Blog

This time we trav­eled to the far north at the begin­ning of Novem­ber. From Novem­ber 2nd to 6th we vis­it­ed Ilulis­sat in West Green­land for 4 nights. Our friends Andrea and Har­ry had booked a short trip there with Green­land Trav­el and asked us if we want­ed to come with them, which we quick­ly agreed to.

I have also writ­ten a detailed trav­el report about our Green­land trip. If you only want to see the best pic­tures, you can find them here.

As you can eas­i­ly see from my pre­vi­ous trav­el reports, I had pre­vi­ous­ly pre­ferred to trav­el to warmer climes, so this trip was com­plete­ly new ter­ri­to­ry for us. We began by inform­ing our­selves inten­sive­ly about the coun­try, peo­ple and cli­mate and became increas­ing­ly curi­ous. Prepa­ra­tion began with the pur­chase of polar-proof cloth­ing, which proved its worth:

Green­land, the largest island in the world, belongs to Den­mark, but is polit­i­cal­ly self-gov­ern­ing. Most of the coun­try is cov­ered by a huge ice sheet that is up to 3 km thick. The ice-free coastal areas are larg­er than Ger­many, but Green­land only has around 56,000 inhabitants.

Ilulis­sat is locat­ed on the west coast near Disko Island and is home to around 4,700 peo­ple (and 3,000 sled dogs), mak­ing it the third largest town in Green­land. The Green­landic word Ilulis­sat trans­lates as “ice­bergs” and the name real­ly speaks for itself. This makes the town a tourist hotspot for any­one who wants to see icebergs.

Ilulis­sat is locat­ed next to the ice fjord of the same name, which is fed by one of the most pro­duc­tive glac­i­ers in the world, the Ser­meq Kujalleq. Every day, the glac­i­er advances about 30 meters fur­ther into the fjord, and gigan­tic ice­bergs reg­u­lar­ly break off from it. Around 10% of the North Atlantic ice­bergs are said to orig­i­nate from here, rumor has it that even the famous ice­berg that sank the Titan­ic came from here.

The city is locat­ed north of the Arc­tic Cir­cle and only gets 5-6 hours of day­light in Novem­ber. This result­ed in a fas­ci­nat­ing light mood dur­ing our trip, as the sun bare­ly rose above the hori­zon. The late date of the trip also had a rea­son: the hope of see­ing the North­ern Lights. And we were lucky in that respect too.