 feet, something to ponder in our age of global warming.

Greenland, an autonomous territory with its own Parliament, is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and is home to 56,000 people. A bit of trivia: Greenland shares a 1.2-kilometer border with Canada on Hans Island, a small speck of land located in the far north. The principal source of wealth, accounting for 20% of GDP, is financial aid from Denmark. (By comparison, federal transfers to our province account for 11% of GDP.) The most important local industry is the fishery, with shrimp being the primary species caught and exported. While the island has extensive reserves of minerals, oil and gas, virtually none of these resources have been exploited. The main reasons for this are extreme weather conditions, the high cost of extraction and a very strong environmentalist movement.

Greenland has been inhabited at intervals over at least the last 4,500 years by Inuit peoples, the Thule, whose forebears migrated there from what now Canada. Today, Greenlandic Inuit make up 90% of the population.

Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland with his father, Thorvald, crossed the Denmark Strait with a group of followers in open boats powered by sails and banks of oars, carrying livestock and all the supplies they would need to start a new life. They settled the uninhabited southwestern part of Greenland in about 986, and their descendants lived in Greenland for over 400 years until they disappeared in the late 1400s.

Many years ago, I picked up a book called The Greenlanders, a historical fiction epic written by Jane Smiley. It describes the daily affairs of Nordic settlers living in South Greenland in the 13^th and 14^th centuries, including marriages, births, deaths, famines, epidemics, trials, church affairs, land feuds, seal hunts, military invasions, and encounters with Greenland’s aboriginal inhabitants. In an accurate description of the book, one reviewer called it a "bleak, stirring picture of the slow slouch towards the death of a civilization". It was the first I’d heard of a European settlement in Greenland, and I was fascinated.

After almost three full days at sea, we saw our first land and our first icebergs. The Nansen sailed up a scenic fjord called Tasermiut and came to a stop just off the tiny community of Tasiusaq, population about 40. As it was fairly late in the day by the time we got there, it was decided that we wouldn’t go ashore, but our zodiacs took us on a run up towards a glacier to give us a better view of the spectacular surroundings. Although we will not reach the Arctic Circle on this trip, the days are long: sunset is at 11:30 pm and sunrise is at 4:30.

We first set foot on Greenlandic soil at the town of Qaqortoq, population 3,000, the only place I know of that has three “q”s in its name. The setting is gorgeous, with multi-coloured houses climbing up the hillside from the shoreline. A nearby lake drains into a small stream that flows through the old colonial harbour district of town, past the Lutheran Church built in 1832. 

Elva and I went into town twice on the ship’s tender, the first to get our bearings and the second to attend a concert in the old church. A drummer from Nuuk had come down for the occasion and a father-daughter duo sang several songs with the MC who was dressed in her finest sealskin jacket. The young woman in the photo is dressed in the traditional Greenlandic costume, much of it made from sealskin. They sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as their closing piece in Greenlandic; such a beautiful rendition, it gave me shivers. Following the concert, I walked up to the highest point I could find to take in the view, then finished off a near-perfect day with a delicious evening meal featuring reindeer.

The first photo below shows a line of older houses. Notice the trees in front of the second one. They must be introduced ornamentals since Greenland has no native trees to speak of except some scrubby willows and birch. The second photo shows a typically quaint house in the local style and the third shows a showy carpet of Alpine azalea I found growing on thin soil at the highest point in the town. How do I know it's Alpine azalea: ChatGPT of course!

Our next stop was the tiny hamlet of Qassiarsuk, population 90. There’s a special reason why we landed there. It became the home of Erik the Red and his clan when they first settled South Greenland in the year 986. They called the place Brattahlid. Today’s settlement consists of a collection of sheep farms, 25 houses or so, a hostel, a church, a primary school, and a store complete with gas pumps and an ATM! According to ChatGPT, the farms here are the most northerly in the world.

The Qassiarsuk area, called Kujataa, is a sub-arctic farming landscape that is the first known example of agriculture in the Arctic. The Viking history, together with the unique combination of farming, hunting and fishing that occurred in the region from the 10^th through 15^th centuries and from the 18^th century to today, explain why it was listed a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.

Elva and I walked from one end of the settlement to the other, taking in the sights, including the ruins of a Viking-era church shown in the first photo. We visited the Lutheran church and the sheep farm as well as the reconstructed Viking long house, then climbed to Leif Erikson’s statue which overlooks the valley and fjord below. We even saw a humpback whale cruising past between the ship and the village. In the afternoon, I joined an organized hike to take in a bit more of the spectacular landscape. It was a sunny day, 10 degrees or so, and we were most grateful for our good fortune.