I’d heard the two former interns from
Visit Greenland, SungHa and Natasha, say countless times how
beautiful Greenland is and how much of an effect it has on you being
there. I believed them to an extent—believed that it was in fact
beautiful, but that it would compare to other destinations I had been
to previously, such as Alaska.
It took me two minutes, a thousand feet
above the ice pack and mountains outside Kulusuk, to understand what
they were talking about.
Silently and in awe I watched out the
tiny window as we passed over the receding ice pack, putting all
stories, pictures, and BBC specials I’d seen about it to shame. It
went on for miles upon miles, with icebergs and sheets flowing out
and away from the mountains inland. It looked something like a puzzle
of white ice among a dark blue background, with the pieces of
differing sizes and shapes. The mountains in the background framed
the picture, jutting out from the coast and covered in snow, like
something out of an apocalyptic end-of-the-world image. As we
maneuvered around and through the mountains to land in Kulusuk, I
thought to myself calmly that if I died, if the worst case scenario
happened and our tiny plane hit a bad wind and crashed into the side
of one of the majestic mountains, I would be okay with it because I
had seen something so otherworldly. The tight grasp I had had on the
seatback in front of me out of fear was loosened and my entire body
relaxed.
After landing we exited the plane so
they could refuel, and laughed at four foreign men who fell to their
knees and prayed that we had landed safely (which made me feel better
than I was not the only one bothered by the turbulence and the impact
it had on our tiny plane). The six or so of us continuing on to Nuuk
waited in the airport, which consisted of two rooms separated by a
small shop. I spoke with one of the Danish visitors, who has been
working in Greenland for years and has been asked to run tourism in
one of the settlements, Paamiut. He told me a few stories about his
settlement and we relaxed until the plane was ready to take off once
more.
Upon boarding the plane again, we were
surprised to note that it was now full with East Greenlanders, mostly
natives who were boisterous and had moved our things about the plane
to sit together. I ended up in back next to an older Inuit woman, who
didn’t speak a single word of English yet took great glee in
pointing at things out the window and sharing the Greenlandic names
with me. When I pulled out a map to continue memorizing the names of
all settlements, she got even more excited and grabbed my arm,
pointing to herself and then pointing at a city wildly, giving me a
toothy grin as her family sitting around us all laughed. After a few
minutes of me looking around her she gave me her seat so I could
watch out the window, though due to wind issues, after a short time
we ascended above the cloud cover. For the entire two hour flight I
watched out, excited to see through breaks in the clouds and catch
glimpses of the endless snow and mountains below.
When we descended below the cloud
cover, winds overtook the plane and we started to be thrown about.
Despite the beautiful scenery outside I grasped the armrests and the
woman beside me rubbed my back, trying to comfort me. I was amused at
the scene—a native Greenlander wearing traditional jewelry and
clothing, who did not look as though she traveled much from home, and
she was comforting someone who had flown over ten thousand miles the
previous year on varying flights.
There was no customs and baggage claim
consisted of a single looped conveyor belt which whipped bags out at
a speed I thought impossible, flinging a bag out at one point and
into the waiting crowd of children and adults crowded into the tiny
room. Anne Mette then took me from the one roomed airport and to my
home for the next four months—a beautiful light wood apartment with
white walls to capture as much light as possible during the endless
night winter months (as the sun does not rise for about three months
in Nuuk). What enticed me most were the views—mountains reaching
into the clouds surround the ‘city’ (and I put that word lightly,
as Nuuk is one of the smallest capitals of the world by population at
just around 15,000), capped in snow, while each building is painted
brightly in colors spanning beyond the rainbow. My room looks out
directly to the mountains with houses decked in colors at the base,
with snow banks melting into rivers below. Although it is not yet
summer, the snow is melting and the sun is out for twenty or so hours
a day, giving precious little time to sleep in darkness before the
sun comes up over the horizon once again at around 0200.
Time to enjoy for that 'precious little'. Night!
No comments:
Post a Comment