This letter from Greenland contains a lot of pictures. We have spent most of the last week in Ilulissat, the third largest city of Greenland. The city has 4500 inhabitants with two legs and more than 6000 inhabitants with four legs. The trip has been a mixture of work and pleasure, and both things have been extremely interesting.
Ilulissat city and surroundings offers so many nice views and experiences, that we feel a need to show you some of the 1.200 pictures we have managed to shoot while we have been there.
A view of Ilulissat Hospital. Not a bad place for recreation.
Also at least one bird family in Ilulissat has nice housing.
Slade dogs on the chain. They are outside all year around and they like it. They are not used to being pet by humans. They are working animals, that seldom live past 6 years of age. Even though they look big on the picture, they are actually smaller than a German Shepherd. In the summer time some of the dogs are set free on small islands in the fjord, where they can walk around and play without being bound.
Feeding time. The dogs have an idea that the one who barks most during feeding time get more food. So they bark a lot.
The Greenlandic people like colors, as you can see. It is a nice contrast to the (a bit boring) Danish taste of colors, and it makes it easy to explain the address to the taxi drivers, when having trouble to pronounce the Greenlandic street names – and because of the size of the city a sentence like “The green house on the hill” makes perfectly sense and everyone knows where it is.
A nice evening view towards west with the old wooden church on the left and one of the hospitals buildings in the right.
Evening walk toward the mouth of the ice fjord. Notice the color of the ice – it is almost orange-pink, as if it was on fire. Astonishing. It was difficult to get into the mind – and to understand the masses of ice we were standing in front of the first time we saw this.
Karolina enjoying the view of me taking a picture.
Greenlandic coffee. The liquid the waiter is pouring at this picture is burning Grand Manier – which gives a nice glow like polar light when made in darkness. The rest of the drink is whisky and Kahlua (representing the sea floor), then added coffee (giving us the dark sea), cream on the top (icebergs) – and then the polar light at the end. A joy for the eye and mouth.
Friday after work… judge for your self.
We were sailing for two hours across the mouth of the icefjord with an old fishing boat. The sight was spectacular.
The water in Greenland is very, very clear. On this picture you can have a glimpse of the magnitude of the under-water part of an iceberg, which is 6/7.
Icebergs.
There was a lot of ice floating outside the icefjord. As you can see some of the lumps are not small at all, so it requires good skills from the captain to sail in these waters.
More icebergs.
This iceberg may seem small on the picture – but the length of the side you can see is more than 600 meters, with a hight over the water line around 50 meters.
More ice.
More ice. When pieces like this falls into the water it can create 10 meter high waves.
More ice.
Hunting polar bears is illegal, but shooting in self-defense is a necessity as a last option, so this guy properly got too close to humans and is now hanging out here while drying. The air humidity in Ilulissat is only around 30%, so everything (being bear, fish, lips or laundry) dries very fast.
Second walk to the icefjord. This time we were more able to absorb the impressions and enjoy it.
Also from the ice fjord – a look towards the glacier, that is 6 km away. The ice in the fjord spend up to two years from it is born to it reaches the open sea.
The icebergs are travelling North when they exit the fjord, and then in the top of the Disco Bay they change direction and travel South to Davids Strait and Canada.
20.000.000 tonnes of ice is produced every day – that is enough to supply New York City with clean water for a year. This is though only 10% of the amount of icebergs floating in the sea around Greenland. Some of the icebergs on this picture is more than 100 meters tall.
In the distance you can see the Disco Island clearly. It is around 85 km away. It is not many places in the world you are able to see so far. The clear air makes it very difficult to judge distances.
We spend the whole Saturday hiking around the cliffs and paths around the city near the icefjord. The whole area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
This puppy was very nice and followed us a bit of the way home after our hiking trip.
Arctic only street sign.
Sunday we were at a two hour dog slade trip on the very last remains of snow. Here we are passing an other guy that was on the way home to the city.
Hurray for global waming. It was very, very wet, but the dogs did not seem to mind, and the slade moved fast, when they pulled all together. It was somewhat of a bumpy ride though.
Karolina and 15 dogs.
Also from the dog slade. As you can see we have managed to catch a little (too much) of the strong arctic sun this weekend.
After we had been droped off the driver jumped on to his slade, and said “AP AP” the the dogs, and then they took off – on the asphalt.
Our last sunset for visit in Ilulissat – with the setting sun, the icebergs floating and the shadows of the Disco Island. Beautiful.
