Dearest Rachel –
We were in the Crown Lounge yesterday morning, enjoying our coffee (which I’d spiked with chocolate syrup from the pancake table; for some reason, they don’t have hot cocoa mix on this trip, when it would be so much more appropriate to have on hand, given some of the places we’re visiting) and tea that we generally start our shore days with…
…when we heard the chime on the public address system, indicating an imminent announcement. We got into port ahead of schedule, actually, and so the tenders were beginning to be called off for boarding and transit into town, so this wasn’t necessarily unexpected.
But rather than our cruise director’s cheery voice, it was the captain, welcoming us to Greenland in general and Qaqortoq in particular. He explained about our surprisingly early arrival (we’d apparently had very fair winds and seas along the way, while they had planned for worse, as you do), and went into details about the meteorological conditions.
As of that moment, however – an hour since we’d checked on those conditions – it was quite sunny and starting to climb into the forties. In short, it was looking like an absolutely beautiful day, by Greenlandic standards, to be wandering around town, and the captain was making sure we were all aware of it.
At the same time, he did want to make one thing clear; “I don’t think you’ll want to go swimming, however, as the water temperature is a brisk 37° Fahrenheit.” I’m assuming he was referring to the water in the bay, as the pool on the eleventh desk was already rendered off-limits by a net that covered it, like it has been for the better part of the entire trip thus far (you might be able to see the net in the above picture, for that matter).
I’m not sure that the captain’s jocular warning would have deterred you. On the contrary, once you’d heard it, you might have begun to consider it, despite being just as bundled as we were to go ashore. It never occurred to you to swim in any of the harbors when we cruised through Alaska way back when, but just the suggestion that it might be too cold to do so would have been sufficient for you to at least think about doing so, just to prove otherwise about ‘wanting to.’ I don’t know.
There’s an old saw about how “Iceland is green, and Greenland is icy” (granted, thanks to a clip from Iceland on “World’s Dumbest,” and the comment thereupon, we tend to think of it as “Greenland is icy, and Iceland… is full of idiots”), and I suppose that, if you go inland from here, that latter would still be as true as the former. After all, there is a reason the stuff in the interior is referred to as permafrost. But for the moment, there’s not much in the way of snow or ice to be seen out here, not even at the tops of the visible peaks. This makes sense; it may be September, and fall is approaching, but we’ve gone through the summer months, with plenty of sunlight time every day to melt whatever may have occupied them from the extended wintertime. That being said, it’s still cold, especially when compared to our home town, and without the suggestion from the captain, I think it wouldn’t cross our mind to jump in the harbor at all. What about you?
***
My apologies for that shaggy dog of an introduction, honey. It’s a lot easier to write in the beginning of the day, when we’re waiting around for everything to start happening, but once we have to be somewhere and actually go and do stuff, the original train of thought is completely lost. So there’s nothing that I was able to write down as we tendered into Qaqortoq and walked around through the main part of town; indeed, I could barely keep up with recording things that our guide was telling us about this place and that as we passed by one thing and another. In so doing, it completely slipped my mind about swimming in the harbor – or even allowing you to do so (and when I mentioned it, Daniel expressed a certain amount of dismay that I’d even consider it. He still doesn’t condone what I’m doing with your ashes, leaving a few grains of you in each place we visit, for some reason)
I will say how, in retrospect, at least one thing fits with the conclusion that Greenland isn’t always icy; it would seem that the translation of the name Qaqortoq (“white,” or “white city”) doesn’t have to do with ice or snow, but the proliferation of white flowers that covered Prince Hill on the east side of town. So that turns out to be quite true. For the rest of the information and observations, I’m going to have to leave the commentary to my camera self, for your consideration…
The tour itself probably only took an hour or so – it’s a small town, after all – we didn’t even get in five thousand steps to cover the place. Although, as we made our way about the place, our guide mentioned that the cafe (and apparently, brewery, since the water running behind the place is among the cleanest places on earth) offered at least one ‘exotic’ dish that I had to try. So we doubled back on the path we’d already taken in order to check it out.
It pains me to claim that it was disappointing; musk ox may be an unusual source of beef, but it is, after all, still part of the cattle family. I was no more able to sense anything distinctive about it than I would from any other breed of cow, to be honest. At the same time, I wouldn’t have come to that realization if I hadn’t tried it, so it was probably necessary to do, in any event.
I’d say that the café was a small part of our time in town, but considering that the waitstaff seemed to forget about us from time to time (in fairness, they were inundated with patrons from the ship; had we all gotten off and wandered about town, we would have increased the population by two-thirds. I actually wondered about their sign indicating a maximum capacity of forty people at one point), we probably spent as much time there as we did with our guide. Comparatively speaking, our meandering return to the ship – punctuated by my attempts to remember what our guide had said about one landmark or another – was a relatively short and efficient exercise.
One thing he did mention was that this was his last tour of the season; after a day of rest (today), he would be flying back to Copenhagen to return to university. For all I know, we might well be passing through Nuuk at the same time, although since his presence there will likely be no more than a layover at the airport, we won’t cross paths or anything. Not only is ours the last ship to pass through town, though, but the day before saw the first frost on the local peaks. However, it had melted by today, and it wasn’t there for him to point out to us. It will be interesting to see if there’s more of it to notice and deal with as we head up the coast to Nuuk – but that’s for us to determine for tomorrow.
For now, though, we have ourselves another day of rest (and appropriately so, as it would seem that much of Greenland shuts down on Sunday, so there wouldn’t be much to see or do today). Until we arrive, honey, keep an eye on us, and wish us luck; we’re going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 