Here, There and Everywhere: Qaqortoq, Greenland

I couldn't wait to get to Qaqortoq. Greenland is just a place not many people have been . I read up on it before we left, and attended a lecture on the ship about it as well. We decided that if we had to miss one of the two unique ports on this cruise, Iceland was better to miss than Greenland. Simply because we can always do Iceland, but it's SO hard to get up here.

I knew before we got off the ship that there was not going to be much to do. Like, pretty much nothing. The ship being there doubled their population. It was going to be about just being there. And you can't get anywhere else, because there are no roads connecting the towns/villages in the country. You have to go by dogsled, snow mobile, plane or boat. We did spend a little bit of time walking around the tiny town when we first got in. There were two small churches, a hotel, smelly fish houses (their main industry) and Inuit people walking around probably totally annoyed that we had taken over their Saturday afternoon (which appears to be laundry day there). Some of them had on their traditional dress, which is similar to what we would think of Eskimos wearing. Inuits are the same as Eskimos, but for some reason they think of the word Eskimo as slang, and they go by Inuit.

Just for the heck of it, we went into their grocery store to see what prices were. We knew they were going to be high because everything there has to be imported due to their lack of soil and being able to grow, and their climate being so cold that they do not have livestock. We almost DIED! A dozen eggs were the equivalent of $6.00 and a litre of Tangueray was $90! Some people who had a beer there told us that their beers were $9.00 each.

We set out to take a long walk and get out of the town. I loved the houses there- they are all different bright colors. Most of them were run down, but a few at the top of the town were awesome. Kevin heard the color of your house depended on what your profession was, but we're not sure. I had it in my head that I wanted to walk over the top of the town to the right of the photo below, so that's what we did. It was pretty tough actually, but totally worth it. I thought we would just go up there, enjoy the view, and come back down. But we decided to keep walking for a few hours because it was just so beautiful. The land is different than any other I have been on (everything grows low- no trees) and the view was unreal. The water was so blue! There were very few other people out hiking and it kind of felt like we were the only ones there. Luckily it was a beautiful sunny day, and about 50 degrees out.

The wind really started to pick up when we were walking back towards the town. I mean to the point where you were fighting to walk against it. I'm just happy it didn't start until later in the day, or we might not have made it to Greenland either!

A view of the town from our ship on the way in

And you say that how?! We said Quark O Tork because I don't know how to do the no "R' thing. The Captain called it the "Q" place during his announcements.