Day 16 - Kulusuk, Greenland
Jul. 23rd, 2012 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
life_of_glamourI have only one other time, one other place, been so deeply in love with a landscape, and that was the highlands of Scotland, because I, apparently, love a desolate wasteland. This terrain sings to me, it attracts me, captivates me and leaves me longing for....what? I don't know. I clearly could never live here – I would never survive a winter. But the stark, deserted, razorlike beauty just...effects me. It gets me deep down inside where the part of me that identifies beauty lives. I desperately love the landscape of East Greenland. I had no idea what to expect, no idea what I would see or what it would be like here. I certainly didn't know to expect...this.
Now that I've bared my very soul, back to the travelogue...
Today we took another helicopter.
Part of our route lay over the iceberg-filled ocean. You know how they always say that 90% of the iceberg is under water? This pic gives a pretty good idea of what's lurking under some humongous icebergs. The big one in the center there is probably 200 yards long (2 football fields) and 100 yards tall. These are immense, and the ocean is full of them all the way out to the horizon.
Then we arrived at the village of Kulusuk.
Then we went for a hike over hill and dale, er snow, although it wasn't really cold – I'm mostly wearing a hat to shade my eyes from the sun, and keep the wind from my ears.
We got a guided tour of Kulusuk – see the wacky iceberg out in the ocean beyond the houses? They kind of lurk there being dramatic all day long, just hoping somebody will notice how crazy they've done themselves up in case you wanted to take a picture or something. It's endearing!
As we arrived over the hill to the village, the harbor lay before us. Throughout the harbor there are stakes of dead seals carcasses. They are there in cold storage for the Eskimos (fuck, at this point I don't even know what to call them. Are they Inuit? Eskimo? First Nations? Natives? I don't know, I've heard them called many things, but mostly referred to as, “The people who live in the village(s).” They're the people who were here first who still hunt seal for food, who, when I first saw them in the airport in Reykjavik, I thought they were from Japan or maybe China. They're not, they're from Greenland.)
I will admit it took me some mental gymnastics to not be horrified by seeing piles of dead seal corpses in the water. I'm...getting there. Anyway, that's what you see in the water in the image below, if you look closely. Feel free not to look closely if that sort of thing is rough for you. It is rough for me.
Then our guide took us into their church for a look, where I saw the first (and probably only) seal-skin kneeling thingy (I don't know the technical terms, the thing you kneel on in front of the altar).
Then we continued our walking tour, and Cathyn got to look at lots of fascinating rocks. He's a rockhound, so that's his happiness.
At one point we were taken into a tiny little building which sold souvenirs. A very strange, brusque, blond man looked at me and demanded, “Where are you from?” I stammered a bit and finally told him California, because I am not used to being interrogated by shop owners, then he glared at me and stalked off, probably to shout at other customers. Later our guide told us that the people who run the shop are Icelandic, and all became clear. I bought a t-shirt anyway, because it was a good one and I'm a dork like that.
And then we went back to our hotel with the splendid view and had dinner.
After dinner, we hopped into a Hummer with some Germans and a Danish driver from the hotel and took a ride up a rocky, torn up road to the old radar station on a mountain overlooking, well, everything. We stopped once on the way up at the request of the Germans for a mid-way photo op:
At the top, which is the previous site of a radar station built by NATO to monitor the Russians, and since torn down and buried “in a hole somewhere”, it was frigidly cold. Well, not so much the cold but the wind coming off the ocean was searing. And yet...I could not make myself get back in the vehicle, I spent enough time out there that my hands went numb and my ears probably cracked.
First, the ocean off the east coast of Greenland – icebergs as far as the eye can see. That's the horizon right near the top of this image. And the iceberg at the bottom is probably 200 yards tall,which hopefully gives you an idea of the scale of these things.
And the rest of these pictures, well, of the 50+ pictures I took up on the radar tower mountain, these were the ones I couldn't NOT post.
I can't stress enough how breathtakingly, mind-blowingly gorgeous I find it here. And how weak and paltry a camera is for recording it.
This beauty goes all the way around you, the camera can't even begin to communicate the immensity and the overwhelming nature of the landscape.
And finally, it's 10:15pm right now and I just looked up to see that the sun is setting out my hotel window. Here's sunset from East Greenland tonight:
For some reason I've started reading the Lord of the Rings again on this trip (which I haven't read since I was in Junior High). Possibly because the scenery here is like a fairy-tale. Fantastical.
Now that I've bared my very soul, back to the travelogue...
Today we took another helicopter.
Part of our route lay over the iceberg-filled ocean. You know how they always say that 90% of the iceberg is under water? This pic gives a pretty good idea of what's lurking under some humongous icebergs. The big one in the center there is probably 200 yards long (2 football fields) and 100 yards tall. These are immense, and the ocean is full of them all the way out to the horizon.
Then we arrived at the village of Kulusuk.
Then we went for a hike over hill and dale, er snow, although it wasn't really cold – I'm mostly wearing a hat to shade my eyes from the sun, and keep the wind from my ears.
We got a guided tour of Kulusuk – see the wacky iceberg out in the ocean beyond the houses? They kind of lurk there being dramatic all day long, just hoping somebody will notice how crazy they've done themselves up in case you wanted to take a picture or something. It's endearing!
As we arrived over the hill to the village, the harbor lay before us. Throughout the harbor there are stakes of dead seals carcasses. They are there in cold storage for the Eskimos (fuck, at this point I don't even know what to call them. Are they Inuit? Eskimo? First Nations? Natives? I don't know, I've heard them called many things, but mostly referred to as, “The people who live in the village(s).” They're the people who were here first who still hunt seal for food, who, when I first saw them in the airport in Reykjavik, I thought they were from Japan or maybe China. They're not, they're from Greenland.)
I will admit it took me some mental gymnastics to not be horrified by seeing piles of dead seal corpses in the water. I'm...getting there. Anyway, that's what you see in the water in the image below, if you look closely. Feel free not to look closely if that sort of thing is rough for you. It is rough for me.
Then our guide took us into their church for a look, where I saw the first (and probably only) seal-skin kneeling thingy (I don't know the technical terms, the thing you kneel on in front of the altar).
Then we continued our walking tour, and Cathyn got to look at lots of fascinating rocks. He's a rockhound, so that's his happiness.
At one point we were taken into a tiny little building which sold souvenirs. A very strange, brusque, blond man looked at me and demanded, “Where are you from?” I stammered a bit and finally told him California, because I am not used to being interrogated by shop owners, then he glared at me and stalked off, probably to shout at other customers. Later our guide told us that the people who run the shop are Icelandic, and all became clear. I bought a t-shirt anyway, because it was a good one and I'm a dork like that.
And then we went back to our hotel with the splendid view and had dinner.
After dinner, we hopped into a Hummer with some Germans and a Danish driver from the hotel and took a ride up a rocky, torn up road to the old radar station on a mountain overlooking, well, everything. We stopped once on the way up at the request of the Germans for a mid-way photo op:
At the top, which is the previous site of a radar station built by NATO to monitor the Russians, and since torn down and buried “in a hole somewhere”, it was frigidly cold. Well, not so much the cold but the wind coming off the ocean was searing. And yet...I could not make myself get back in the vehicle, I spent enough time out there that my hands went numb and my ears probably cracked.
First, the ocean off the east coast of Greenland – icebergs as far as the eye can see. That's the horizon right near the top of this image. And the iceberg at the bottom is probably 200 yards tall,which hopefully gives you an idea of the scale of these things.
And the rest of these pictures, well, of the 50+ pictures I took up on the radar tower mountain, these were the ones I couldn't NOT post.
I can't stress enough how breathtakingly, mind-blowingly gorgeous I find it here. And how weak and paltry a camera is for recording it.
This beauty goes all the way around you, the camera can't even begin to communicate the immensity and the overwhelming nature of the landscape.
And finally, it's 10:15pm right now and I just looked up to see that the sun is setting out my hotel window. Here's sunset from East Greenland tonight:
For some reason I've started reading the Lord of the Rings again on this trip (which I haven't read since I was in Junior High). Possibly because the scenery here is like a fairy-tale. Fantastical.
