Tag: kangerlussuaq

Trip around the world 2003. Part 2. Landing on a 6000 feet thick ice runway and more. Greenland.

I connect with the guide I met last year, a pleasant young guy called Lars and he gets me checked in to the airport hotel (reception desk about 50 feet from the check-in counter… they don’t come closer than this!) and I hope  that I am going to get a few hours shuteye, as feel like I have been run over. Sleep deprivation is the most effective torture. If you kept me awake until tomorrow, I’d confess to anything, I know I would. But no such luck. I have to go out to look for Musk Oxen, which roam wild here, so a quick shower and I am back downstairs and popped into a van and off we go. Road soon runs out of tarmac and we lurch along the topsoil, but the more we look, the more the Musk Oxen are not there. That’s the big trouble with wild animals – they tend to foxtrot oscar when you need them to be in one place.

So eventually I make it to bed and of course now I can’t sleep. Such is life in the fast lane. Of course, the curtains are thin and the sun is shining as strongly at 2300 at it was at 1100, so not a great night’s sleep. Next morning, after a very minimal cafeteria style airport restaurant breakfast, I take the Air Greenland flight up to Ilulissat (there may be a test on names later, so please pay attention). At the gate, I meet up with two cheerful Dutch guys who look anything but Dutch, as short and dark, who were on the flight from CPH and will be everywhere I go too and even on the same flight back to CPH at the end. Turns out that they are brothers (though no one would ever guess it) and their mother is Indian, hence the confusing non-Dutch appearance. One of them is a plane fanatic and will travel anywhere just to fly on a certain type of plane. A great collector of airline logo bits and pieces and he understands totally that it is normal for people to collect sick bags and safety cards etc. He is thrilled when I say I have some old Air Mandalay tickets at home, as he doesn’t have these in his collection. Also meet a very friendly Danish couple, both long timers with SAS, she just hitting 40 years of service. We exchange horror stories and worry about whether her son will remember to cut the hedge at home.

We fly on the Dash 7, nice old warhorse of the skies and we all make a fuss of a local woman who is travelling with her 5 day old baby. Because my Dutch friends and I  are the types of people who notice things, we can see a stowage in the cabin for ‘polar survival suits’, so we have to ask the flight attendant about them and she happily informs us that if we have to land on the ice, we shall be kept warm.

Great views of the inland ice cap and icebergs floating around in the bays – we are definitely not off Long Island here. In Ilulissat, set on the wonderfully named Disko Bay, there is a posse of guides waiting for me, including the Danish girl who bravely suffered my visit last year. On the SAS flight, I had snaffled some Danish women’s magazines and presented them to her, but she did not jump up and down as I had expected her to. 

The head of the guides was there and I spent the rest of the day with her. A lovely Danish girl called Hanne but pronounced as if there was an ‘a’ on the end. Quite besotted with Greenland, she has been coming every summer for the last six years, while on summer vacation from her veterinary college in CPH, from which she will graduate next year. Then she wants to come back here fulltime – Greenland has become her passion. It seems slightly mad when you think of how awful the winter is, severely subzero and with weeks of complete darkness.

First thing: did I want to go on the helicopter ride that most of our gang will be doing, so of course I did, thus 5 minutes after arriving in the hotel, I am on my way back to the airport. Life in the Greenlandic fast lane. There a nice crisply red-painted helicopter was waiting just for me to turn up and I had to smile sweetly at the other 6 pax and apologize for keeping them waiting, but it turned out they had waited all of 5 mins, so they were not put out. The Captain turned out to be Irish and the other heli is flown by his Danish wife. So off we buzzed and had great views of the ice flow and we landed on the ice and took our snaps and marveled at the grandeur of the dirty looking surface, which is apparently some 1500 feet thick! A smart off-white Arctic Hare came lolloping along and didn’t seem at all put out by us. We looked at him and he looked at us. Then a low-level flight back and we saw seals basking in the sun, on the ice though.

Later into town, which is very cute. Very small of course and wooden houses all painted different pastel colors, sitting on the rocks, so up and down and all over the place. There is just no soil at all, so nothing grows and the houses are bolted on to the rocks and stand on short pylons. Tiny harbor with a small freighter offloading containers. (got to bring in the g and t ingredients plus much else) while large pieces of ice just bobbed around. They have to bring enough supplies in during the summer, as from October, the place is solid ice. I was introduced to several people who all were greatly pleased to see me and a general good time was had by all. Due to the smallness of the population, everybody is either inter-related or just knows those who are not family. Quite a lot of tourist shopping but at a steep price. We have a bad combination of high Scandinavian prices to start off with and then the cost of living on an island that has to import everything. 

The mosquitoes are kamikaze and much spraying is required, but I still managed some large bumps to grow later – at least no risk of malaria. But they are a real pest and you can’t leave a window open or you will have a room full. But the best thing is that the rooms have pulldown blinds as well as curtains, so it’s the darkest place I’ve been to yet up here and for such great mercies, great thanks! (later addition, the blinds came down OK but of course there was still enough blinding light coming around the rim to light the room quite nicely thank you). I’m going to turn into a daylight sleepwalker at this rate.

I manage to meet up with the hotel manager and go over all our arrangements.  They are just not used to large groups, so details needed from me.  But that is why I am there, so no question is stupid.  The funniest thing about this hotel is that the chambermaids are … wait for … not local or Danish. They come from Thailand. Hard to imagine somewhere further removed from home. They stay a year or two, earning huge Scandinavian wages and then go home and can set up their bar in Pat Pong, Bangkok.

Next day I jump back on Air Greenland to Kangerlussuaq and wait for our big silver bird to arrive, which it manages to do to the minute. A very smart looking silver and blue 757, which normally operates for the Dallas Mavericks … just think of the money they must make if they can support them in such style! This long slim machine has only 63 seats in it, which will spoil our gang forever. 88 seats are going to seem crowded after this. Many old friends disgorge from the aircraft and I enjoy much hugging and kissing and before I know it, we are winging our way back up to Ilusissat, so we can start the fun and games in earnest.  One very cheerful frequent traveler with us, who seems to do nothing but, trusts us to take her somewhere good, yelled to the others in flight “Tim is here, we are okay”!

The hotel staff all agog to see what real breathing Amurrican mega-millionaires look like, although I had tried to persuade them that they look just like other people and don’t have two heads or anything unusual. Well, a shortage of hiking boots and perhaps more Hermes scarves and Gucci bags and sling back shoes than they are used to.

The weather is cooperating magnificently and the sun shines and the icebergs glisten. This area of Greenland produces some of the major icebergs of the northern hemisphere and these guys break off from the ice shelf and then eventually float south west and drift down the north eastern coast of Canada and the USA, mainly Newfoundland, so Janny, I’m looking at what you will see sometime soon. Would be good to paint your name on the side and you could do an iceberg watch for it.

We did a nice walkabout and sail about and had the pleasure of listening to the amazing sounds of the icefield surrendering to the forces of Mother Nature. There is enormous, vast pressure working inside the ice mass and it sounds like huge cannons going off, a very wonderful and awe-inspiring sound, like a distant battle. One group was really lucky and saw an iceberg calving, when a huge mass of ice actually parts company with the glacier and crashes down into the water and a huge wave whams out and anything in its path rocks and rolls. What a wonderful sight this is and how small we all feel. This mass of frozen water has been moving along for hundreds of years, grinding inexorably to its date with the sea and now its moment has come.

I also flew, with some brave guests, by Twin Otter and actually landed ON the icecap.  They have a very long ‘runway’, which is just flat and clean and you do go a long way along the ice, with some very gentle braking.  I did have some some surreal thoughts about a B757 doing that … Now we are standing on 6000 feet (yes 6000) of solid ice which was working its way to the water (and it is doing this at about 30 feet a day, which is positively whizzing along by local standards – I almost felt dizzy). It was really wonderful and you feel like a grain of sand (which is a kinda daft thing to feel like, seeing where you are) but I don’t think a snowflake works, though that would do better). The take off was amazingly fast.

What I have really wanted to see is an iceberg actually turning over. It happens all the time here. Basically, this mega gigantic, super-sized ice cube is worn away underneath by basic melting and erosion and therefore in the end becomes top heavy. It finally goes base over apex and it just (so I am told by those who have seen it) goes round and round, trying to find its center of gravity, so it is not just a top to bottom deal, but it keeps on revolving until it works out where the hell the top is in relationship to the bottom. I would love to see that as it must be just sensational. I realize I am writing to most of you who have never seen a mega iceberg and it is awfully hard to explain how awe inspiring they are. I would sit on a clifftop for days to see this. You always know the ones which have turned over, as they have no right angles. The original, right way up ones, are all jagged and probably dirty on the top, whereas if you are looking at an iceberg which is curved and smooth, it has turned over.

And the day after, we reversed everything and they went off to Iceland and me to Russia.  Then the fun and games of scouting really started.  I hope that you are game for it.

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Trip Around the World, in many parts. 2003. It starts here. Part 1 Getting to Greenland

Just to give you a heads up on forthcoming episodes here, I am bound for Greenland, via Copenhagen, then back to CPH and on to St Petersburg. This is advance work for a new trip, which will be running right behind me. I just have to be there first and make sure all in in order and remind everyone that we expect a perfect visit. After that I am off to check out all new places, which have to be looked at really hard, in great detail, notebook in hand.  This is when I am scouting possible destinations for the Private Jet trips.  There is always a good reason for us wanting to go somewhere, but there needs to be more than just one big draw, so the more the merrier in terms of worthwhile diversions, especially if there are some things totally unique to the destination right there. You can never count on someone who lives next to some jaw-dropping sight/site to be able to see the rest of their home area  through the eyes of foreigners. Thus, I go look. And then there are the many hotels to check out, sleep in, eat their food, talk to the local inbound operator, meet the guides, look for potential problems and ask a thousand questions. It can mean long days, sometimes with people who are totally on top of things and ‘get it’ and then there are plenty of others who just don’t have a clue. This is when it is like drawing blood from a stone. And I ALWAYS check the toilets, everywhere.  I am near PhD level on international toilet inspecting. No seat or lid is left unlifted.

Coming up – Yerevan, capital of Armenia, then up to Samara, then east, very east, to Irkutsk and Petropavlovsk, both in Siberia and continuing as far east as you can go in Russia to Khabarovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula and Vladivostok, home of the Russian Far East fleet and a place of such naval sensitivity that foreigners used to be banned from even going there. From there to get home, I fly down to Seoul and back to New York.  This long trip will be broken down in to many parts, so I hope you will come for the ride and don’t run out of steam.

So, to start at the beginning (an old custom and one that still seems to work), I am up in a plane … a nice Scandinavian one, from Newark to Copenhagen. And of course, I introduced myself to Madame la Purser as I boarded and said I’m a refugee from your business and anything she could do to rescue me from seat 36C would be greatly appreciated and it actually worked.  Many of these pleas tend to fall on somewhat newly deaf ears and she did not look like the too accommodating type. Very  senior, with the snowiest of white hair, but after the door was closed, a young f/a was sent back and I am summoned up to 8G, which is of course where I think should have been all along.

Going from NY to Greenland via CPH makes zero geographical sense at all. (Vera, I know it will help if you find your atlas now and keep it out dear, as otherwise you are never going to keep up – have one of your helpers assist you. OK?). But amazingly enough there is no air service WEST from Greenland to anywhere, which is hardly surprising once you have been there, as the whole place points to Denmark with as much fervor as all Moslems face Mecca. A severe shortage of mosques here though. They could almost have built a bridge to Newfoundland and only a few disoriented Newfies in search of cod or Ikea would have ventured forth. Thus I fly 7 hours east, to spend 3 hours on the ground, so I can fly 4 hours west. I think it warrants the Guinness Book for Records for daft traveling. Only real good thing is I end up with only a two hour time change (apart from losing tonight of course)

And lose the night I shall, as the bloody SAS flight left pronto at 1710, which is way too early for the Atlantic. (and they started to board a 60% full flight 50 minutes before departure). It will only be just after midnight NY time when we glide on to the concrete at Kastrup Airport and then I sit until 0315 NY time, which will be hell, as most of you know I am NOT a night bird. I usually find a reviving Tuborg or similar helps, as by that time you are dehydrated, even if you have drunk copious quantities of water in flight but are in a generally discombobulated  state. This reviving beer will set the personal economy back a fair old sum I can tell you. Welcome to hi-rent Scandinavia and airport prices – a bad combo.

Re losing the night … this being High Summer (I left June 22) we are going to have a curious light night as of course we are tracking severely NNE and thus it will never get anything like dark. I think l have seen (if that is the right word) my last dark night for some time. Kind of unusual to fly the Atlantic at night and NOT have a night of any kind. And to rub salt further into the wound, the flying map thingy on the wall screen shows us now south of where I shall eventually end up tomorrow.

Anyway SK Biz dinner was frankly nothing to get excited about. They produce a fancy looking menu and separate wine list that comes within millimetres of taking itself off, though not quite up to the great lush prose TWA menus of the early 70’s with their “Morning picked, dew fresh, sun kissed ….peas”, which to quote Basil Fawlty were ‘fresh when they were frozen”. Anyway, much OTT hyperbole here and I wonder who the hell do they think they are kidding? Mainly themselves.

Otherwise their classical music channel is fine … three warhorses. which is what plane pax want. We are NOT into the moment to hear experimental music or song cycles recently unearthed from Norse graves. Give us what we know and like and we can lie back in a semi- comatose state and enjoy. UA drives me mad as they think we don’t have an attention span of more than 6 mins and play many bits of things and spend half the time wittering on about them too.

We finally arrive in CPH dead on time and I get myself checked in for Greenlandair and there is their nice new A330 waiting, in their spiffy new colors too. They are now called Air Greenland, so what color do you think the plane should be? Hands up those who said British Post Box RED. It is totally painted all over; you could not lose this one in a crowd anywhere! And even on a Monday morning, it is packed to the rafters. Don’t think Ms Greenland will ever win Ms World as the passengers are a rather scruffy looking short-arsed gang. The 12-20 year old girls are all into the low slung jeans with the bare midriff look, which is all well and fine if your midriff is smaller than your jeans. but this lot are somewhat padded (I suppose could almost be blubber?) and it then immediately becomes seriously less than pretty. Metal adornments are de rigueur and one of them looks like she was the victim of a deranged staple gun attack.

Sadly none of the crew I met last year is here and this is a  much more mature group, but they sure smile a lot. They are all Danes, based in CPH and all they fly is this route, nothing else. And in the four hours 10 mins it took to bring me half way back to where I started, they never stopped being out and about in the cabin. Rather a dreadful “brunch’ meal (due to the four hours time difference, we were sked out at 0910 and in the other end at 0940, so neither one thing or the other). And yes Vera, those really are the times, I did not invent them. Much encouragement for imbibing alcohol (a Greenlandic way of life) and the smokers, of which there are many, must have been vibrating from lack of nicotine. When we get off in the sunshine and enter the terminal, the place is practically pea soup thick with smoke. 

We are in somewhere called Kangerlussuaq and of course, may be better known to you by its former name, Sondre Stromfijord.  Are you still with me?  It’s claim to fame is that it is perfectly geographically located right on the ‘over the pole’ sort of route from Northern Europe to the Middle and West of the USA and Canada.  Like Keflavik, in Iceland, and Shannon in Ireland, they were used to the aircraft of 20 years ago dropping in, sucking up a new load of fuel and off they went. Greenland is the country with unpronounceable names and also some of the longest words ever created.  I gazed at them in the in-flight magazine … some had more than twenty five letters.

Okay … you get a break here… there is an awful lot more to come… just wait until first Nellie and then all Mother Russia embraces me.