For The Love of Travel

August 2, 2014
by Lids
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Hvalsey and Qaqortoq

This morning we anchored off Hvalsey to check out the 10thC, best preserved in the whole of Greenland, Norse ruins constructed of granite and lime mortar.
We also sailed to visit Qaqortoq (you need to make a guttural epiglottis sound when you say phonetically…”Carcortock”). With 3,000 inhabitants, it’s a charming colourful town with a small square, and a few beautiful colonial buildings dating back to 1775.
Greenlandic food tasting was on the menu prior to departure…delicacies such as reindeer fat on crisp bread; reindeer meat ( I mentioned to people that the vestige of Chernobyl was still probably present in the food chain!!!); smoked halibut and char; mussel and shrimp soup; and a number of dried bird meats – the latter we decided were safe from extinction….very hard, dry and not much taste.
Tonight we are looking forward to locals coming on board and entertaining us with a drumming performance.

August 1, 2014
by Lids
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Prins Christian Sund

In the morning, we had two great educative sessions – ‘Building your own visual narrative’, a presentation from Jay Dickman, a National Geographic photographer and…’Greenland geopolitics’, a talk by Henning Thing (Danish, but passionate about Greenland getting its independence from Denmark).

An afternoon for travelling through the Prins Christian Sund fjord, where the south coast of Greenland meets the sea. We saw some awesome towering cliffs, icebergs and ancient rock. The rocks of Greenland are the oldest on the planet! The ship’s decks (baby it’s cold outside!!) and observation room being perfect for viewing this landscape!!

July 31, 2014
by Lids
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The Denmark Strait

Following in the wake of Eric the Red; Brendan the Navigator and the Bismarck before it was sunk…….today we travelled through the Denmark Strait, which connects the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, and separates Iceland and Greenland. The waters are of strategic importance as part of the Greenland/Iceland/UK gap and the economic importance of rich fishing grounds. I seem to remember a few politically tense incidents in the 1980’s between Iceland and the UK about fishing rights….Iceland won (the US put pressure on UK to accept Iceland’s terms in order to keep NATO forces stationed at Keflavik….well it was still tense times with the USSR).

We didn’t get off the ship today……so there was time for ‘stretching with Claire’ :), a Greenland history presentation with Henning, Captain Leif Skog’s welcome aboard cocktail party and dinner and after dinner, a film ‘The Deep”, about a fishing trawler that sank in 1984 in the Westmann Islands and it’s sole survivor.

A small group of passengers saw a blue whale surfacing 3 times off the port bow this afternoon, and as soon as an announcement had been made, the rest of us scrambled to the observation deck….sad to say, whale didn’t surface again…..too many paparazzi obviously!!