Day 7 of 4 in Ilulissat started with snow. Snow had started falling overnight, with a light snow still happening through the morning.
“Nothing is guaranteed.” Familiar words? That it how our blog ended yesterday, and keep those words in mind as you read today’s blog.
Or, in Inuit, Immaqa (eem ah caw, with the eem sound like in beam, for pronunciation). Immaqa is Inuit for “Maybe”.
(sorry for the large amount of text before the bulk of the pictures… but the tale must be told, and there will be a large amount of pictures to make up for it)
We had the fortune of a 12:35 pm flight to Nuuk, thus eliminating the need for another 5:45 am wake up call. We could sleep in, enjoy breakfast, and catch the 10:50 bus to the airport. With a 10 am checkout time, we were all down waiting for the bus to the airport, which was good, because the shuttle was 10 minutes early. Good start! Our entire group made it on the bus – the plan (we described yesterday, where they would hold the plane for us so we could make Copenhagen today) was continuing to work… We all checked in for the flight…
It snowed over night and intermittently snowed while we waited for our flight. While watching snow accumulate on the runway caused a little unease, three planes took off in this light snow through the morning, so that helped ease the concern of weather delays.
But yet…. We were delayed. (As we mentioned yesterday, Air Greenland was going to hold the flight from Nuuk to Copenhagen, as we had only 15 minutes to pass security and switch planes, so we didn’t have time for any delays.)
The first delay was ‘there’s a delay and we’ll give you an update around 1:00 pm’ (for our 12:35 flight that only had a short gap to make the Copenhagen flight). This was followed by ‘the plane that you were supposed to fly on yesterday is still not fixed’. (Well yeeaaa… no one really wanted to get on a plane we had seen on fire just yesterday.)
And then we received confirmation that we would go out on one of the two later/last flights, but no confirmation on whether it was the 3:35 pm flight or the 6:35 pm flight. Of course at this point we didn’t care so long as we made it to Nuuk. Part of the concern about getting to Nuuk is that flights don’t run from Nuuk to Copenhagen every day, so if a flight tomorrow or at the latest Friday was missed, we would be delayed days meaning we wouldn’t get home until next week, Tuesday at the earliest.
We finally found out we were on the next flight, the 3:35 flight. Yay!! But then Greenland reality set in, as that was the good news. The bad news was… well, there was some kind of conference going on, and there was not a single hotel room to be had in all of Nuuk. We had to get to Nuuk regardless, so the home office started trying to figure out what we would have to do for accommodations without any hotels available.
At 2:30 pm, they pushed a plane out of the hangar (yea, we wondered if it was our fire plane) and started prepping in, including watching our luggage get loaded on it. We told Christine to “keep an eagle eye on the engine, and SPEAK UP if she saw something, not to wonder if that was bad (as she had the day before). We actually departed Ilulissat early, at 3:30 pm, heading to Nuuk! (SUCCESS on Day 7 of 4!!!!)
Nearing the end of the flight as we approached Nuuk, Greenland reality once again raised it’s head… the pilot made the obligatory announcement – ‘we’re getting close to Nuuk, here’s the weather forecast’, which included fog with a final qualifier of ‘hopefully we can land’. No, he wasn’t being funny – it was extremely foggy, and that is another common thing for Greenland, flights being waved off / unable to land because of fog.
Fortune smiled on us though, and we landed in Nuuk, Greenland. Three days late, and a missed Copenhagen flight, with no hotel room to sleep in… BUT, in Nuuk.
The Nuuk airport is cut out of the side of the hill overlooking the bay. Here are some shots of it.
After collecting our luggage our tour leader was on the phone with the home office as well as at the Air Greenland counter for a quite a bit working on the lodging dilemma (and an evening meal as well). When he finally approached the group, he had a big childlike smile and said, “Now this will be exciting!”. We’d so much excitement in the past three days there was no way to predict was what coming next. “There are no hotel rooms available in Nuuk, but we’ve found a boat we can sleep on!”. Yes, a boat. WHAT AN ADVENTURE! (Our attitude was: People pay a lot extra for experiences like this, so we were very excited. Some of our comrades… ummm, were not.)
Leaving the airport, we had to drive along the coast / the bay. Here are some shots of the drive to give you a feel for Nuuk, as we drove to the docks where our boat was waiting. Generally, it is a rocky coast, with many houses and apartments up on rock cliffs of the bay.
As we got down to the more working area of the docks (more working boats versus fishing or large commercial boats), we began to get a feel for where we would be sleeping tonight. On a working boat, not some touristy luxury liner. (More about the boat in a bit.)
At last, we had arrived at our boat. It was moored to the dock with a gang plank down to the deck waiting for us.
We handed our suitcases down to a the boat’s captain, where he placed them along the walk-way waiting for us to take them up to the bow (front) of the ship. This was down a ship stair, so Tim carried the large suitcases down for many of the ladies who were traveling solo so that they only had to carry down their carry-on luggage. They also had a container on the bow, that we could store our luggage in over-night, so that we wouldn’t have to try and carry them down the narrow passage ways or keep them in tight cabins.
Within the door into the ship, they asked that we take off our shoes while inside, so we all explored the ship in our socked feet.
As we came into the ship, there was a central hallway leading to the mess / dining area towards the aft (back) of the ship, and a hatch with a ladder stair down into a hallway leading to the bow of the ship which is where the crew cabins were located.
There were 10 crew cabins down below, with a shower room at the end – right of the passageway, and a toilet / sink at the end – left of the passageway. We call these crew cabins, because as noted earlier, this is a working ship, not luxury ship. In fact they were a geological ship that typically carried scientists (geologists) on various missions, and as we later found out, they were able to put us up for the night only, because they were setting sail the following afternoon.
They did ask if there were any couples (of which there were two sets of couples, us and our new friends from Maliorca), however, since we were the last to raise our hands, they noted us and assigned us the largest cabin which had a “double” bed rather than either a single bunk or two bunks (one above the other) that the other cabins were equipped with.
This was our cabin:
And here were examples of the other cabins (both single and double bunked).
And on down the passageway to the shower and bathroom:
Once we all had our necessities in our rooms, and had met the Captain’s first mate (his wife) in the galley, we set off for our Nuuk City Walk that was three days late. Fortunately the sun was still up (mostly) so we had the opportunity to see a lot, it was just in a hurried manner due to the compressed timeline. Well, hurried in the sense we still did it, albeit we walked a LONG way (all over town and the coast), so it was dark before we finished and were ready to eat dinner).
Here are shots from along our walk as we walked into town, to again give you flavor for the City of Nuuk.
One interesting thing pointed out down by the docks, was the Greenland military’s special forces building / offices / training area.
And just a bit farther down the road from this (while still basically in the area of the docks), we ran across a very quaint little red house.
Why do we note this one house out of all the other quaint houses we’ve seen? Welllllll, it’s a special building is why.
(And in case you can’t quite see the seal over by the door, let us enlarge it for you…)
Yes, this is in effect our embassy in Greenland, and where our United States consulate lives/works. Tor told us that they are looking at moving to a new building, that has more space, as evidently they are very cramped in there. Continuing on with the tour / feel for Nuuk…
This is the Nuuk town hall / municipal hall.
And from here we walked down into the shore, where there are some protected Inuit housing remains.
The “transitory” Inuit built the bases of their shelters at various hunting locations into the ground, with the top open. Thus when they were at a location, they could stretch seal skins across the top of some branch supports for a roof / protection, but when they moved on to other hunting grounds they could take the seal skin roof with them for use at the similar abodes in the other hunting areas.
Just on the other side of these apartments was an extensive coastal boardwalk system that we then walked down, admiring the foggy coast line as we went.
We came to a little commercial area, where there the remnants of the tracks (and carrier) used to put boats out to sea.
Next to the old hospital (hospitals were traditionally yellow), there was a statue of the “Mother of the Sea” (an Inuit woman who was given to the sea and became in essence a goddess, with dominion over sea life) down at the water’s edge. The statue was exposed while we were there, but often (at high tides) she is under water as befits a goddess of the sea. Since it was too dark to get a decent picture of the statue, a picture of a wall mural photo (at the restaurant we ate dinner) will be shown in it’s place below. (And yes, polar bears are actually considered sea creatures.)
This first photo below (the high-rise) is the Country’s offices for the various Greenland divisions. The two photos following are the governmental halls of their “congress”.
Nuuk, being not only the capital but the largest city in Greenland (pop. ~20,000), is nothing like Ilulissat, the 3rd largest city. There are stop lights and crosswalk lights. Homes have yards. There are many 3+ story tall apartment buildings and a downtown area. Not downtown like Kansas City, but a small area where there are stores, banks, and restuarants.
After passing these governmental buildings, we entered the more modern, commercialized areas of Nuuk. The interesting building below had retail shops as well as a movie theater in it.
Speaking of restaurants, we appreciate Air Greenland treating us to the 2nd most expensive restaurant in Nuuk! This was an upscale chain restaurant – A Hereford Beefstouw Steak House – with locations in several cities in Denmark and Australia. Why Nuuk? There are a lot of conferences in Nuuk and Nuuk hosts a lot of dignitaries and they wanted a nice place for meals. Being from the Midwest and loving meat, we were afraid of us being “meat snobs” would cause us to smile and say how amaaaazing the steaks were, knowing we had much better at home. We would have been wrong because the steaks truly were amaaaazing, along with the apps and desserts.
The restaurant was a roof-top restaurant on the top floor of the building below.
After dinner some of the group taxied back to the hotel….uh….boat….and we and the rest walked the roughly 20 minute walk back across town to the docks. It was chilly and the fog continued to roll in, but it was a nice way to stretch out knowing we would be sharing a bunk on a boat tonight.
We made it back to our boat, and had to put a couple of night pics of the boat in just because it was sooo cool. (You’ll notice that the tide was in… and where the boat’s gangway had been “down” to the deck (from the dock), it was now “up” to the deck (from the dock).
We were also able to get a pic of the bridge as we were walking by, lit up nicely in the night.
We must leave for the airport at 5:00 am Friday, and a quick breakfast will be served by the captain’s wife at 4:30 am, so we will be setting an alarm for 4:00 am. And we will hope that nobody falls out of the bunk tonight.
Leave a reply