Category: July

Iceland/Greenland

June 27 – July 5

Iceland

We left the North Atlantic islands and arrived in Iceland to rainy weather. Unfortunately, the rain hardly ever stopped during our time there which is a shame. We were in Iceland five years ago and drove around the island for nearly two weeks to mostly good weather where you can really appreciate the beauty and diversity of the island.

We were only here for a couple of days and with the rain I only have a handful of photos to share. One day ashore was canceled because the winds prevented us from taking the zodiacs off the ship.

One thing we noticed was that the capital city of Reykjavik had a large number of new hotels and other buildings. Iceland has seen such an influx of tourists that they have been struggling to accommodate them. From our memory of the last trip, no place is more indicative of their struggles to handle all of the people than the airport.

The main trip here was a 4×4 jeep trip into the Iceland countryside. These vehicles were huge and could auto-inflate and deflate the tires as we drove to handle the various terrain. Nothing seemed to be too rough for these things. We did pass a herd of reindeer on the trip, but they ran off before we could get a good photo. Here is a sample of photos from the trip, but it really does not do the country justice.

This is Arctic Lupine which blooms for about a month every June. It spreads like weeds but is very helpful by adding nitrogen to the soil. Large fields of this plant are really beautiful to see.
The country is home to literally hundreds of waterfalls.

I was in the front passenger seat of our jeep and tried not to look down too much. Our vehicle had three rows of seats so could seat 8-10 people.

We visited one of the main geothermal plants that pipe water all the way to the city. The only fossil fuels used in Iceland are the gasoline for the cars.


Here are a couple of photos from our previous trip to Iceland to provide a tiny sample of its real beauty.


Greenland

The largest island in the world contains a massive ice sheet that makes the interior of the island uninhabitable. The few cities on the island are on the coast, except for Kangerlussuag which houses the only commercial airport on the island and sits at the end of a fjord. It is where we ended our cruise and flew on a charter to NYC.

The country remains a protectorate of Denmark and relies on them quite a bit for financial assistance and skilled labor. The resident population of the island is 90% Inuit. The population of the entire country is only 57,000.

We took a walking tour in the capital city of Nuuk (you could walk from one end to the other in an hour) with a 20-year old woman as our guide. She had been going to school in Canada for the past two years and did not seem to have any desire to remain in the country for the rest of her life. She indicated that most young people feel this way as there is really nothing for them to do in the country and as you can imagine, life is very hard here. She still adhered to some of the local culture, not the least of which was being proud that she had successfully hunted seals and wanted to hunt a caribou this summer. The killing of seals, whales and caribou is very much ingrained in the culture here for both boys and girls and is used quite a bit for food. They even had whale blubber to eat at one of the hosted lunches. Only a few brave souls tried it.

We spent a week going around the south and western parts of the island exploring as many of the fjords that the weather and ice flows would allow. The scenery is certainly spectacular and similar to Antarctica but we saw very little wildlife there, with the exception of a few local birds. We wondered if most of the whale and seal population had been killed off. We did pass one or two musk ox on a tour to a glacier one day.

Here are some photos…

A view from the ship of the ice flow that blocked our entrance into any of the fjords in this area so we had to keep going further north.
A typical view of the ice flow as we traveled along the side of the ice heading north.
There were hundreds of icebergs in both the open waters and in the fjords. This was one of the larger ones.

From a walk through a town called Quaqortoq.
There were reports of polar bears in the area a few days before our visit so the ship armed a number of expedition folks with rifles and kept a perimeter around us as we hiked. Nobody was allowed outside of the boundaries. Apparently, the town did not appreciate the need for such caution and we were the subject of an article in a Greenland publication.
Needed a bird photo here, right? This is a snow bunting that I caught singing.
A typical view in one of the fjords with a large glacier at the end and many on the sides of the mountains that bordered the water on both sides.


Eva and I did our “polar plunge” into the waters shown in the photo below. Yes, it was cold…. Yes, we have photos that we will keep to ourselves (smile).

In one of the fjords, in the pouring rain, we got on zodiacs and toured around the ice and in front of this massive glacier. This is a photo just after a piece of the glacier split off (calved) and created a bit of a wave in the water. When the glacier calves it makes the loudest crackling noise first that grabs your attention trying to see where the ice is splitting off into the water.


As night fell on the final days of our cruise, we were incredibly grateful to be fortunate enough to have taken such a voyage. We were reminded that the simplest things are the most amazing – a sense of the local history and culture, a wildflower in an otherwise barren landscape; a beautiful mural on the side of an unremarkable building; incredible cloud formations and sunsets; the local wildlife, and of course, the thousands of different species of birds that I came to appreciate. Time to go home…


Bye for now. Thanks for reading.