Iceland review - 2002, Qupperneq 42

40 ICELAND REVIEW
THE BIG CATCH By KRISTA MAHR Photos PÁLL STEFÁNSSON
Just over 100 years ago, East Greenland got its first taste of Europe,
and vice versa. Today, in towns where Adidas is the brand of choice
and the only kayaker in the harbour is employed by Air Iceland, everybody’s still
trying to understand each other in this transforming world.
I crunch up a steep hill over sharp-toothed jawbones and broken
glass, toward the highest point in town. The brown rock at the
peak is marred with its three billion years of wear and arctic
weather. I turn around to take in the view of Tiniteqilaaq, an iso-
lated settlement of 60 weathered structures built on a
windswept peninsula of the Sermilik fjord. Though three graves
mark this peak, a crowded graveyard of white crosses lies off to
my left.
“What a place,” says the Swiss architect I’ve been walking
through town with. He’s spooked. A wide bay of sprawling white
and turquoise icebergs and floes opens to our right. Snow-capped
peaks of the fjord across the dark, glassy water are shrouded in
mist of the overcast afternoon. In a yard below, hungry sled dogs
start to howl.
Tikilluarit – welcome – to East Greenland
“Greenland is exactly the opposite of what you think,” advises
Robert Peroni, Italian-born extreme sportsman-cum-tour organiser
who has lived in East Greenland for over 15 years. “If you go to a
settlement like Tiniteqilaaq, at first impact it seems hard, rough.
But if you stay just two, three days, you will find that it is soft, and
incredibly sweet.”
There is something uncannily warm about this cold place.
Tiniteqilaaq residents greet each other and the strangers rolling
through its three main roads. Kids play soccer in the town intersec-
tion. At the northern edge of town – five minutes on foot from the
centre – a woman sings from the open window of her rectangular
blue house. Passing whales surface and exhale between icebergs,
and if you move even closer to the water, you can hear the ice itself
cracking.
Tiniteqilaaq is one of nine settlements and two towns in the vast
1,451,000 km2 of East Greenland. Given the unfortunate and inap-
propriate nickname of Tunu, which literally means ‘backside’, East
Greenland has traditionally been cast off by the rest of the world’s
largest island as backwards, plagued by incurable social problems,
and too isolated to ‘fix.’
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