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life_of_glamourToday we took an 8-hour boat ride, we visited a village located on a glacier fjord, then we cruised through the icebergs. But the first thing we saw was a humpback whale:
Oh my god, I took 376 pictures today, there may have been an hour there where I never turned off my camera as we moved through the fjord filled with glaciers. I've managed to distil all of the images down to the 37 best shots, or ones that we liked best. It was a challenge. If you truly want to see all the images, catch me in person, because there are way too many to process for loading (I have to resize them all down quite a bit to get them to upload at anything resembling a reasonable speed. There's MUCH more detail in the originals!). Since there are so many, I've just pasted them all at the end of the text here. Ok, here goes the narrative of the day, pics at the end:
There were 6 of us travelers on the boat – Cathyn and I, a Spanish family of four, the travel guide from the company that set it up (Arctic Adventures, if you're curious), and the boat captain, Lars, who was great. The first couple of hours we cruised up and around the island we're on through a large fjord surrounded by massive mountains plunging straight down into the sea. This is the area I call “Why Greenland can't have nice things, like ports or cities.”
Then we landed at the village called Tiniteqilaaq (you don't pronounce the trailing “q”, according to our guide, so that clears pronunciation right up...). We walked through the village, which was a little sad because it was full of chained up miserable looking dogs, up to the cemetery, where we got our first glimpse of the iceberg fjord, which is where 3 different glaciers dump their ice into the sea. One of them, according to our guide, is moving at a rate of about 12 kilometers per year, so that's a lot of ice to drop! So, as we hike up over the rise to the cemetery, the full glory and majesty of a fjord packed full of icebergs smacked us in the face for the very first time – it was a very good way to do it, I must say!
Then we walked through the rest of the town, getting fine views of the fjord, then all got back on the boat. So, getting on and off of the boat was an adventure because there aren't really docks or anything, so the captain, Lars, would nose us into wherever we were getting off, then we had to clamber along the side on the narrow shelf while holding onto a rail, the walk across the bow and off the nose of the boat onto rocks or whatever. This was terrifying the first time but I got the hang of it quickly and the second time was a lot less scary.
Next stop was for lunch, where we found a nice rocky island to scamper up and have our lunch. Best lunch view ever in recorded history, possibly!!
And then we spent the rest of the day cruising a fjord full of icebergs, completely and utterly magnificent. In fact, I thought to myself several times, this may be the best use of a day in my entire life. It's all downhill from here. (Of course, I thought that when I went to Staffa in Scotland, and yet here I am having another “best day ever” so it's good to know that there are possibly some more brilliant, pinnacle days in my life yet to come. If I'm lucky.)
After we turned out of the fjord back towards Tasiilaq we had a few km where we were in open sea, and it was rough going – apparently there was a storm out in the Atlantic yesterday and the remnants of the waves were making for some pretty hefty seas for us. I spent the last hour inside talking with Lars and asking him questions about living in Greenland and boats and hunting and culture and he asked some about America and our wacky politics (seems to come up a lot with people here, they're kind of mystified by the results of some of our political processes. So am I, my friends...so am I). All in all, I have had a brilliant, shining, magnificent day that won't soon be topped.
Here have some pictures, there are too many for me to upload individually, so here's an album. I hope you enjoy!
Oh my god, I took 376 pictures today, there may have been an hour there where I never turned off my camera as we moved through the fjord filled with glaciers. I've managed to distil all of the images down to the 37 best shots, or ones that we liked best. It was a challenge. If you truly want to see all the images, catch me in person, because there are way too many to process for loading (I have to resize them all down quite a bit to get them to upload at anything resembling a reasonable speed. There's MUCH more detail in the originals!). Since there are so many, I've just pasted them all at the end of the text here. Ok, here goes the narrative of the day, pics at the end:
There were 6 of us travelers on the boat – Cathyn and I, a Spanish family of four, the travel guide from the company that set it up (Arctic Adventures, if you're curious), and the boat captain, Lars, who was great. The first couple of hours we cruised up and around the island we're on through a large fjord surrounded by massive mountains plunging straight down into the sea. This is the area I call “Why Greenland can't have nice things, like ports or cities.”
Then we landed at the village called Tiniteqilaaq (you don't pronounce the trailing “q”, according to our guide, so that clears pronunciation right up...). We walked through the village, which was a little sad because it was full of chained up miserable looking dogs, up to the cemetery, where we got our first glimpse of the iceberg fjord, which is where 3 different glaciers dump their ice into the sea. One of them, according to our guide, is moving at a rate of about 12 kilometers per year, so that's a lot of ice to drop! So, as we hike up over the rise to the cemetery, the full glory and majesty of a fjord packed full of icebergs smacked us in the face for the very first time – it was a very good way to do it, I must say!
Then we walked through the rest of the town, getting fine views of the fjord, then all got back on the boat. So, getting on and off of the boat was an adventure because there aren't really docks or anything, so the captain, Lars, would nose us into wherever we were getting off, then we had to clamber along the side on the narrow shelf while holding onto a rail, the walk across the bow and off the nose of the boat onto rocks or whatever. This was terrifying the first time but I got the hang of it quickly and the second time was a lot less scary.
Next stop was for lunch, where we found a nice rocky island to scamper up and have our lunch. Best lunch view ever in recorded history, possibly!!
And then we spent the rest of the day cruising a fjord full of icebergs, completely and utterly magnificent. In fact, I thought to myself several times, this may be the best use of a day in my entire life. It's all downhill from here. (Of course, I thought that when I went to Staffa in Scotland, and yet here I am having another “best day ever” so it's good to know that there are possibly some more brilliant, pinnacle days in my life yet to come. If I'm lucky.)
After we turned out of the fjord back towards Tasiilaq we had a few km where we were in open sea, and it was rough going – apparently there was a storm out in the Atlantic yesterday and the remnants of the waves were making for some pretty hefty seas for us. I spent the last hour inside talking with Lars and asking him questions about living in Greenland and boats and hunting and culture and he asked some about America and our wacky politics (seems to come up a lot with people here, they're kind of mystified by the results of some of our political processes. So am I, my friends...so am I). All in all, I have had a brilliant, shining, magnificent day that won't soon be topped.
Here have some pictures, there are too many for me to upload individually, so here's an album. I hope you enjoy!
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Date: 2012-07-24 07:00 pm (UTC)So stark, so beautiful!
I want to go see it all myself. Thank you for sharing with us.