For The Love of Travel

Today we saw an amazing iceberg (Ice Arch) formation just west of the Frederikshab Isblink glacier on the way to Nuuk, and spent hours honing our photography skills using aperture, shutter and program settings….beautiful weather to boot. Seriously gorgeous afternoon…endless magic and beauty. And we saw the iceberg ‘calve’, which means a part of it shaved off into the sea.

And more interesting presentations from dudes travelling aboard, ” Digital basics: Buttons and Dials and Photographing in the Ice” by Ralph Lee; and….”The mobile landscape: how glaciers shaped the North” by Eric Guth.
Tonight, a documentary from James Balog that you must see if you haven’t seen as yet. Called “Chasing Ice”, it chronicles the extent of glacier melt from the Arctic, with him using cameras that use timelapse photography over years to track the melt. It is absolutely compelling!!

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.

 

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!!