Yesterday, which was Saturday, and today have been no fly days. Not due to the weather mind you, just the helicopter has been busy doing other things. Yesterday it had to take a party of New Zealand school girls up to Helheim Glacier, the weather wasn’t great so they didn’t go. Today it was a day off for everyone all round – no planned flights. So a couple of non weather-caused day offs. What to do, what to do, what to do? Hmm dissertation? Lets see, I could sit here at the hotel and stare out at the bay and the mountains and the icebergs while trying to finish another chapter… or Thomas could knock on my door and say “lets go for a hike up the flower valley walk." Oooh tough decisions. Oh listen, Thomas just knocked on my door.
The flower valley hike is, according to the hotel, “a pleasant two and a half hour ramble up the valley to see the amazing small summer flowers blooming." Which in non-hotel speak roughly translates into “a five minute walk." This is Greenland, though, and it was raining lightly so we took plenty of waterproof gear with us and set off up the valley. We passed the launderette where the town's maniac taxi driver was dropping off some people. Some notes about the Tuumu taxi driver: He drives a 4X4 that somehow he manages to slide or wheelspin 90% of the time; furthermore, I swear he follows us and I swear he thinks an accelerator has two positions, off and on the floor. He constantly has his bluetooth headset on, techno music thumping and the tires squealing. Every time he drives past I imagine his steely eyes sizing us up behind his Raybans. For some reason he scares me – I think he may be out to harm us…
Anyway, up past the laundry, then what looks like a sawmill and then the graveyard. Like Kulusuk there seems to be far too many small graves for such a small town. Most of them are lovingly adorned with flowers and ornaments. It's quite poignant. Past the cemetery the flowers really start and they are very very pretty. I’m no botanist so here’s my technical description; there were pinkish white ones and blue ones and purple ones, blanketing the hillside, it was really lovely. We went up along the track to a couple of small lakes. As we were walking it struck me hard that the landscape was somehow familiar to me, with the tussock grass, the meandering small river, the low plants and the grey sky. Of course! Scotland. Spitting image of some of the glens on a typical Scottish drizzly day. The resemblance is uncanny. That old glacial action sculpting the landscape in such a familiar manner. Thank you, Agassiz and Lyell.
The lakes were millpond flat with fish rising to the surface to get at the swarms and swarms of flies. Not mosquitoes this time, but the air was still thick enough with flies to breathe them in. We headed south up one of the cols to see if there was a view from the top. It wasn’t a hard hike but it was a reasonably steep gradient and by the top I had ditched my rain gear as I was getting too hot. We got to the watershed of the col and looked down into a perfect bowl, where there must have been a lake at one point, but now there was a swamp. Perfect fly country!
Thomas laughed when I exclaimed “the world's green and orange!" I had been wearing blue tinted sunglasses and had just taken them off. Bizarrely, the world remained brightly hued to me for a minute or two before my eyes re-adjusted. We had managed to get above the HGA (Human Garbage Altitude) on the way up the slope, but we couldn’t decide if someone had just dropped the litter on the way here or if storms had picked up trash from the open dump on the other side of town and dumped it further inland. Most of It resided in stream beds and low spots so we suspected the wind was the culprit – although it does seem to preferentially pick up beer cans.
We crossed to the east of the col and came back to the village from another direction along a second, unexpected valley that was also stuffed full of summer flowers. In all we had been gone about 5 hours, a decent hike. The rain had eased and we were home in time for dinner.
Now today, Sunday. With the church bells in town ringing we went to an outfitters and hotel called the Red House. The Red House rents kayaks. A childhood ambition of mine has always been to kayak around Greenland. Now this is patently stupid. You can’t kayak around Greenland – unless you want to walk a good amount of it, there’s too much ice. As I have become wiser my ambition has morphed, now for the longest time I have wanted to finish my dissertation… no wait, no, I mean I have wanted to kayak *in* Greenland, rather than around it. Aren’t distractions great? Anyway as of today my ambition has changed again. My new ambition is to kayak in Greenland more.
Today was perfect weather (why aren’t we flying?), a very light wind and virtually no waves in the bay, a bay which currently has about 10 monster icebergs in it. There’s something about icebergs. They just sort of impose themselves upon the landscape, they get in the way. You no longer see the bay and the mountains and the town. Instead your eye is magnetically drawn to this impossibly gigantic floating blue-white blazing ice cube bobbing around in the water just offshore, at the edge of town. This monstrosity threatens to roll over, or to split in to a multitude of bergy bits, yet like a moth to a flame I just want to go out there and be near it. It calls to me. The townsfolk zip past it all the time in their boats, but wouldn’t it be cool to kayak up to it?
We rented two sea kayaks, managing to get one that actually had stowage space and covers for the gear and set off around the bay. As soon as we were out of the cove where we launched from I realized two things. One, Thomas is a way faster paddler than I am and two, going anywhere near that berg would be stupid, to put it mildly. What had I been thinking? This top-heavy chunk of ice, easily 60ft tall could collapse at any minute – hadn’t I been willing it to do so for the last few days? Those deep blue cracks were real. This was the berg that when it grounded shook the town a couple of nights ago. No way was I going near it!
Instead Thomas (a self declared coast hugger) and I set off westwards along the shoreline of the town. There’s a couple of new houses which are being built here, and a relatively new one just up from the shore had a gable end made of glass, which must provide the most amazing view. I wonder what house prices are like here? I know in the capital Nuuk, they can be more expensive than in Copenhagen. Its good to see new houses going up though, it usually means the town is doing okay. And the houses are going up in the middle of town, not spreading out in sprawl like so many other places. Past the town and into “dog country." There are pockets even in the town where the locals keep their working sled dogs. Like the ones in Kulusuk, these wolf-like animals howl each time the sun goes down. Outside of town, sometimes considerable distances outside of town, there are dogs chained up here and there waiting eagerly for the snow. They yowl and yip and howl ever time we go near. We pass the small hydro power station that provides electricity, I cannot see how it works in the depths of winter when everything is frozen but there are notices saying to stay away from the sea ice in the area as the power station outflow makes it unstable. At the door to the little blue facility a lady waved at us. This was to become a feature of the day, everywhere we went, even when we felt as though we were miles away from anyone, someone would be there, just sitting, maybe having lunch, just enjoying being outside, no means of transportation in sight. Maybe they were watching us? Maybe it was the taxi driver!!
I was in heaven. We even kayaked up to some of the smaller bergs, these were maybe only 30ft tall, but still impressive from kayak level. I told Thomas that only thing that would have made the day even more perfect would be if, instead of him being in the other kayak, my girlfriend was. He laughed and said he wasn’t offended at all.
After a lunch of smelly Danish cheese (good stuff!) we kayaked up to the ocean end of the bay. We dawdled around some more ‘bergs and circumnavigated a few islands before beaching the kayaks for a rest on the northeast side of the bay. We spent some time there breaking open some rocks, mostly granites with a few nice garnets in them, before heading back across the channel to the town. The channel crossing was really the only time that we had any significant ocean swell, with some complicated wave patterns of reflected waves, boat wakes and the direct ocean swell making for some interesting balancing. Back in town (and back to the flies) I found out that maybe Thomas isn’t a much faster kayaker than me after all. It took two of us to haul my kayak out of the water, with the phones, waterproofs, food and gear in it. Thomas lifted his lightweight kayak out of the water with one hand…
At the end of the day I am exhausted. We hope to put in two sites tomorrow. So I am going to bed. Some wise words for today – don’t put a tube of SPF30 sunblock next to your toothpaste. Bleauch…
PS: As I upload this on Monday it is raining. With grey laden skies and low cloud. Nothing happening today either... Still have 7 sites to go.
(More goereferenced photos in Google Earth here.)