Blogs from East Greenland, Greenland, North America

Another flight gets us back to the west coast and Greenland’s second largest town Sisimiut, a small town centred around a harbour full of fishing boats. Behind the port are the old houses of the original colony, now a museum spread across seven buildings - only four seem to be open. The Colonial Manager's house is the largest, of course, and houses a museum on hunting and fishing, complete with a fearsome harpoon gun. A display also gives us instructions on the right way to attach dogs to your sled; it depends on the sled type apparently! It's minus 2 with light snow so we head out to sea in an open boat with Jan to look for whales. In the second fjord that we explore, we find four humpbacks feeding and diving; it's worth braving ... read more

Thinking of Greenland most people suppose there is only an ice sheet. Or melting ice at least. But Greenland is greener than that. Specially around Kangerlussuaq in West Greenland, just north of the polar circle. Linda, my son Robin and I made some beautiful hikes around this area this week. Kangerlussuaq Let's face it, Kangerlussuaq is ugly. No houses with Mediterranean colors embellished with pots of geraniums and hanging baskets with fuchsia's, no boutiques with the latest Gucci models, no cosy restaurants with candle light where you can eat your chateaubriands. On the contrary. The former US military basement is nothing more than a hotchpotch of iron utility buildings, containers and some wooden house blocks in bright blue and yellow. Pipes run throughout the settlement, coming from Lake Ferguson and supplying the settlement with water. Not ... read more

“Swans of weird shape pecked at our planks, a gondola steered by a giraffe ran foul of us, which amused a duck sitting on a crocodile’s head... All the strange, fantastic shapes rose and fell in stately cadence with a rustling, whispering sound and hollow echoes to the seas.” Frank Worsley, Captain of ‘Endurance’ - describing icebergs Anywhere in Greenland is 'out of the way', however, on this voyage we got to some very rarely visited places even more out of the way - even by Greenlandic standards! About a hundred and fifty miles from the open ocean, the mighty Daugard-Jensen Glacier spills stadium-sized icebergs into the vanishing depths of Nordvestfjord, a twisty finger of sea, that ends abruptly at Ingmikortilaq (the land that looks like an island). Getting to this part of Scoresby Sund is ... read more

Just a quick blurb! We left Akureyri, Iceland and headed back to Greenland by ship. Greenland is ice and Iceland is green? Greenland is the world’s largest island and is about 80% covered in ice (so it is actually white by default) but nevertheless it is still called Greenland. Quite an imaginative name! However, imagination was lacking when they named the national park in the northeast of Greenland… The Northeast Greenland National park which, unsurprisingly, is in the northeast of Greenland, is the world’s largest national park. It’s almost a million square kilometres, or about the size of Ontario or 5 United Kingdoms. Most of the park is covered by the giant ice-sheet that smothers the land, but the fjord systems along the shore, and the mighty coastal mountain ranges are free of ice and are ... read more

On day 7 we woke up to a foggy cold morning, we could barely see the glacier in front of us, after breaking camp around 10am we started heading down to the glacier lake below our campsite, went around it and followed it until we are face to face with the glacier, it was beautiful, Kata has no plans of walking over it as we have no crampons so we tried to find a way to get around it, took awhile, scrambling on scree and big boulders, it was a tough 1st 2 hours, we took a break but it got colder so we hurried and started walking again, our aim is to get closer to the Qorlotoq lakes, there are several of them and are tagged with numbers, lake # 1, 3, etc. We walked ... read more