I'm off today for 3 nights in Greenland - Ilulissat, to be exact. Where is that? Right about there.....
Why? Well, why not? I was in the neighborhood, and probably won't ever be so near again; so, why not?
Ilulissat is the 3rd largest town in Greenland, with a population of 4500, and probably 3x as many dogsled dogs. They say you can hear them howling at night; I heard them whining and yipping at feeding time and let me tell you, these are not household pets!
The draw of Ilulissat is the Ilulissat Kangerlua (Jakobson Icefjord, a Unesco World Heritage site), which clogs up Disko Bay with gargantuan icebergs, and a solid expanse of bitty bergs. The most productive and proliferate glacier outside Antarctica, it's probably here that the berg that sunk the Titanic came from. I had thought the glacier lagoon in Iceland was cool - this is mind-blowing!
Icebergs coming down from the glacier, 55kms away
Reaching the mouth of the bay the big ones get hung up on the shallower bottom creating a backlog
There's 3 walking trails from town down to the icefjord, so I took a wander and I had a hard time picking my jaw up off the ground. Massive is such a puny description of these icebergs, some must have been 100's of feet high. The water depth at the edge of the glacier where they calve off is 1500m deep, and some of the icebergs are so huge they are dragging on the ocean floor!
I've booked a boat tour tomorrow to a little Inuit village, and we pass thru the outer edge of the fjord so I'm sure I'll learn even more about it.
For now, I'm off to enjoy a Greenlandic buffet dinner at the Hotel Hvide Falk - I'm gonna try all the exotic local delicacies!
After: in addition to the usual shrimp, king crab, cod, salmon, sushi, lamb there was wolf fish, dried fish, dried whale, whale skin, narwhals skin; reindeer, musk ox, seal, whale - the latter 4 stewed, dried, marinated, you name it. And I ate pretty much it all, and enjoyed it. I sat with a local Italian tour operator and his Greenlandic family and they went to town on the narwhal skin. I guess it's extremely expensive here. It was tasty but had a hard crunch, like chewing cartilage, and they dip it in a powder that tasted (and looked like) chicken bouillon. Go figure.
Spicy mussels, fish patty, seal, whale, musk oxen, and reindeer
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