Sunday, June 30, 2019

Nuuk to Narsarsuaq

Unfortunately, the weather turned during my second night asleep on the ferry, and when I woke up on the second full day on the boat, excited for our stop in the Greenlandic capital of Nuuk, it was drizzling a chilly rain and looking mighty gloomy out. 

I got up and walked the 20 minutes from the ferry dock to the old colonial part of town (which is what the guide told me to go see in the time we had) all the same, though I can't say it was my favorite part of the journey. It doesn't look so gross out in these couple decent pictures I got, but it was pretty gross out. Also, it was early in the morning, before most things were open, so the town had a forlorn, empty feeling to it. Which is funny, because Nuuk is by far Greenland's most populous city, with about 17,000 residents. (There are only about 55,000 Greenlanders TOTAL on the whole island.) In a way it's all fine because (1) the weather is gloomy and drizzly a lot of the time in Greenland, so I was getting a true local experience, and (2) from what I've heard Nuuk isn't the most stunning part of the island anyway. And I'm grateful I got at least a couple of hours there.




As I struggled to focus on the fact that this is just what Greenland is like and it's part of the experience, it stayed rainy and clouded over for the better part of two days. At several stops, it didn't even seem worth it to get off the boat, because there was nothing to see but mist and nothing to get but soggy. By the time we got to Qaqortoq, though, I was very antsy. And I'd been told by another tourist that Qaqortoq was her favorite town in Greenland. So I was going to explore no matter what. This ended up being lots of stops in many of Qaqortoq's absurd number of grocery and convenience stores per capita to dodge the raindrops, and spending more time than I might have otherwise marveling at how an entire wall of yarn....


...would be adjacent to an entire wall of rifles.


I think this tells you a lot about Greenlandic life.

I was also mightily impressed at how even these towns that it feels like Time forgot somehow have decent little sections of bright produce that must have come from so, so far away.


Qaqortoq has a collection of sculptures throughout town that add some artistic flair:


But as always, my favorite thing is just to wander and keep an eye out for a particularly pretty view or moment, a break in the clouds.




During this time of gross weather, the water was also more choppy, which meant that I was self-medicating with Dramamine, which I soon realized KNOCKS me OUT. Meaning I was whiling away hours at a time like the Greenlanders, dead asleep in my bunk in the middle of the day. (Though I stayed more dressed than those guys next door did.) So at the end of my ferry ride, when we reached its southernmost stop of Narsaq, it felt like it was probably good that the sea voyage was over. I could see myself just descending into a Dramamine-induced permanent haze and riding endlessly up and down the coast of Greenland, never to be heard from again.

Instead, I dragged my luggage ashore through the rain and the mist and turned to bid a fond adieu to the ship...


...slept off the rest of the Dramamine in a guesthouse bed in Narsaq, and the next morning (unable to find anyone to take my money for the stay and having to leave some cash on the counter of the reception desk folded into a piece of paper with my name and room keys...which is what I felt a Greenlander would probably do under the circumstances, so I hope it was okay) caught one last, hour-long boat from Narsaq an hour through the fjords (and past some shockingly blue ice bergs)...


...to the town of Narsarsuaq, which has an airport which has one flight per week to Copenhagen. But before getting on that plane, I spent my last few hours wandering Narsarsuaq taking way too many photos of all the impossibly picturesque sights in every direction.





When the plane took off, I was sad to be leaving Greenland, for sure. The whole experience there still kind of feels like a dream. One I'm grateful for. The sweet, mellow people, the weird coziness of being a small amount of humanity set against that epic landscape, and so much of the island I'd still like to see...Hopefully someday I'll be back.

In the meantime: let's visit Copenhagen, shall we?

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