Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.05.2013, Síða 31

Travel
ÞÓRSHÖFN
VOPNAFJÖRÐUR
THORSHOFN
ILULISSAT
ITTOQQORTOORMIIT
NUUK
KULUSUK
NARSARSUAQ
GRÍMSEY
ÍSAFJÖRÐUR
AKUREYRI
EGILSSTAÐIR
REYKJAVÍK
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31
From Reykjavík though, it’s just four hours to
the west coast of Greenland, an island that
looks bigger than Australia on a map even
though it is actually three times smaller. It was
almost enough time to master some Green-
landic phrases like ‘Timmisartornermi’ (“En
route”) and ‘Timmisartup iluani pullanneqas-
sangilaq’ (meaning, yes, you guessed it, “In-
flate upon exiting”)—before the plane began
its descent on the snow-covered landscape
below. “It’s a nice, clear day,” the pilot said,
“and the temperature is -28° C.”
It certainly didn’t look warm as we homed
in on the area’s claim to fame—massive
icebergs jutting out of a frozen-over fjord.
A designated UNESCO World Heritage site
since 2004, the Ilulissat icefjord is presum-
ably what brings the town’s 36,000 annual
visitors to spend time 450 kilometres north of
the Arctic Circle.
FROZEN SNOT AND TEARS
Not until I stepped out onto the tarmac did
I begin to understand what -28° C really
meant, as my lungs tried to cough out the
cold Arctic air.
I would later learn that Ilulissat is blessed
with a high-pressure system, which means
it is dry. “You leave Ilulissat where -28° C is
okay, and you arrive in Copenhagen where it is
-9° C and you’re freezing cold,” explained Ole
Gamst-Pedersen, a Dane who runs the local
art gallery.
But it was still cold enough to freeze the
snot deep inside my nostrils and to coat my
eyelashes in a frosty white as soon as we
ventured outside to explore the town and
its colourfully painted wooden houses. The
nation-wide aesthetic that is so iconic of
Greenland was instituted by the Danes in the
early 1950s, long before Greenland would
become an autonomous country within the
Danish Kingdom.
As our cameras faded on and off, con-
stantly threatening to give up, we took refuge
from the cold as often as we could, popping
into all of the stores and tourist shops in the
downtown area. For such a small town there
were a large number of stores with a selection
of all kinds of modern conveniences, from
soda water machines and fish aquariums to
Roombas.
Passing Café Tutu and Café Hong Kong,
we went to Icy Bar, a seemingly upscale café
serving pizzas, which Ole later told us are the
best in Greenland. We sat there for a while
watching America’s Funniest Home Videos
dubbed over in Danish. After toying with the
idea of seeing Django Unchained, the only
film being shown at the town theatre, we
decided to retire to our hotel, Hotel Icefiord.
There, from our rooms, we watched the sun
set over the frozen fjord, the stillness dis-
turbed only by the occasional pair of ravens
or gulls flying past.
TRADITION UNDER DANISH
INFLUENCE
We awoke to an equally impressive sunrise,
which we enjoyed with breakfast before
rushing into town to observe 10 AM mass at a
large brown wooden church overlooking the
fjord. We took our seats in the back with the
families juggling little kids, almost all of them
chewing gum—evidently a special treat—
which I caught some of them flaunting to kids
in other pews.
We went through the motions, flipping a
Lutheran bible from one Greenlandic verse to
the next. My eyes wandered to the window
where I spotted some of our fellow passen-
gers from the flight over, a Chinese painter
and his entourage, wandering over to the fjord
edge, perhaps scouting for a landscape to put
on canvas.
Just when I was getting restless, everyone
turned to the back of the church where a hus-
band and wife dressed in traditional Green-
landic garb—the man wearing a white anorak
and the woman wearing seal skin bottoms and
a colourful beaded top—came walking down
the aisle with their newborn, whose baptism
we got to witness before going out into our
second day in Ilulissat.
At a tourism office in town we were told
that there were no dog sledding or boat tours
available to us due to the extreme frost, as
most of the town’s fishermen were off fishing
for halibut by dogsled, a far more lucrative
business than chauffeuring around tourists.
We walked down to the harbour, hoping
to convince somebody to take us along, but
unfortunately everything was gridlocked and
we had trouble communicating—English
seemingly as foreign to the fishermen as
West Greenlandic was to us. One of them
wrote “Atersuit Qaleralinnut, tumimaaíia” in
my notebook, which made no sense to me.
Unfortunately, Google translate is not yet
available for Greenlandic, a language spoken
by a nation of 57,000 people.
ROOMBAS BUT NO BANANAS
Instead of going out to sea we met Ole at
the Ilulissat Art Gallery, “a castle compared
to the rest of the houses,” as Ole described
it, “as it was built to house the Danish
colony manager.” Today it houses a perma-
nent exhibition by the 20th century Danish
landscape painter Emanuel A. Petersen.
“It would have been far too cold to be
outside painting in Greenland, so he made
numbered sketches and then went back to
“You
leave Ilulis-
sat where -28°C
is okay, and you
arrive in Copenhagen
where it is -9°C and
you’re freezing
cold”
Photo: Anna Andersen
Photo: Alísa Kalyanova
Flights to Ilulissat provided by Air Iceland. Book flight at www.airiceland.is or call +354-5703000