Author: angie

Qaqortoq, Sunday, 23rd July 2023

We’re back in Qaqortoq, the town where we first made landfall in Greenland. Summer has arrived here yesterday, and the sun is hot and strong. I’m sitting by the side of a clear rivulet that gurgles through the town into the harbour basin and is supplied from the large freshwater lake behind the town which also serves as the reservoir. Feet dangling in the water, I’m marvelling at all the things we’ve done, heard, observed, and been part of since we first arrived. We closed a first loop.

The heart of the town is the protected harbour and an adjacent small square with a picturesque fountain in the centre and a bridge across the stream. Every evening kids, teenagers, and adults alike gather here to fish, casting their fishing rods and reeling them in. This square plays a major role in many events in the town, as we saw last time we were here.

Around the harbour, the town rises in the rounded hills surrounding it. Its southwards facing slopes in particular are densely dotted with wooden houses, painted every vivid colour of the rainbow one could imagine — purple, blue, green, turquoise, yellow, orange, red, carmine. They give the place a very cheerful aspect that matches its outgoing, friendly and welcoming people.

In the winter months, those pigments must create a fabulous contrast to the white of the snow and the ice, and the dark of the night. The more time we spend here, the more I notice how my curiosity rises to be here during the time of frost, snow, and darkness. Spring and summer are the time of light and the ice.

Although blossoms had been out when we were here a month ago, particularly purple lupine and some shy yellow buttercups, now they are truly abundant and lavish. The whole place is a riot of colours and liveliness.

The riverbanks are ablaze with buttercups and the grass has grown to hip-height and radiates in tints of lush green. Carrying heavy heads that harbour the ripening seeds of next year’s meadows, the stalks are bent in graceful arches. The arctic poppies grow in backlit bushels of delicate creamy-white, flaming orange and deep yellow, blossoms bobbing and twisting in the slight breeze. Their unopened buds hang downwards, green and purple promises of boisterous hues to spring forth. The lupines with opulent blossoms of violet, navy, and white grow in dense tufts. They have a certain geometry to them that reminds me of an organic checker board.

We go for a swim in the lake the stream originates in. Now, the water is aswarm with the local kids in wetsuits, jumping off cliffs, floating with air mattresses, snorkelling with goggles. When we were first here, we hiked around the lake and dove in for a moment or two, the water being chilly then. Now, we can go for a real swim, and enjoy stretching out and floating in the water. The lake’s temperature having risen to what feels like 15°C or more, it feels balmy to me after swimming in the sea peppered with ice.

A kid calls us and we crawl over to chat with him. He tells us how he learned swimming in the sea in Turkey, how salty the water was there and that he made friends with the hotel owner. It being school holidays now, he says, all the kids are just in the water all the time, spending four hours or more enjoying the wet. Not having the benefit of the wetsuit, we do get a little chilly after a while and say goodbye to our lovely little friend who swims towards the cliff jumpers to join them.

Earlier we met the friendly taxi driver again who had showed us around the first time we were here. On the rainy national day, he picked us up at the market place after we had watched the butchering of a seal, to bring us to the sports hall, where everyone was gathering for the live music and the throat singers. On the way there himself, he offered to give us a ride. Rather than go straight there, he showed us around.

Clearly proud of his charming town, he pointed out useful places like the bank and the supermarkets, and took us up the hills to the best views. One of them being right next to his house on Qaqortoq’s “Blueberry Hill”, so-called for the abundant blueberries in summer. A sweeping view over the harbour and the fjord towards the sea awaits us when we stop there for a short break.

We planned to spend our time in his area, the south-west Greenland, part of the commune Kujalleq. So we chatted about the area and life in Qaqortoq with him. Born and raised in Qaqortoq, he is in love with and is proud of the region. However, for most of his professional career, he worked in Nuuk for the government. With two high-pressure jobs, he found himself burned-out some years ago. This was a turning point, and he decided to return to his hometown and to put himself and his family first. To live, not just to work and exist. Once back, he started his own business ‘in his own time and without deadlines.’

When he asks us now how we like the south-west after having spent a month here, I admit having fallen in love. ‘It’s the best place, isn’t it,’ he beams, and I have to agree. He tells us how on coming back from Nuuk, he, too, fell again for the beauty of the area. There is no one single aspect or simple list that one can compile that makes it. A superficial glance, looking for the extravagance of the tropics, might miss it altogether. There is an intense beauty to Kujalleq that reveals itself with time. It gently unfurls and allows for gradual and intimate discovery that asks for time and dedication, and gives abundance in return.

Angie

Ivittuut, 15th July 2023

From various sources we had heard that there are muskoxen not just in the north and east of Greenland, but in the south too. They lure us, entice us, seeming just out of reach. What a marvel it would be to set eyes on one of those striking animals that appear as though they have travelled through time from days bygone – the past ice age. Greenlanders call the umimmak, “the animal with skin like a beard”.

I first got to know of these prehistoric animals just 10 years ago, in a talk by Arctic photographer Florian Schultz, who shot an emblematic photo of three muskoxen bulls walking side by side in an advancing line, facing the wind in an evening snow drift. The low mellow light on their faces in a white-out landscape, their legs invisible, the snow wafting and coasting near the ground, their long, glossy coats of dark brown, chestnut, and sienna colours billowing and rippling in the breeze like mares’ tails, the pale downy wool on their saddle tangling the rose light. Their muzzles raised, these three musketeers look into the distance.

I was taken by this photograph and Florian Schultz’s vivid descriptions of these extraordinary Arctic animals. I guess it was then that a desire and longing took root somewhere deep inside to some day go and see them myself.

Although muskoxen have for a long time populated all northern coasts of Greenland, they are not endemic to the south-west. Possibly the ice expanse of Melville Bay prevented them from moving further south. Nevertheless a shred of unfounded, unreasonable hope has been glimmering inside me that, despite all implausibility, we might just see some while in Greenland. But really we are far too far south. Or so I thought.

We had been anchored near the “Serengeti” with its herds of caribou pouring and eddying over the hills into the fertile verdant glacier flood plains, like grey wood smoke over a web of meandering streams the colour of pearly aquamarine. Consulting the weather forecast, the charts, and our ideas and longings, we pondered whether to return south or carry on following the lure of the muskoxen further north. Seductively close by then, they were but a long day sail away. The dice fell in favour of finding those special animals — we’re all too excited to let the chance slip — so we set forth to retrace our wake out to sea, around a couple of increasingly mountainous and towering islands.

The first we see of the umimmak is a small herd with several young on a hillside above the sea while approaching the outer stretches of the Ivittuut peninsula. 15 individuals were introduced here in 1987. By now, the population is estimated to be around 800-1000. They stand out in the landscape like dark brown big boulders. We can discern several adults and a couple of youngsters.

We decide to head in and find a decent anchorage just around the point before a pebble beach and the backdrop of a stream snaking and curving through the lush basin of a valley that stretches towards encircling tall mountain rims. As we drop the anchor, we spot yet another muskox resting by herself in the stony riverbed, her dark coat showing prominently against the bright grey crystalline rocks.

Piling into the dinghy with our photo gear, we settle on the plan to split up into two parties so as not to approach the resting animal as a crowd. Accompanied by chirping snow buntings and Lapland longspurs, Alex and I track over the springy multicoloured willows, mosses and lichen in a wide arch inland. We crawl down into the riverbed after a bend and scramble downstream towards the muskox. Richard and Arnaud take the via direttissima.

We cut cross the river and find ourselves nearly above her, for she too has swapped sides. Backing off and retracing our steps, we traverse back and, trying to be inconspicuous, ever so slowly grope through the undergrowth and keep to the shadow of boulders along the steep slope of the river gully. Munching willows, scratching and scraping along the rocks on her side with visible delight, the muskox doesn’t seem disturbed, just attentive, when in the end she makes me out.

Their natural predators are wolves and men, the former of which don’t live here. Although muskoxen are hunted – or “harvested” – here to prevent overpopulation, they are not alarmed when they discover us.

Lying in a cloud of mosquitoes that feast on us, we watch the animal browse and scratch her body and neck to shed the thick, dense fine under-wool. It hangs in shreds between the long skirt-like glossy guard hairs that sway almost to the ground. The guard hairs protect the animal from the elements while also trapping the heat within the wool. Muskoxen wool, locally called qiviut, is said to be eight times warmer than sheep’s, and as soft as the pashmina of Kashmir goats. We dream of pullovers made of the stuff! Despite their name, muskoxen aren’t bovines, but have a sheep/goat ancestry, and their closest living relative is the takin of northern Tibet.

Later, we trek around the headland to locate the herd we had first seen from aboard the Atlas. We find them in nearly the same place as before. One large adult is lying on her side and appears to sleep, with her head periodically slipping down to the stream she’s lying next to. She reminds me of grandmother sat in a rocking chair in the corner of the room, nodding off, her head dipping onto her chest from time to time.

Across from us, three adorable young calves are gambolling about like playful little foals, while two adults graze. A sooty arctic fox stealthily zigzags across the scene and closes with one of the calves, who starts chasing it around. Entertained by the odd pair’s capers and prances, we are surprised when the entire group suddenly stampedes after them, disappearing over the side of a hill. The entire group, but grandma, that is.

Grandma lies oblivious and dreamy in her old spot. A long while later she slowly rises, sits up on her haunches and looks about sleepily. Without hurry, the muskox gets up, shakes her body, and follows the group in deliberate strides, her skirt billowing in and out with her steps.

Ivittuut, 16th July 2023

Sharp brittle gravel born of many-hued crystalline rock crunches sonorously under our boots. We are exploring the abandoned mining village of Ivittuut, to the north-east of Kap Thorvaldsen. Founded in 1854, this village was built around the cryolite mine, the only one on earth. 150 years later, in 1987, with the mine exhausted, the village fell into disuse.

Cryolite is a rare white or colourless mineral that was used as a catalyst in aluminium smelting before a synthetic substitute was invented. It is peculiar, brittle and crystalline, shattering readily in our hands. Its name means ‘ice stone’, a fitting name, as this mineral has a strong resemblance to ice. When cast into water, the clearest of it will become as invisible as translucent ice, since it refracts light the same way water does. It is Greenlandic ‘ice’ that lasts, ice we can slip into our pockets as tokens to remind us of this place.

Four years prior, on our own boat, we visited Suriname in South America, a former Dutch colony embedded in the latticework of Amazonian tributaries. On an excursion into the depths of the Amazonas rainforest, we drove past a large aluminium factory now equally out of commission. An entire forest valley was flooded to create a vast dammed reservoir, the Brokopondo, to satisfy the immense power thirst of the aluminium production.

The trees in the lake died and, though waterlogged, curiously didn’t rot. They remain standing tall in a bizarre and baffling graveyard of white wooden skeletons above and below the water surface, creating an eerie and unreal landscape reminiscent of scorching deserts containing only the pallid bones of what was once alive. The lake is deep and we navigated on it in a boat, following the former valleys so as not to run ‘aground’ on the towering trees.

Today, those trees are valued as tropical hardwood that, being dead already, doesn’t face the export restrictions rainforest logs are usually subject to. They are felled underwater by divers who descend into the darkness of the caffe-latte Amazonian water with hydraulic chainsaws. Imagine diving 30 metres deep in water as dark and impenetrable as ink, with a sharp chainsaw in your hands to cut down trees you can’t see and which will vanish to the bottom as soon as felled if not chained on and pulled up right away.

There is a strange and poignant symmetry to now coming across this vacated mine in Greenland, nigh on at the other end of the hemisphere, but linked by nearly the same longitude, which produced the material needed in the tropics to extract the aluminium from its ore by heating and melting.

In the tropics, decay is rapid, life is constantly renewing itself and the rate of change is quick. Houses left to their own devices are soon overgrown by prodigious plant life and sheltering a host of animals. To someone used to temperate latitudes, tropical habitations can have the appearance of neglect, when in reality, the decomposition of organic material is simply much faster, and upkeep a constant battle. The very soil under our feet felt bustling and alive.

The Arctic and Subarctic, on the contrary, preserve inorganic and organic material in a state that seems frozen and timeless to us. Decay here is an immensely long drawn-out process, making the landscape appear unaffected by the passage of time. Despite better knowledge, on approaching the village, we had the impression it was only recently left by people. The paint of some of the houses seemed impeccable, the roofing intact, pathways clear.

A pocket of a harbour cut into the village’s embankment sports a wharf in good nick that we can tie up to. With fenders and lines prepared, we moved into the water pouch at a slow pace. Large wooden posts rammed into the ground and secured with forearm-thick bolts to the side, a ladder to climb up and several cleats to make fast our lines. This could equally be the pier of one of the Greenlandic towns we have visited.

Only on closer inspection is the deterioration revealed, the havoc caused to the forsaken town by high winds, frost, vandalism, moisture, salt, and ice becoming visible. There is a stark and intense beauty to the decay of human traces in this Arctic landscape. What remains of industrial and domestic buildings are the mining facilities and the residences of overseers and managers, while the workers’ dwellings have long ago collapsed and disappeared.

Electric motors of colossal dimensions, conveyor belts on tall stilts, large areas of excavated material, a giant workshop building with an aesthetic old-school truck next to the opencast mine, now a crystal-clear lake connected through a fault in the wall with the fjord. The tide pours into the pool, slowly raising the water level. Large logs float about, parts of the protective fence surrounding it, broken and tumbled down. The pit was 90 metres deep at its lowest point, and had to be pumped out constantly while the mine was in use.

Like the workshop and the crushing place, the doors to some of the other houses are open. The former mess with its large kitchen appliances, a two-storey cavernous oven, fridge containers, and stainless steel work surfaces nearly ready to allow one to start cooking a meal, if it weren’t for the collapsed ceilings and the debris on the floor.

The manager’s house is the noblest and most beautiful, with a generous conservatory and terrace to the south, overlooking the former vegetable garden: a patch of vibrant green and the startling yellow of butter cups and arctic poppies, standing out in a landscape dominated by mellow tints of sage and olive green, auburn and copper, dark brown, ochre and cream, silver and ash grey, white and ebony. The broken glass panes of the framed windows now let in the air, and debris collects in the plant basins surrounding the conservatory. Inside, we find wooden parquet flooring and a grand open fireplace that asks to be lit.

Nearby, the minuscule Norwegian pavilion of the 1889 World Expo in Paris has found its resting place. A flight of stairs leads up to it with an impressive pair of antlers adjacent to the door. It seems to be one of the few places still in use. There is a Refleks diesel heater with a tank that seems ready to go, clean tables surrounded by benches, a felt blanket and some photos of the former tennis court, of which it used to be the club house, and instructions for assembling the picnic bench outside pinned to the wall. The tennis court was once the pride of the village, and allegedly the one with the most expensive ground, of cryolite.

As we step around the pavilion, we see a movement. A dark brown mass in the midst of greyish-green willows. A muskox barely 20 metres from us browses solemnly amongst the bushes.

Angie