Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.05.2013, Blaðsíða 31

Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.05.2013, Blaðsíða 31
Travel ÞÓRSHÖFN VOPNAFJÖRÐUR THORSHOFN ILULISSAT ITTOQQORTOORMIIT NUUK KULUSUK NARSARSUAQ GRÍMSEY ÍSAFJÖRÐUR AKUREYRI EGILSSTAÐIR REYKJAVÍK our very best price is always online. highly seductive offers to all our destinations iceland, greenland or the faroe islands airiceland.is 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

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