Greenland: Ilulissat (meaning: icebergs)

Ilulissat may be the most spectacular place that I’ve ever been. It is a traditional village and is populated primarily by Greenlanders, though you do see quite a few Danes running around as well. The houses are colorful and typical of what you might expect to see in Scandinavia. The town sits on the outer coast and just north of the Kangia Icefjord, which is fed by Sermeq Kujalleq (Southern Glacier). Its called an icefjord (instead of just a fjord) because of the steady stream of large icebergs that travel out to the ocean. The fjord is so packed with ice that you often can’t see any water. On a side note, most fjords in west Greenland have a "Northern Glacier" and a "Southern Glacier", so the name Sermeq Kujalleq is not particularly useful to those of us with western minds.


From Ilulissat you can watch fishing boats weave through the icebergs at all times of day. With 5000 people and 5000 sled dogs its actually a pretty busy place. It has several grocery stores, restaurants, bars, hotels, and a hostel. The local orienteering club meets on Mondays and the kayaking club meets on Tuesdays. I’m not sure what else is happening, but there seems to be plenty to do. Plenty for the tourists as well, and it seems that its only a matter of time until Ilulissat is “discovered”, which I think is unfortunate. Its nice to know that there are still amazing places in the world that don’t have jewelry stores and t-shirt shops on every street corner. But at least I can say that I was there before it became a major tourist destination.


We spent one day in Ilulissat going through all of our gear that was shipped ahead of time and double checking that we had everything. We also tried to trim down our gear as much as possible so as to limit the amount of helicopter trips we’d need to get everything to our camping site. It ended up taking three trips to haul 4 people plus about 5000 pounds of food, camp supplies, and scientific equipment. That’s an expensive camping trip, since the helicopter runs at $3000 an hour (we needed two hours to get everything to camp). Thank you NASA.