Wanderung 25

Fall Follies

August - September 2011


 

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Monday, September 7th, 2011: Nuuk (Godthab), Greenland

Bob:

Our ship was just entering the fjord area leading to Nuuk, the Capital of Greenland, when dawn broke, so we went up on Deck 16 to take pictures. We had a beautiful sunrise amidst the rugged mountains of the fjord area, but a cloud layer that hid the tops of the mountains spread across the sky as we slowly steamed up to the city.

Monika:

When I got up I noticed that it was just about sunrise. I dressed warmly and hurried up onto Deck 16. The sun was indeed trying to rise behind a layer of clouds that covered the horizon. There was also one lonely peak sticking out of the clouds. That was all you could see of the landscape. Not the greatest of sunrises but better than what we have had on this cruise. I was surprised that the area in front of the bar was roped off until I saw a couple of crew sliding along. When I looked closer I saw that a lot of the area was indeed slightly iced over reflecting the crew standing on it.

Bob:

We were rewarded for braving the cool weather on deck, however, by catching sight of a small pod of three humpback whales. They were headed back out to open sea and passed by our port side just a mile or so out from Nuuk's harbor.

Monika:

We turned slowly into the Godthaabsfjord. Nuuk was situated just inside this fjord and Nuuk's Danish name had been Godthaab. The entrance to the fjord was a stony archipelago. We had been told that whales liked to play in here, so we were standing at the bow looking for whales. And we were rewarded. Suddenly someone yelled "whales" and we all looked for the blows. As we slowly glided towards them they came towards us, and when they were port side we could get a look at these giants of the sea.

Bob:

Although Nuuk is the largest city in Greenland, Greenland is a very sparsely settled island the size of Alaska but with only 56,00 total inhabitants, so we weren't quite sure what to expect. No tours were offered for Nuuk, but we were planning on walking around anyway so that did not affect us. Nuuk is spread out along both sides of a peninsula, and our Captain idled into position just offshore the eastern shore of it where the Old Town area of Nuuk is located. It was too deep to anchor, so he kept station using the bow thrusters and stern Azipods to precisely counteract the currents and any tendency of the shift to drift. Since there was just a small floating dock on the shore, we had to use the ship's lifeboats to tender over to the dock.

The Old Town area of Nuuk has most of the tourist attractions, and one you cannot miss as you come ashore there is a HUGE, fire-engine red, post office mail box just a few feet in from the floating dock. The post box is at least 10-15 feet tall, 7 feet or so across, and dedicated to mail from Santa Claus, of all things. It also had the requisite depictions of the jolly old elf himself plus Christmas trees and such like, which felt weirdly out-of-place in early September!

Monika:

After the show was over, we went back to our stateroom to get ready for going on land. But first we decided, our camera needed to be charged up, plus we figured there would be a large line for the tenders anyway. So we spent an hour in our cabin charging the camera and reading. After that there still was a line, but we waited only 15 minutes or so until our tender number was called. Again the tendering was handled very well and soon we were riding on top of the tender towards Nuuk.

On land we tried to orient ourselves and finally figured out that we actually were let on shore right in the old harbor where all the tourist attractions were, such as Santa Claus mailbox, the Greenland National Museum, the old church, and the statue of Hans Egede who converted the Inuits and colonized Greenland for Denmark in the 18th century.

Bob:

We kind of followed the crowd of people disembarking from the Crown Princess's tenders as they flowed northwards along the shoreline road. We passed by the Greenland National Museum for the moment and climbed straight up the hill with a statue of Father Egede where we could both get a close look at the statue and have a scenic view out over the bay with our ship on one side and the city of Nuuk on the other side.

The map we had been provided by Princess listed an arctic botanical gardens and a monument just up the street from the Father Egede statue and church, so we continued northward in search of those. Our search was in vain as all we found was a small, fenced-off paster with some friendly sheep in it. One in particular, possibly the ram, had a set of really fancy curled horns and we took a picture of him. He apparently thought we were going to feed him because when Monika leaned inside to focus, he came trotting right up to her and the resulting picture was a marvelous close-up of just his eyes!

Monika:

We decided to keep the museum for last and start out by climbing up to the statue of Hans Egede. It was on a little hill and from there we had a nice view over the city and the bay. We saw that to the north were more little hills with probably even better views. So off we went past the colorful houses of the Greenlanders. In olden times the colors actually were a signal for what purpose it or the persons living in it fulfilled. For instance, yellow was for medical assistance, red for merchants, and so on. Nowadays, I think it has more to do with what color fits into neighborhood.

Bob:

Not being folks to give up lightly, we continued northwards into the rocky hills that surround the city's reservoir. There I re-learned a critical lesson I had first learned in Qoqartaq on our last visit to Greenland during Wanderung 18: stick to walking on the rocky ridges or you will get your feet soaked! The low moss and bush carpet between the rocky spines on the hills typically holds water underneath, and you never know if you are stepping on solid earth or a moorland bog. We both ended up getting our feet wet, but we took to the rocks in time to avoid getting them completely soaked.

Once on the crest of the hill we saw another, more modern part of Nuuk across the way and a large water reservoir over on our right. Giving up on finding the arctic botanical gardens, we cut over across the moor to the reservoir and followed a rough shoreline trail back into settled areas.

Monika:

The mountains around the town were still shrouded in clouds. But up on the highest hill, we could see the reservoir that held the drinking water for the town. So we decided to walk to it and from there back to the commercial heart of the town. What we had not counted on was that between the hill and the reservoir was a bog. And although there were lots of stones to jump across, ever now and then we did land in the water, and again had wet feet. However, this is a lot more uncomfortable when the temperature is only 35 degrees as it was in Nuuk rather than in the 60s like it had been in England.

I thought there was a road along the reservoir, but there was only a more or less well defined path that had us scramble across the rocks. The rocks themselves were fascinating: there was one big glacial erratic just sitting there. Others were heavily veined, and some rather interestingly eroded; one, for instance, reminded me of a toothed whale.

Bob:

We re-entered Nuuk, however, in a modern section dominated by 10 huge blockhouses of apartments arranged like a row of dominoes and with just about as much architectural character. Each block was four floors high and 1/8th of a mile long, and we estimated each one held somewhere between 90-120 families. I'm sure it was sturdy, efficient, and easy-to-heat housing, but esthetic it was not.

Continuing on to the main shopping district a half a mile beyond the big dominoes, we walked the length of Imaneq street, a pedestrianized street that seemed to have most of the stores as well as the cultural center. The latter is a unique building with wavy walls and no square corners that reminded me of the Museum of The Native American in Washington, D.C. The rest of the stores were typical modern outlets, but the prices were what I would call "Scandinavian Sky High"! That is, pretty much everything was at least 3 to 4 times as expensive as it would be back in the U.S., and that was a consistent pattern across Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. Even when we found the equivalent of a "dollar store" on a side alley, it's minimum price was 10 Kroner which converted to $2.

Although after a couple hours of walking we were getting hungry, the prices discouraged us from having lunch at any of the restaurants--I'm just not ready to pay $24 for a hamburger I guess. When we finally found a SPAR store we purchased a big, triangular-shaped sandwhich made with poppy seed bread for 25 Kroner or $5. But they refused to accept our 100 Kroner bill, so we ended up using a credit card!

Monika:

Once back on regular streets we headed towards the center of town. We had to pass a rather large number of similarly constructed apartment buildings. Counting the balconies and multiplying by four stories and at least 15 buildings, we concluded that on very little land, the authorities had built apartments for over a thousand people. Not pretty, but very efficient

Stopping at grocery store, I looked for the beer brewed in Greenland I had enjoyed last time we were in Qarqatoq, but could not find it. The brews they had cost about $ 5.-- about what the ship charges so I did not buy any. We also tried to find a WiFi hotspot but did not succeed. We did, however, find the cultural center. Its architecture reminded me of the Native American Musuem in Washington, not a straight line in sight. They did have an information center, where we obtained a better map of the town and a suggestion which cafe to try.

We did find the cafe at the other end of town, but we did not like the look of it. So we just kept on walking and found a Spar grocery store. There I checked again for the local brew I remembered fondly. But no luck, instead we found an interesting looking large sandwich for about 5 dollars or 25 Krone. I wanted to pay with the 100 Krone bill I had left over from the Faroe Island - after all both the Faroes and Greenland use Danish currency - but the young girl at the counter did not recognize the bill and was not going to accept it. So we used my Maestro card instead, sat down outside and munched on our sandwich.

With the worst of our hunger appeased we kept walking through town. The sun was peeking out and the clouds lifted a little from the surrounding mountainside. Enough to let us get a feel for how barren the slopes are. There seemed to be nothing but rock, no vegetation. But soon the sun decided, that was enough for today and went back in and it really got colder. We headed back toward the tenders.


 

Bob:

Working our way back to the Old Town section, we decided to tour the Greenland National Museum, and curiously enough they DID accept the 100 Kroner bill as perfectly legitimate currency, which left us scratching our heads. The entrance was 30 Kroner or $6 each, but we felt the displays were worth it. We started off with what looked like a special exhibit on bird skins used to make clothing and really beautiful quilts. Quite pretty and they looked very soft but the exhibits were behind protective glass, of course, so I could not be sure of that.

The focal point of the museum was the history and development of the Innuit culture from the initial wave of families migrating eastward from the northern parts of what is now Canada about 2000 years back, down to the present. The basic equipment of the Innuit were boats for travel across the seas, sleds for travelling across the land using sled dogs, and tents made of skin for sheltering in the summer.

The boats were of two very distinct types, the kayak for a single person to hunt seals or other small game in, and the 20-30 foot long Umiak that required a team to paddle it. When the village was being moved, the women paddled an Umiak with the entire contents of the village in it, while the men paddled their kayaks. For hunting big game like whales, however, the village men used the Umiak with their spears and other equipment. One curious thing was that the assignment of men to hunting and women to household chores was not absolute. If there were not enough men, some female children would be raised to be hunters. The exact assignment of girls to a hunting role also depended on their given name, but exactly who gave them their names and how that influenced being given the hunter's role rather than a domestic role was never clarified.

Be that as it may, the Inuit had successfully adapted to the really harsh climate, but were basically hunters. When the Vikings came around 900 A.D., however, they were farmers, primarily pastoralists. The cultures coexisted in Greenland for a while, but the Viking settlements eventually failed in the colder weather and changed political situation in the 1300s and their people disappeared, whereas the Inuit survived.

Monika:

We had still enough time for the museum and with the line waiting for the tenders quite long, we really felt that spending an hour in a museum was a good use of our time.

When we had to pay the entrance fee of 30 Krone or 6 dollar each, we did not have enough American money. So I produced my 100 Krone bill, and here they were quite willing to accept it. I think, that the Faroes and Greenland have different pictures on the bills, and the young girls had never seen any 100 Krone bill that was not from Greenland. So we walked into the museum and I was surprised by the size and thoroughness of it all. There were English explanations everywhere and non-flash photography was permitted, so anyone who knows Bob knows that we spent longer in the museum than planned.

The first room exhibited clothing and blankets made from bird skins. Clothing made from bird skin is warm and durable and was used as the inside layer of a jacket. Since bird skins are small, the blankets made of them resemble quilts and were quite beautiful.

The next room contained information and artifacts of the life of the Inuit before the Danish colonization. It was fascinating to see, how these people coped with the harsh conditions. They migrated into the interior for hunting and berry picking in the summer, living in a tent made from animal skins. In the winter they lived close to the water in sod houses hunting seals and whales. At the end of this room was a special room that held the mummified remains of six people. We skipped that room.


 

Bob:

The Norsemen got their revenge, as it were, in the 1700s when the Danish reappeared in the form of imperial colonialists, complete with the obligatory (Lutheran) missionaries, and colonized Greenland and the Inuit using "Guns, Germs, and Steel" to borrow Jared Diamond's phrase. In the process, just as American missionaries did in Hawaii, the Danish colonization destroyed the native religion and way of life. The Danish built European-style homes complete with all the amenities such as furniture, tableware, and even luxuries like pianos. The lives of the Innuit were much more basic, rugged, and crude by European standards although I'm not sure how the Inuit themselves saw the situation.

Although about 90% of the population of Greenland is Inuit, my observations of the commercial life of Nuuk indicated that it was still dominated by the Danish. All shop signs were given only in Danish and the names on the factory buildings also indicated Danish rather than Inuit ownership. Greenland is self-governing now, however, so these things may slowly change. One evidence of that would be the National Museum itself; I found the content of the exhibits (and I read everything that was in English), was remarkably even-handed in treating both the Inuit culture, the old Viking settlements, and the Danish colonization period. So if you get to Nuuk, be sure to stop in and see the National Museum.

We were, by this time, quite tired and retreated to the ship for a quick snack of pizza and then a liesurely meal with our table mates. Afterwards we put our feet up and tried to read the second "Railroad Detective" book in Marton's series, but I kept falling asleep whilst reading so we just called it a night.

Monika:

For the next exhibits we had to go around to three other buildings. There was one building on the transportation of the Inuits and held large numbers of Kayaks, Umiaks, and sleds.

The next building talked about what is known about the Viking settlements between 800 and 1300 AD. They seemed to have lived apart from the Inuit in farms bringing cattle and sheep with them. Why they died out between 1300 and 1400 is not known, probably a combination of less trade and colder weather.

The last building was a cooper shop and there was not much to see there. So we were ready to get back to the ship. There was no longer any line for the tender, so we climbed again up to our favorite spot on the top to get a few more pictures of Nuuk and the mountains that surround it, which were no longer obscured by clouds.

Back at the ship we were still hungry, despite the small, little sandwich we had eaten. But dinner was not too far away, so I suggested, we try the pizza. I got a slice of pepperoni pizza and still had a beer left over from Lerwick. After that we rested. We roused ourselves to go to dinner, and it was amusing hearing our four English tablemates talk nostalgically about the radio and TV programs they had grown up with.



Copyright 2012 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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