I FEEL
like I'm a very long way from home.
I'm in
Kangerlussauq, a settlement on Greenland's wild south-west coast, and it feels
like I'm on the other side of the world.
It took three
flights to get to this remote destination – there was the hop from
Melbourne to LA, a comfortable trip to Toronto, and a four-hour flight into the
Arctic Circle this morning – and some of the maps I've seen during the
journey didn't even show this final destination in Greenland.
I'm here
to do a 14-day cruise aboard an ice-breaking ship called the Clipper
Adventurer and, after seeing a small section of the Greenland coast, we will
head west across Davis Strait to Baffin Island in Canada and then through the
famed Northwest Passage.
The whole
journey – apart from a few short hours this
evening – will be done inside the
Arctic Circle and we will visit Inuit communities, explore glaciers and fjords,
and call on isolated spots that were once home to intrepid explorers and
incompetent sailors.
Our
expedition started with a tour of Kangerlussauq this afternoon.
It’s a relatively-young settlement that’s home to just a few hundred people and it was established
by the US military six decades ago as a place for military planes flying across
the Atlantic Ocean to refuel or find sanctuary during bad weather.
The Yanks
built the runway here in 1941, and expanded it during the Cold War when the big
reconnaissance and bombing planes regularly hopped across the sea to the Soviet
Union, but it was handed back to the locals a few years ago.
Greenland
is now part of Denmark –I'm ignoring that fact, and
counting this as my 51st country – and now most of the residents
either work at the airfield or in the ever-expanding tourist trade.
The Danes
are so eager to populate this outpost that the government helps any locals
looking to build a home, and residents can construct a comfortable cottage with
a couple of bedrooms and place to park the snowmobile for the subsidised price
of $AUD7000.
It's
summertime in Greenland, just a couple of months since the longest day happened,
so there's no snow on the ground and Kangerlussauq looks a bit dishevelled with
all the faults and flaws usually hidden by the layer of white on full display.
Our tour
of the town included a visit to the dog kennels below the runway, where the
hounds that pull the sleds during the cold months are accommodated, and we got
to meet a couple of these Greenlandic K9s that are part wolf and part the domestic animals we have in Australia.
We also
had a stop at the Kangerlussauq Musuem – it was originally the hotel
built by SAS to accommodate crews and passengers that made a stop in Greenland
during the hop across the Atlantic – and saw the warehouse where
the town's supplies are kept.
Only two
cargo ships visit Kangerlussauq during the year, delivering everything this
snug settlement needs to survive, with the stores put in the prized warehouse
near the airport.
And this
is such an isolated spot that there must be at least two years worth of
provisions in reserve at any time.