So instead of arriving at 11:00am with only an hour to wait until my pre-booked 1pm tour to Point 660, at the edge to the ice sheet, I arrived at 8:00am with a good four hours to kill. I must confess that, having spent a fantastic day up on the ice just two days previously, there was a temptation to let this trip slide. However by the time 1pm arrived, I had already spent a few hours at the airport/hotel where the main excitement is waiting for the Copenhagen flight to land.. which it finally did... on the 3rd attempt.
I say airport/hotel as Hotel Kangerlussuaq is IN the airport. The reception is upstairs from the check-in area, and the hotel cafeteria provides the only refreshment for the airport. You'd be hard pressed to distinguish between a view from a hotel room and the departure lounge (see below). Although I wasn't able to check-in immediately, as a paying guest of the hotel I was able to use the exclusive hotel bar as I waited, which it turned out was not long, as my room was ready before 11:00am. Having settled in (and watched a farmer pull the guts out of a recently slaughtered cow on DR1's daytime TV slot - Denmark's equivalent of BBC1), I had a quick nap in the very comfortable room, before heading downstairs to meet the tour.
(Left) Every resource in the airport is lined up to meet the Copenhagen flight.. which we hear pass over not once, but twice before a (centre) successful landing on the 3rd attempt in the fog. If the planes can't land at Kangerlussuaq, the only choice is Rekjavik (Iceland) or, more commonly, four hours all the way back to Copenhagen as there are no other suitable airports in Greenland. Now THAT would be a painful start to the holiday.
The first two photos are from the hotel bar. The third (right) is from my hotel room (no zoom).
Muster point for the Point 660 tour is 'outside the airport' and I was slightly dismayed to see not one but two large vehicles, which were best described as lorries with boxes on the back, pull up and load up about 60 passengers. We boarded (with no apparent check on who'd paid or not... ) and our driver introduced himself over the intercom. Soren had been a bus driver in Denmark but still needed to earn money so decided to become a bus driver in Greenland.
We stopped at a couple of points along the way to see the most northerly golf course in the world (Sondie Golf Course -
this NY Times review is somewhat overrated; the course is described in the
tour guide as 'makeshift' which would be more accurate), a miniature forest planted by an enthusiastic Dane who failed to understand the extremely short Greenlandic growing season, and a lake where it was hoped musk-ox might be spotted. No such luck. I was more interested in the grading machines used to sort the sediment of the glacial outwash river for use on the roads either repairing (larger gravel) or ice-treating (fine sand - it's too cold for salt to work).
(Left) Grading machines close to the Sondie Golf Course, (centre) a stop for tea by the lake and (right) views from the nearby hill)
The buses reached Point 660 after about 90 minutes and all passengers disembarked. Hiding amongst the moraines was an old digger, left in 2001 when
VW was building an Audi test track on the ice sheet. Puts the earth-moving capabilities of JCBs compared to glaciers into nice contrast, I thought! A small pond also heralded a surprising proliferation of wildflowers, just next to the ice sheet.
Once out, the second bus driver, a long haired, chain-smoking chap, then corralled the visitors onto the, by now pretty wet and bitingly cold, moraine for the briefing about the ice sheet. The briefing seemed to run to: follow me and don't wander out of sight. Not what I would have expected for a tour on a slippery ice sheet potentially littered with crevasses. The path there was quite steep and very well used so I was pleased I had brought my walking poles with me. Many of the visitors looked more like cruise ship passengers, and not well equipped for such terrain.
Between the weather, the size of the group, the nonchalant attitude of the 'guide' and the difficulty with which several people were attempting to negotiate the moraine and ice sheet, I made my way quickly back to the bus and kept myself warm with my Audible book and a stashed energy bar. It was quite disappointing.
The nadir was having seen a fresh fag-end dropped onto the pristine ice. There was only one person that I could see smoking on the two buses.
I never did know how much I paid for each part of my adventure (but it was A LOT), however I can't imagine this particular trip was really worth it. There are much better ways to experience the ice sheet.
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