What it's like to live in Greenland

Yahoo

23-02-2025

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
The Inuit of Greenland have 80 different words for ice. Niels Davidsen is currently most familiar with sikuuvoq (sea covered by a layer of ice) because the sikuuvoq has stolen his boat. It is currently sikkuppaa (frozen into sea ice) in the harbour of Ilulissat, on the west coast of Greenland, and there it will stay for a couple more months. Come June, the thaw will rescue the vessel and its many neighbours, or else the town will decide its winter visitor has outstayed its welcome and employ an ice-breaker or dynamite to swiftly blast an ammavoq (passage in sea ice for a boat to pass through) and be done with it.
For now, though, Niels visits his little white boat in Illulissat harbour every so often to chip off the pukak (layer of ice). I've spent the morning skittering around the streets of Greenland's third-largest city (population 4,670) — a place of low-rise wooden houses in Lego colours, their yards filled with a jumble of upturned boats and indistinguishable objects hibernating under the snow. I meet Niels after venturing out to the harbour, overlooked by the warehouses and shipping containers of the Royal Greenland fishing company. In a North Face beanie, aviator sunglasses and brown-and-white jumper knitted by his mum, he looks a good two decades younger than his 60 years.
A manager at a local school by profession, Niels lives and breathes fishing and hunting, like many Greenlanders — 80 different types of ice aren't going to stop him from enjoying either. 'In the winter, I go out to the fjords on my dog sled and fish with a long line through the ice,' he tells me, happy to pause his inspection to sit on the side of his boat and chew the fat. Tomorrow he'll go hunting, heading with his dogs on a sled for 30-odd miles with the aim of finding an allu (hole in the ice through which a seal breathes) and then waiting for his quarry to appear through it. It's a type of self-reliance that survives in rude health in this part of Greenland, despite the presence of supermarkets and takeaway joints. 'It's important that every day we have something to pull out of the freezer,' he says. 'Three days the food comes from the grocery store, the rest of the week is fish, reindeer, musk ox or seal meat I have caught myself.'
Still, he puts his chances of a successful hunt at 20%. 'Even if I don't catch anything,' he says with a contented smile, 'I still enjoy the solitude.' When I ask him if he's ever scared to be out on his own so far from help, he shrugs. 'My father was a fisherman and he taught me about ice — I know what is safe and what is risky.'
Niels' skiff may be out of action, but plenty of others — mainly professional fishing boats — have broken free and putter across Ilulissat's Disko Bay, steering a course through slim, slushy channels. Beyond them, even larger vessels float: craggy icebergs that look like distant islands until you realise they've ever-so-slowly shifted position or spun round since the last time you looked. After I've spent a few days in town, they start to feel like giant visitors silently observing from the ocean.
It's an environment that can't fail to conjure thoughts of spirits and monsters despite the pragmatism that seems coded into Niels' DNA, one born of generations of people used to interpreting and dealing with the often hostile forces of nature around them. A short, slippery walk from the harbour, in a building that was once used to make dog sleds, I find the Inuit Artist Workshop and Hans Møller. Bent over a battered wooden work bench — snow piled up against the window panes, reggae playing on the radio — Hans uses an electric tool to shape and smooth a reindeer antler into the figure of a man. In glass cabinets around him are the results of his and other artists' handiwork: polar bears rearing on their hind legs; Inuit in fur hoods carrying tiny fishing rods on which hang tiny fish; and strange beasts with flared nostrils, pointy teeth and fearsome eyes.
These last are tupilak, a sort of Greenlandic voodoo doll. 'They used to be like a bad spirit,' says Hans, shifting his baseball cap on his head. 'You made a tupilak and you used it to curse an enemy.' They're mainly sold as unique souvenirs these days, to sit benignly on the mantelpieces of adventurous travellers around the world, but they're remnants of a time when the Inuit here relied on a greater power to protect them and not just their own considerable survival skills.
Like Niels, Hans learnt his craft from his dad, who was taught by his father before him. I am quickly discovering that using traditional skills, whether fishing, hunting or carving, is a mark of respect for one's ancestors for many here. It's never more apparent than at the Women's Association, a single-storey building an uphill walk north of central Ilulissat. Vera Mølgaard welcomes me in from the cold, sitting me down with coffee, biscuits and an abundance of smiles. Scattered around are the paraphernalia of her own craft: seal skins, thin strips of leather, bundles of twine.
The association was formed to give younger generations the tools and knowledge to make traditional costumes, and it's met once a week in this building since the club took it over in the 1980s. They also invite visitors on Ilulissat tours to come and learn about their heritage. Preserving that heritage, Vera explains, has particular poignancy in Greenland. An autonomous territory of Denmark since 1979, the country was subject to what amounted to cultural cleansing up until the 1970s, including the forced relocation of the Inuit from their villages. After generations of living cheek-by-jowl with the natural world in the same close-knit communities, entire settlements were split up, moved into apartment blocks in town and given jobs as factory workers and office cleaners. Vera's grandparents were made to move to Ilulissat in the '60s, and their lives changed overnight. 'Their traditions were destroyed alongside everything else,' Vera says, her naturally sunny disposition momentarily darkening.
It's no wonder, then, that Vera is so driven to keep her culture alive. 'I'm concerned if we do not give the old traditions to younger people,' she tells me, offering a plate piled high with home-made cookies, 'it'll die out within 35 years.' She shows me the various parts used in the hand-made national costume, often worn at confirmations and on wedding days. Among them are long, white embroidered boots topped with lace, and shawls delicately stitched with colourful beads. 'In the old days, the women were mostly doing the necessity of making the men's hunting clothing, like the skin anoraks they used to kayak in. When they had time, they would make other costumes.'
When Vera was a child, every woman she knew could make the national dress. Few have the knowledge now but interest is growing, with more and more younger people attending their club nights. 'The motivation tends to be if they want to own a costume it can cost 30,000 kroner [£3,400],' she says laughing.
The simple act of coming together keeps the culture alive in itself — women gathering as their forebears did before them, to sit and make and mend as their men were out on the ice. 'This is a place of joy,' Vera says, handing me an illustrated print of a national boot as a gift. 'I've got a lot going on in my life, but here we make our costumes and we talk and we tell stories. There is happiness in that.'
I wake the next morning to find a particularly large iceberg has shifted into view of town. It has been on quite the mission to get here. Having started life as snowflakes some 250,000 years ago, it has spent the millennia turning itself into a chunk of the Jakobshavn Glacier before calving off and nudging its way along the Ilulissat Icefjord and out to the open sea. From the glacier to its position in sight of my hotel breakfast is a journey of around 25 miles that has likely taken 15 months.
It is a journey of 1.5 miles and about 45 minutes for me to walk to the mouth of the Icefjord. I'm accompanied by the howls of Greenland dogs for much of the way, passing yards where vast numbers of them are kept. They perch on their kennels, doze inside, dig about in the snow and otherwise cease all activity and embark on a frenzy of yelping when their owners come to take them out. An unsteady totter down a slip-slidey boardwalk takes me past the town's culture and nature museum — the striking, iceberg-shaped Ilulissat Icefjord Centre — and down to water coloured the brightest, purest turquoise.
In a sheltered bay freer from ice than the town's harbour, Ilulissat's fishing industry is in full flow, relocated here for the winter. Fisherfolk busy themselves on the dock, loading crates on and off the 20 or so boats moored after a morning out at sea. Rowdy seagulls shriek overhead as catches of halibut are filleted, the surplus tossed into plastic buckets, and nets are mended.
Around the next headland, the Icefjord reveals itself. An enormous, jagged iceberg takes centre stage, big as a mountain, with a tiny dot of a sea eagle floating over one of its peaks. Smaller chunks of ice float past, twirling in the current. Far in the distance, people stand on drifting sea ice, likely hunting seals. It's a landscape so spectral, so unexpected, I return to it a few times over the coming days, finding it altered each time. Sometimes the ice is deep blue; sometimes the brightest white against a black sea; sometimes tinged pink. What stays constant is the silence and the purity of the air and the sense that this is a view little changed since humans first arrived here some 4,500 years ago.
Change is coming, though. Fishing is still the main industry here but tourism is catching up. The building of a new airport near Ilulissat aims to encourage more land-based stays, breaking away from the cruise-ship tourism that's traditionally made up most arrivals to Greenland. With few roads between communities, land-based travel in winter involves snowmobiles or dog sleds. Numerous outfitters run trips from Ilulissat, whisking visitors out of town on snowbound adventures.
I spend a day with one operator, bouncing on a snowmobile past the clanking construction site of the airport to Oqaatsut (population 40), 10 miles north, a muddle of wooden houses dotted around a frozen lake, with sleeping Greenlandic dogs curled like pretzels between them. Here I learn to fish through the ice, dropping a line 65ft down to catch an unfortunate-looking shorthorn sculpin, and chat to locals about their encounters with narwhals, musk oxen and polar bears.
Travelling further afield becomes a little more complicated. Getting to the many islands scattered off the coast typically means sailing; with the sea frozen, hopping in a helicopter is as routine as catching a bus, with passengers piling into bright red choppers, pulling on ear defenders and whizzing across the bays. I take one to the island of Uummannaq, 100 miles north of Ilulissat, swooping over the trails of dog sleds crisscrossing the ice, before landing in the shadow of the eponymous heart-shaped mountain that rears over the main settlement.
Uummannaq is famous for its dog sled racing — a common activity along the coast — and the quality of its huskies, and they are everywhere on the offshore ice, forming a barking, furry ring around the island. I pass through them with the local, family-run company Avani, driving in a 4WD across a frozen fjord to watch the sun set in full view of the mountain, its two peaks fading in and out of view behind wind-whipped clouds and finally disappearing in the dark.
A helicopter is not the least conventional way to get about in these parts. For my final couple of days, I return to the mainland and join World of Greenland, travelling inland from Ilulissat to the edge of the Jakobshavn Glacier. The chosen mode of transport is a Pistenbully, normally used to plough snow. Operating at a pace slightly slower than 'drifting iceberg', we bump out of town and into a vast emptiness, creeping over frozen lakes and through deep crevasses, the tracks of Arctic foxes and hares leading away from our path. After 10 miles, we reach the outfitters' wood cabin and transfer to snowmobiles, following behind guide Christopher Chemnitz to the day's destination: the start of the Ilulissat Icefjord.
From a high vantage point, we look down at a landscape of endless white, the fjord meeting the tongue of the Jakobshavn Glacier in ranks of crinkled sea ice, the broad expanse of the ice cap beyond that. Packs of dogs pull fishermen on sleds up and down the fjord, taking them to prized ice-fishing spots to return with crates loaded with halibut. 'From a line that's one to 2.25km long, they might catch 100 tonnes of fish,' Christopher explains. 'And it's all taken up by hand.'
As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it's forbidden to take motors onto the Icefjord, so we continue on foot, walking past giant formations in the ice — natural sculptures that look like drooping trees, pointing fingers and curling waves. With winter slowly on the wane, the surface beneath our feet is starting to melt in places, and we jump over wide cracks that reveal luminescent blue water beneath. 'By June,' Christopher says as we make another leap, 'all of this will be gone.'
We return to World of Greenland's wood cabin, Igloo Lodge, a welcoming place to thaw out in after time on the fjord. Candles glow on long, communal tables, reindeer-fur throws cover the chairs, and gin and tonics are served with 250,000-year-old ice chipped from the bergs we've just wandered amongst. With the sky darkening, dipping from mauve to navy, Christopher sits down to chat, pulling off his red beanie and knitted jumper as the warmth of the cabin takes hold. Born in the capital Nuuk but raised in Denmark since he was 12, he tells me he was drawn back to Greenland in 2016. 'I'm just extremely happy when I'm here,' he says. 'I love the fellowship. Everyone is tangled together in a place like this. And it feels right to be in nature — it's like coming up for air.'
Guests here can take being in nature to another level: not for nothing is this place called Igloo Lodge. Beyond the window, I can see my sleeping quarters for the night: a carefully sculpted igloo poking out of the snow, softly glowing from a candle lit within. 'Igloos were once used as temporary shelters in Greenland when hunting,' Christopher tells me. 'It's not so common now though.'
In temperatures of -16C and with the faintest wisps of the Northern Lights twisting overhead, I head outside and to my igloo, crawling through a narrow entrance tunnel to pop up in a little chamber shimmering a supernatural blue. With a hot water bottle clutched to my stomach, sleeping bag pulled up as far as it can go and only my nose exposed to the elements, peeping out between hat and scarf, it's tolerably mild, if not exactly warm.
It seems a fitting place to spend my final night: making a small nod to the generations of people who've lived lives intricately tied to the natural rhythms of land and sea in this remotest of spots far above the Arctic Circle. I soon doze off, waking only when a water droplet falls from the ceiling and lands on my nose. Perhaps the thaw is coming after all.
Published in the March 2025 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).To subscribe to National Geographic Traveller (UK) magazine click here. (Available in select countries only).