Ilulissat to Nuuk

After seeing as much of Ilulissat as I could in the time I had there, I boarded the Arctic Umiaq line ferry that travels the southwest coast of Greenland...

...and settled into my couchette bunk (the bottom left) for a 3 night, 3.5 day ferry voyage. There were some other tourists on the boat; they were generally very insular, mostly retirees, and all European. Most people on the boat were Greenlandic, traveling to see family or for work or studying. I shared my little bunk area with a Greenlandic grandmother and her two grandkids, and then there was a second group of four bunks (populated by an ever-changing--from port to port--group of random men who always seemed to be napping) with which we shared a little bathroom.

What I gleaned of the Greenlandic people during this half-week of intimately sharing space with them: they are generally quiet, respectful, self-contained people who are not effusive but are at root extremely friendly, trusting, and trustworthy. I had little choice but to leave all of my things on or around my bunk while I roamed the ship and even got off the ship at each port, and nothing went missing. By the end of the trip I was pretty lackadaisical about my things, just knowing they were safe with strangers here. The kids were allowed to run a bit wild, but that was actually kind of good to see, considering how mellow and controlled the adults seem to be. And everyone, young and old, runs fast and loose with the bedtimes, often staying up until the wee hours and then sleeping a good part of the day if they feel like it. Also: be advised that Greenlandic men, regardless of pot-belly size, are not shy about falling asleep on top of their bedsheets wearing only very skimpy underwear, regardless of who might walk by or how surprised she may be to see such a sight in a place where people are generally covered from head to toe against the weather year-round.

So anyway: we left Ilulissat on a brilliantly sunny afternoon, heading out past the massive icebergs once again. Sorry, but I just have to share another picture and a video...they're just so amazing.

And then, two or three times per day, we would pull up to a dock that usually looked a lot like this:

People would be crying and hugging and laughing and waving and reuniting and it was all very sweet. We would stay anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours, and we were welcome to get off the boat and explore the towns we stopped in. One that I was particularly excited to see was Sisimiut, which I'd heard is a particularly pretty place.

At the craft workshop, there was this one old man with very few teeth who had learned to say in English: "Danish Kroner. No card. Money, money, money!" He must have repeated it a dozen times in the five minutes I was in there and it sounded funnier and funnier to me each time.

Many of the towns we stopped in had these sets of whale jawbones, which bring good luck if you walk through them. I did.

And there were often really picturesque examples of traditional sod houses versus Danish colonial-style houses. The ship even had an on-board guide who would sometimes get off the boat and take us on a walking tour and tell us a bit about the towns we were stopping in. It was interesting to me how much our (Greenlandic) guide focused on the colonial history of Greenland rather than the long pre-European human occupancy. I'm not sure what that was about, but I was definitely left wanting more balanced information about the history of native Greenlanders and then the interactions between Greenlanders and then Europeans, when they arrived.

It wasn't so hard, though, to let this go and just focus on wandering and enjoying the great beauty of this coastline and the places we stopped. (Here: still Sisimiut.)

Whenever the breeze died down the mosquitoes emerged in FORCE. I kept trying to take a picture of the huge swarms of them. You can kind of see them as little specks of light in this shot.

There were also a few towns that the ferry officially stops at that don't have a harbor big enough for it, so instead we lowered a skiff and they transported passengers to and from the ferry that way while the rest of us looked on from the ship's decks. This is the picturesque town of Kangaamiut, where the skiff had to make three round-trips to bring aboard all the new passengers.

Past Kangaamiut, en route to Maniitsoq, we got to weave among the rocky shoreline a bit more, which was BEAUTIFUL.

And I particularly loved our passage into Hamborgsund, where we could see glacial tongues reaching down toward the ocean from among still-craggy peaks.

And just when I would feel like we were on the outer edges of the world, far, FAR from the things of man, another cluster of brightly-painted houses would appear, perched on the rocks. Just amazing that people live entire lives in such remote, isolated, tiny towns like this (Maniitsoq).

Okay, that covers the first half of the ferry trip. I'll save the second half for the next post.