Note the housing in Greenland. Photos provided.
(Editor’s note: looking for a different vacation? Laura Ballance, director of the Hudgens Center for Art and Learning, has returned from a vacation trip she put together herself: Greenland. Now, that’s a destination that is distinctive!–eeb)
By Laura Ballance
DULUTH, Ga. | On a Tuesday morning in late November, my husband and I sat at a boarding gate in Copenhagen, looking out at the bright red Airbus A330-800 neo, Air Greenland’s only jet aircraft, which runs twice weekly flights to Kangerlussuaq. Five hours later, I found myself in what is often referred to as “the world’s strangest international airport.”
Ballance
Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, is a town of 200 people. In the two-hour time period when the flight from Copenhagen lands, unloads passengers, and boards the return flight back to Denmark, the population of Kangerlussuaq easily triples. As I walked across the tarmac to the airport’s only gate, I was immediately struck by the quiet cold and the jagged icy rock landscape in the dark days of Greenland’s winter. It seemed like landing on the moon.
As of 2020, Greenland had 36 American residents (presumably, researchers), four beehives and three motorcycles. Greenland is the northernmost area of the world and the largest island, with a land mass equivalent to the larger Midwest, stretching into Mexico. More than 80 percent of that land mass is an ice shelf with such a harsh environment that only microbes are able to survive there.
My husband and I had pieced together a seven-day trip, with our first three nights in a glass igloo, tucked into the rocks above a fjord just outside the capital city of Nuuk and hoping for a glimpse of the Northern Lights. With roughly 18,000 residents, Nuuk is home to most of those who live in Greenland. While there, the temperature was between 4-25 degrees F., and snowed often.
A cultural center is the heart of Nuuk, where residents gather for movies, festivals, or beers while watching their beloved national handball team on a large screen TV. The city’s shopping mall opened in 2012, with much fanfare, apparently, and boasts 11 stores, one of which is the grocery store. It takes less than ten minutes to walk the entire mall but, when it’s cold enough outside, you can stretch it to an hour, if needed.
Menu options in Nuuk and throughout Greenland include musk ox, reindeer, seal, narwhal, walrus, Beluga and Minke whale, and even polar bear during certain times of the year. The fish market in Nuuk is a small room where people gather to buy whatever is brought in that day.
The Labrador Sea is Greenland’s highway. We spent the latter half of our trip on a passenger and cargo ferry, the Sarfaq Ittuk, that travels up the coast once per week. It is the only connection to the outside world for most of Greenland’s small settlements. Its bow has survived more than a few icebergs.
Stopping at towns with no more than a couple hundred people, the Sarfaq Ittuk hauls mail, groceries, and medical supplies, among other things. We saw the week’s trash get picked up – from one town, it was just three bags. It’s a truly special thing to get a glimpse of everyday life in a world so different from the one we know. We chugged up the coastline, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Making our way through Greenland proved to be a profound experience, the kind that opens you and changes you forever, for the better. We never saw the Northern Lights. They remain elusive, like so many other things. Though we never got what we came for, that feels right, in a way.
The Greenlandic language doesn’t have past or future tense. Everything is lived in the moment. Coming home, it was hard to let go of that moment. It’s an incredibly special place.
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