In the meantime more people we know had arrived in Angmassalik, and were staying at the Hotel Nansen. The hotel is owned by the same people as the one we’re in (I think) but allows you to cook for yourself. So Abbas was basically press ganged into cooking a curry, with pakora no less, for everyone. Thomas made a Swedish apple pie and I threw together a salad. Salad! Wow! What’s that then?! A lettuce cost $8US! Like everywhere else in the world it seems here that you have to spend a bit more money to eat healthily. I was all excited about eating some leafy greens, but I had forgotten that all the new people here, well, were new. They’d just got here. Salad was no big deal, they’d had a salad in Boston or Maine or wherever yesterday. Us? We hadn’t seen a salad in three weeks! The meal was fantastic, especially the curry. I hadn’t quite appreciated that I obviously have never put enough onions into the curries I made at home, although I couldn’t get the recipe out of Abbas – his wife’s secret apparently, which would explain the myriad of phone calls he received during the day.
During the meal we talked a bit about the trip folks had done previously with support of a Greenpeace vessel down the east coast of Greenland. One of the comments that impressed me most was that the captain of the boat couldn’t find a place to weigh anchor in the Scoresbuysund area (the world's biggest fjord system). Immediately next to the shore the depths were sometimes 1500 meters or more and the anchor only had 150m of chain. Apparently the fjord walls are also virtual cliffs going up a thousand meters too, not much real estate with which to do work, then.
We ate late as another group was wanting to use the kitchen before us. Everyone decided to take a walk just to let the enormous amount of good food go down. We were treated to some magical displays by the northern lights. If it were possible to see music, then this is what I imagine it would look like. It was beautiful, weird and fantastic. "This is how religions are started" was the comment that was made. Luminous green swaths of bars that shimmered and pulsed and curved across the sky, swirling and twisting and turning in impossible mobius loops. It was incredible. It's also very hard to put into words.
We didn’t fly for a couple of days after this – weather, as usual — but then somehow we managed to get a flight in to the south end of Jens Munk Island. The flight spent the majority of time over open ocean, which surprised me a bit. In Antarctica the helicopters are not equipped with safety gear for ditching in the ocean, so there are no flights over open water. Here there are life rafts, life jackets and floats on each of the helicopter. Even so I wouldn’t bet too much on how it would be to land in the very very very cold ocean, so flying over the ocean made me nervous at first. But as with everything, you get used to it, especially when you can spot the whales, of which there we lots, in the crystal clear water.
We got to our site at Kap Poul Louvern (64°27.913'N 40°9.982' W) only to find that there was absolutely no chance of landing; the terrain was far too rough, even though the contours on the maps looked good. We settled on a peninsula just a bit further to the south and even then the parking space was such that the antenna on the front of the aircraft was within an inch of being bent. Per mimicked a blind person with a cane, jokingly insisting that the antenna was his "seeing eye antenna for, you know, feeling around when it is foggy." The weather did not look good at the site, and Per and Abbas flew off to get some fuel in case it got any worse – "better to get fuel while we can." Thomas and I worked in the cold rain and got the site built pretty quickly. It was easier as we, again, didn’t have a full complement of batteries with us.
The next day we finally used the little disposable hibachi grill that Abbas had bought when we’d had grand plans to camp at one or two of the sites. We again went down to the hill to the Nansen and made cheeseburgers. Through the course of the grilling, it became obvious that Abbas has more than a passing interest in setting fire to things! "The fireman" is his new nickname. I have never seen a grill come up to heat quite as fast!
Photo by Thomas Nylen, UNAVCO
The next few days were complicated by the poor weather, an unexpected strike called by Air Greenland, and the need for helicopter maintenance. The maintenance has to be performed in Nuuk on the other side of the country and Per was taking the charter Bell 222 over there to get new engines. All our scheduling now had to be done around the local supply and taxi flights between Tasilliq and Kulusuk and the surrounding small communities.
On the plus side, it meant we would have access (finally) to a 212 helicopter than can carry more with more ease. We had 4 sites left to do – although it became obvious quickly that one of them would be impossible this trip. As I mentioned before, the site at Kangerdlussuaq is just too far to do unless we had a dedicated helicopter, like the one we just lost. That left us with three sites in the south, two which were essentially built and just needed batteries and one that needed a complete install. So with time running out the weather took a turn for the worse. Arrrgh. Rain, rain, rain, fog, high winds rain.
It gets depressing and I miss my girlfriend. And I don’t want to sit cooped up in this hotel anymore. Thomas and I have both read all the trashy novels available. I have hen pecked away at my dissertation. And we have both caught colds from working in the rain. The lack of vegetables (can you say scurvy?) isn’t helping and we’re both kind of feeling run down. We went around town trying to find some souvenirs that we could actually get back into the US, but since most of the beautiful handcrafted carvings and arts here are made from the bone of marine mammals which are illegal to import into the US, we didn’t find anything.
We found the little (and I mean little) bookstore, where the traveling optician for Greenland was just beginning to set up shop. He goes from village to village, usually once per year, to do eye tests and help people out. He was a friendly guy and quite pleased to talk. That evening another cruise ship appeared in the bay, as did an old friend from Antarctica. The Kapten Klebnikhov is a Russian-built ice breaker that sometimes visits McMurdo station. It was a strange coincidence to see it here. The cruise ship disgorged hundreds of tourists, who really flooded the town. A bit of a bonanza for the villagers, especially those that could put on some sort of cultural show (the sled dogs in the middle of town seemed to attract the most attention). But like most tourists here, a day later they were all gone.