Day Twenty-Six: Yellowknife to Nuuk

We left Yellowknife early in the morning, which was the default setting for the trip, but due to the constant time changes had become quite tiresome. The flight to Nuuk was around four and a half hours, and somewhere over the Labrador Sea we quietly handed back five hours to the clock. Nuuk sits five hours ahead of Yellowknife in summer, a detail nobody fully appreciated until we landed and the afternoon had mysteriously vanished.

Arrival formalities, fuel, and the usual ground business took their time, after which we drove into Nuuk and checked into the Hotel Hans Egede. Everybody was tired in the particular way that only time zones can produce, and we had little ambitions for the evening. The hotel happened to have a steakhouse, which solved the question of dinner without anyone having to form an opinion, and shortly after that the day was declared over and everyone went to sleep.

Day Twenty-Seven: Nuuk & Ilulissat

In Nuuk, we woke up later than the tiredness would have suggested and went out to walk around Nuuk. We visited the Hans Egede statue, which stands on a hill above the old cathedral and looks out over the colorful houses and the fjord beyond. Egede was the Danish-Norwegian missionary who founded the place in 1728. We wandered a bit, found a few scenic spots overlooking the city, and then made our way to the Greenland National Museum and Archives.

The museum was worth the visit. It covers around four and a half thousand years of Greenlandic history under one roof, alongside skin boats, sledges, and the kind of clothing that kept people alive in places that have no business supporting human life. The part everyone remembers, though, is the Qilakitsoq mummies, a group of women and children from around 1475 preserved so completely by the cold and the dry air that you can still make out the stitching on their clothes.

What we did not expect was the local art. One piece in particular was rather suggestive about the historical relationship between the indigenous population and the local bears, in a way that left very little to the imagination. There is a photograph in the gallery below which should be able to do the work, rather than attempting a description here. We did, however, come away with a new working theory, which is that we now understand one countrie’s recent enthusiasm for acquiring Greenland. One look at that particular artwork and the whole foreign policy starts to make a different sort of sense.

From there it was back to the airport for the flight to Ilulissat, which we were able to fly VFR. That meant a proper scenic run past the three glaciers of the region, the great rivers of ice grinding their way down toward the sea and feeding the icefjord that the whole area is famous for. It was the kind of view that makes the time zone change feel entirely worth it.

Landing in Ilulissat presented its own small problem. The town is building a new airport, a longer runway meant to open later this year and finally take the larger jets. However, from the air the new strip looks every bit as finished as the one currently in use. Our pilots, reasonably enough, lined up for it, and were some way into the approach before they worked out that the runway they actually wanted was the other one. They adjusted, put it down on the correct piece of tarmac, and we checked into the hotel. Dinner was a quick affair, since the day had used everyone up.

The one development worth recording involves one of our pilots, who roughly eight months ago had decided, with considerable conviction, that he absolutely had to spend a night in the glass house. What had not been factored into this decision was that Ilulissat in summer does not really do nighttime. The sun simply does not set. So there was a night in the glass house, and along with it a full and uninterrupted dose of daylight from one end of the night to the other.

Day Twenty-Eight: Ilulissat

We were up early again for a glacier tour to the Eqi Glacier, one of the most active calving glaciers in Greenland. Because it was still early in the season, the ice would only let us get to within about eight kilometres of the face. The whole outing ran around six hours, which broke down neatly into two hours getting there, two hours picking our way through the ice, and two hours back. Even at a distance the glacier is enormous and makes for a great view.

Before we had left for the Glacier, the pilots held a brief conference and decided, citing what they called situational awareness, that we should depart that same evening rather than wait for the morning. The official reasoning was a concern about fog rolling in the next day. A potential unofficial reasoning, which presumably carried at least equal weight, was a strong disinclination to spend another night trying to sleep under the sun in a glass house. So we flew on to Keflavik in Iceland, landed, checked into the hotel, and slept.

Day Twenty-Nine: Keflavik to Mollis

In the morning we left at nine for the final leg home. For once the weather was on our side, and with a decent tailwind the flight was meant to come in at three hours and forty-five minutes. We did lose a little time on the ground beforehand, courtesy of airport staff who were not operating at peak attentiveness, but once we were airborne the flight home was about as easy as flying gets.

The trip had handed us four distinct weeks, each with its own culture, climate, and time zone, split out fairly evenly between them. However, whilst flying over Switzerland it was hard to conclude anything other than that home remains the most beautiful.

The final words of this trip’s blog are dedicated to RMF. His shoes had held together across the entire journey, every leg, every country, every continent. As he stepped off the aircraft, the sole gave up completely and parted ways with the rest of the shoe. Everybody was happy to be home.

Many thanks to the two pilots, the ground crew, and the guests, and to everyone who followed along. We very much enjoyed this trip, and we are already looking forward to the next one.