Among the bright lights and icebergs
Simon Hampton discovers the small fishing town of Ilulissat, 350 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, boasts plenty of unique charm.
We’re walking up the dusty road towards the Arctic Hotel for dinner. The freezing air mellows the waft of fish drifting up from the port below. A beaten-up ute dips its headlights and rumbles past, down the hill into the town of Ilulissat.
Darkness washes over us. Only the distant hum of a tired fishing boat pulling into the harbour breaks the silence. On the horizon, a faint glow lights up the ridgeline.
We duck off the road and into an old boatyard for sanctuary. The faint glow brightens and creeps directly overhead, and the stars fade as the aurora borealis takes centrestage.
Sound often accompanies something so majestic, but the silence is pure as the northern lights dazzle and dance across the Arctic sky.
The deep green lights bend and cut shapes across the sky like an over-zealous dance floor drunk. The show lasts 10 minutes and then the lights fade into a distant glow behind the ridgeline.
It’s the final night of our four-day stint in Ilulissat, a small Greenland fishing town
350 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle.
We’d decided to round the trip off with dinner at the Arctic Hotel, a plush residence nestled into the hill behind the town, with picturesque views across the iceberg-laden Disko Bay. Its restaurant is renowned as the best in town and offers a Greenlandic-take on fine dining, with musk ox, reindeer and halibut prominent. It’s essential to round off any meal with a Greenlandic coffee.
At the bar across from our table, our waiter plants down two wine glasses. She tells us the drink represents the whole of Greenland in one glass. She pours in a shot of whiskey.
‘‘This is for the tougher parts of Greenland – the landscape, the workers.’’
She adds a shot of Kahlua.
‘‘For the nice things in Greenland – the women and the beautiful scenery.’’
Hot coffee is then poured over the top to represent the coming together of families on long, cold Arctic nights.
Whipped cream is then heaped on top. ‘‘The icebergs and glaciers of Greenland,’’ our waiter informs us.
Lastly, she applies a blowtorch to Grand Marnier and drizzles it over the drink ‘‘to symbolise the northern lights’’.
In Greenland, Ilulissat translates to ‘‘icebergs’’. And, all-year-round, the pastel-coloured houses perched on the craggy, rocky coastline of Ilulissat watch out over the steady stream of icebergs drifting out across Disko Bay and into the North Atlantic Ocean. The icebergs break off the Ilulissat ice fjord, a 40km glacier that connects the Greenland Ice Cap with the North Atlantic.
Each year, some 20 billion tonnes will break off the fjord and drift out to sea. And each morning, local fishermen can be seen slaloming through the icebergs on their way to a day of fishing on the bay.