FAR-FLUNGFROLICS!
Greenland is the world’s biggest island — and one of the most extraordinary, says Mark Porter
THE pelt of a polar bear and several sealskins decorate the walls of the Mamartut restaurant. Through the panorama window, beyond the pastel- coloured houses, icebergs are sweating in the latesummer sunshine.
Earlier, it soared to 10c, but is now down to 5c — sensationally balmy for a Greenland evening, but not so good if you are an iceberg.
Welcome to the land of the hunter and the hunted, where the midnight summer sun does its best to make up for the rest of the year.
We are in Ilulissat, a town well inside the Arctic Circle, from whence the iceberg that sank the Titanic began its fateful voyage.
‘The ice is now too thin for hunters’ sleds in much of Greenland but, up in the north, there are still icebergs the size of Manhattan,’ says Tagak, our guide and one of only 51,000 remaining Greenlandic Inuits.
Greenland is the world’s largest island and is nine times the size of Britain.
Lying between Iceland and Canada, it is a heavily subsidised autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark.
‘The vast majority of us are Inuits,’ says Tagak. ‘We used to be known as Eskimos, but that word is considered demeaning.’
These folk live on the margins of Arctic existence. Further north, they are still allowed to hunt polar bears for subsistence and are the only humans of whom the Arctic monster is (rightly) afraid.
We awake to a panorama view of Disko Bay and myriad icebergs glimmering antifreeze-blue in the weak morning sun, like aliens on a vast indigo stage.
After a hefty Danish breakfast at the Hotel Icefjord, we board our sturdy fishing boat, the Sapangaq, and gun north for 50 miles, up the Ataa Strait and through the Pakitsoq fjord system, to visit the Eqi glacier.
SMALL icebergs bob and wobble as we thunder in and out of channels between the bigger ones, hitting larger and larger chunks of ice. Thunk! Thunk! Gradually, the sea turns from bluey-grey to grey as it changes into frozen sludge.
Half a mile short of the glacier, a jagged ridge rising to hundreds of feet above sea level, the skipper brings us to a halt. ‘Any closer, very dangerous,’ he announces. Two minutes later, a huge slab of the glacier collapses into the sea, sending a sludgequake that slaps the side of the boat and causes the bay audibly to tremble.
(By mid-September, the bay is ice-locked and the tiny communities hunker down to face seven months of isolation. So plan your trip now for next summer.)
We eat lunch in the restaurant at Ilimanaq Lodge, where an old village is being restored and where World of Greenland owns 15 chalets. We fly to the capital, Nuuk, checking in to the excellent Inuk Hostels, where we meet the owner, a Greenlandic author and scholar called Liisi Egede Hegelund. She suggests we take the hour-long boat trip across the glassy stillness of an inland fjord to the semi-abandoned village of Qooqqut. Here, we meet Sulli, Greenland’s breakdancing champion, who is also a waiter at the cheerful seafood restaurant some 400 yards from the pontoon. During his break, he gives me a spin on his quad bike. The sunset glows orange across the water as we sail back — the stillness occasionally disturbed by the distant thunder of a glacial waterfall.
On our last day, we watch the film of Inuit life made in 1934 by the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen. It brings tears to my eyes.
‘ We are hunters for many generations,’ says Tagak afterwards. ‘But hunting on thin ice is not safe and many think that the alternative — fishing — is a woman’s work. That’s why so many men go to the pub.’