MAGAN'S WORLD:THE MAN climbing the cliff was carrying a sack of seabirds. A clear plastic bin liner stuffed with the mis-shapen carcasses of large gulls and gannets, their feathers awry, leaden eyes pressed against the plastic and beaks poking through.
The sight had a sordid beauty – the egg-blue Arctic sky running into the even paler-blue waters of Baffin Bay bathed everything in the light of a Northern Renaissance still life.
Less than 40m away was a prefabricated timber building selling the full array of brushed aluminium and lacquered Bang Olufsen gear. I was in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, and considering the town lacked a proper youth club or low-cost supermarket, the presence of so much extortionately priced Danish electronics was a surprise. Greenland is part of the kingdom of Denmark, and its 88-per-cent-Inuit subjects are finding it hard to adapt to modern life – 20 per cent of 15- to 17-year-old girls on the island attempt suicide at least once. Alcoholism is high, educational levels are low and the collapse of fishing has increased unemployment. So the idea that space-age headphones were something these people might need had an element of “Let them eat cake” about it. They made the sod-roofed houses and driftwood dog sleds look all the more primitive; as though reinforcing the idea that the Inuit might not be quite ready to govern themselves – the equivalent of the Eno tablets that British colonialists used to drop into water to bamboozle African tribes.
Tourism is Greenland’s new hope. Although the country is ferociously expensive, it offers sights and experiences that will brand themselves on you forever. From the moment you land at Kangerlussuaq airport, just north of the Arctic Circle, it becomes clear that this is an entirely new realm of experience. The airport looks like an Arctic research station, set in a vast stony wilderness at the head of a fjord. As there are no national roads, one needs to take a boat or plane from the airport to anywhere else.
Alternatively, one could just stay there: the button-nosed, soapstone-skinned girls in the tourist office can organise
dog sledding, caribou hunting and kayaking in the area, as well as musk-ox safaris and trips to camp and stunt-drive on the Arctic ice sheet. One can even shop for most of the local crafts at the airport – seal-skin clothing, caribou antler and walrus ivory carvings.
But, as you’ve paid more than €800 for your return flight from Dublin via Copenhagen or Reykjavik, you might as well blow the budget and head out into the rest of the country.
One economical and memorable way is to hike from the airport to the glorious town of Sisimiut, on the coast, which has many original 18th- and 19th-century prefabricated timber buildings and a huge whale jawbone arch as an entryway into the old town.
The 150km trek from Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut takes about 10 days across the tundra, along rivers, around lakes and through marshes, sleeping in huts along the way. The route is relatively easy and well signposted, although keep in mind that compasses deviate close to the North Pole and that the rate of deviation changes every few years. The walk is possible only in summer, but for the rest of the year you can do it by dog sled or snowmobile, and springtime opens up the possibility of some serious cross-country skiing.
If you’re lucky some icebergs might be floating off Sisimiut, but, if not, it’s worth taking a passenger ship north to
Ilulissat, because icebergs are the real wonder of this area – looming ice ghosts, cantankerous creaking solidified clouds. You owe yourself a look at them.
manchan@ireland.com