Greenland Travelog: Kuummiit
Day 1. June 3rd, 2016.
Kuummiut, Greenland.
Kuummiut is a tiny fishing village perched on the edge of a fjord in remote Eastern Greenland. We arrived here after flying to Kulusuk, a landing strip with a miniature airport on a nearby island by way of a prop plane from Reykjavik. Just like a scene out of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, there were only seven people on the seventy-eater and the flight attendants informed us that we should remain in our assigned seats scattered about the plane until they too realized there were only going to be seven people on the flight.
We walked right off the plane at Kulusuk’s gravel landing strip and into a terminal building, after all this was an international flight and although Greenland is officially part of the Kingdom of Denmark, it is not part of the European Union and has its own customs and immigration procedures for international flights. We walked right past the unmanned customs check and into a small souvenir-store-turned-check-in-counter and were promptly asked if we needed a helicopter ride to Tasiilaq, the region’s largest town on the island next door. However, we were bound for the settlement of Kuummiut, a two-hour boat ride away.
As the fog settled in, icebergs were quickly choking Kulusuk’s small harbour and our window to leave was shrinking by the minute. “If your plane arrived thirty minutes later there would have been no way to land; you would have been flown back to Iceland.” Commented Lars, our host for the day. Lars came to Greenland from southern Denmark nearly two decades and after a few stints as a photographer and philatelic bureau director, he decided he could just hunt and fish for a living in Eastern Greenland. He owns a few boats and was bringing us to his former home in Kuummiut to stay for a couple of days.
As we loaded our gear from the back of a four-wheeler trailer down into the boat, stumbling across the rugged, craggy, seaweed-covered coastline, local children looked on from their trampoline. They bounced up and down, taking turns at backflips, as we fumbled our gear through the local cemetery, white crosses protruding from the ground, down the rocky cliff face. Small, colourful houses dotted the rocky hill above the ice-latent bay. This place was strikingly beautiful, shrouded in mist that rose from the surrounding seas.
A group of Greenlandic fishermen were also headed back to Kuummuit from Kulusuk on their boat and we spend the better part of an hour navigating through the icebergs that had covered Kulusuk harbour toward the open sea. With spears and hooked sticks, everyone helped out to push away the icebergs and create a small navigable path for the boats to clear. As the boats took turns in the lead (ours was larger and heavier, good for moving icebergs, theirs was smaller yet more agile, more adept at finding pathways through the ice), Karim flew the quadcopter overhead to capture the scene as it unfolded.
After about an hour of pushing through miraculously deep blue, white and translucent icebergs of all shapes and sizes, the sea ice appeared before us after a thin layer of sea ice still present across the bay. A pop rang out into the distance. One of the fishermen in the dingy was holding a rifle, its butt firmly placed on his shoulder. “It dove under, one last bit of strength.” Lars lamented. A red blood spot was all that was left on the surface of the ice. The ringed seal sank to the bottom of the ocean, a meal lost to the sea this time. Without any trees or agriculture, in this area, every seal, fish, whale and polar bear is a treasured food source and an opportunity to catch one should not be spared.
Once we hit the open ocean Lars kicked the boat into high gear and we sped across the frigid sea to Kuummiut in a little over an hour. Somehow it was only around two in the afternoon when we arrived, as if time became irrelevant, and we walked up into the settlement. Lars handed us a key, showed us how to use the toilet and turn on the heating, and then said he would be back to pick us up in two days: “The little blue house is where you can get drinking water and the grey houses down there are for showering if you would like. We already walked by the Pilersuisoq, you saw. You’re going to want to sort that out first.” With that, Lars walked back down to the dock and took off for Tasiilaq before more ice could more in.
The Pilersuisoq is a general store that exists in nearly every Greenlandic settlement—think of it as a general store, grocery store, hunting supply store, post office and a place to pull out cash. It’s large enough that there are even Pilersuisoq-brand cereal and condiments for sale. Many food items come frozen from Denmark and although they are likely partially subsidized by the Danish government, they are by no means cheap.
Karim and I flipped through the freezers hoping to find some of the local catch—fish seals, even whales, but we only found frozen pizza dinners, microwave-ready lasagnas, wedge potatoes, beef brisket and pork cutlets among others. Realizing that this may be a sort of blessing in disguise, we stocked up on DrOetker Pizza Tradizionale, Pilersuisoq brand cocoa crispies and pre-marinated frozen pork cutlets.
We took our supermarket catch back to the house and popped one of those pizzas in the oven as we prepared our sleeping pads and bags for later. It was a bizarre yet thrilling feeling to be looking out of the cabin window onto a bay of icebergs and colourful little houses all perched on the rocky shore.
After lunch, we set out to explore the settlement. Lars has found us a local willing to take us fishing with him at 5am the next morning so we had plenty of free time for the rest of the day to wander around. I did not make it out the door before I caught the attention of the children. They had seen us coming up from the Pilersuisoq a while earlier and were waiting outside the steps leading to the house. Before long, Karim and I had a troupe of about a dozen kids in tow.
Although they learn English in school, most of the kids only know a few words and don’t really put together sentences. Everyone speaks Greenlandic Inuktitut and even Danish is not very prevalent around here even though this is technically part of Denmark. One of the older children, a rambunctious twelve-year-old who watches a lot of Western TV and wishes to become a ninja named Robert, has a pretty good English vocabulary, so he’s been our unofficial translator with the other children. They enjoy having me copy Inuktitut words, with their strong guttural stops and slurring, and laugh each time unless I get it right—then I get handshakes and little pats on the back
One of the little ones just likes me to carry him piggyback style across the settlement. The first time I put him down he patted me on the back and then all of two minutes later came to show me a small cut on his finger as if it’s a great excuse to get carried around again. Well, it worked. As we wandered through the settlement, scaling over boulders and seaweed, the grandparents would watch on and come out to chat. I’ve been surprised with their English level actually, better than most of the children. I guess carrying kids piggyback made me trustworthy in the community since all the old people come over to have a short conversation. One grandmother was really happy I came from Canada; she said we were neighbours but too removed from each other and could not understand why.
Karim had the quadcopter with him and the children loved watching him fly it around. They jostled for positions to see Karim’s iPad screen as the drone buzzed down the fjords and across the settlement. As the drone took to the skies, we walked to the end of the settlement to the helicopter landing pad, a square-shaped gravel field with lines spray-painted yellow. Kuummiut, with less than three hundred inhabitants, does not have any cars and is only accessible by boat, helicopter, or when the sea ice is frozen by dogsled or snowmobile.
Each family in Kuummiut keeps sled dogs; they are all tied up across the village in front of houses in groups. Occasionally the dogs are let loose to roam around and get into fights with neighbouring dogs, creating a commotion audible across the entire settlement. Pieces of seal blubber are found around the dogs, which leads me to think they are given seal scraps from the local families to eat.
The downside to this Pilersuisoq-based convenience is all the garbage generated by all the plastic wrappers and bottles. I guess it was not too long ago when settlements like this were completely dependent on the ocean for their food, so now that they can easily pick up a frozen pizza or chicken tikka masala. However, taking care of the trash is a different problem altogether and there seems to have not been much progress in terms of education on protecting the local environment.
The pathways have become littered with wrappers and cans and since we are in Greenland where there are neither trees nor soil, the settlement’s official dump is just off one of the cliffs. I don’t think there’s an easy solution to all this. I guess they could burn it, but that would create a different problem altogether. Ideally, at least some of the solution could start with what kinds of packaging materials are allowed into the settlements in the first place to cut down on waste, but they would probably further exacerbate prices in a place that is already really expensive given its remoteness.
The children left us around six to head home for their dinners, so Karim and I decided to do the same and went back to our house to cook. This was my first time in a place with twenty-four hours of daylight and I did not know what to expect. Time almost seems to stand still—the only thing to pay attention to is when the Pilersuisoq is open so you don’t lose out on being able to buy food supplies. After crashing for a few hours from exhaustion coupled with jetlag, I watched the nightless night pass by from the window with a certain degree of bemusement as to what to make of it. Even as I write this post now in Kuummiut, it’s 2:10 am and still light outside. I will not see a dark night for the next three weeks; what an adventure lies ahead.
Day 2. June 4th, 2016.
Kuummiut, Greenland.
The next morning I woke up to my 4:30 am alarm with a pretty bad headache. I could not tell whether it was from a lack of sleep, a lack of good sleep, a reaction to the anti-parasitic medications I was on since picking up that little devil in Russia back in March or from something else. I popped in an Advil and got dressed, pulling up my black Fjallraven pants over a fresh pair of long underwear and layering myself with fleeces underneath my puffy.
Having never gotten dark, it was, of course, already light outside when we walked down the rock path to the fishing harbour. Fatty seal corpses and an entire whale skeleton could be found amongst the boats and fishing lines scattered about the dock. Illi, the local fishermen who we met the day before came walking down in his bright yellow jacket and sunglasses carrying a fishing pole and green fishing net attached to the end of a long stick.
Ammassak, a small, slender fish, were gathering along the fjords in massive numbers to lay eggs and this was a great opportunity for the local fishermen to stock up. We took the dingy past what seemed like a gate of icebergs through the harbour and into the open sea before turning down a nearby fjord. We hugged the coastline with the motor barely running until a large school of fish appeared below the boat in the shallows. Illi carefully pulled out his net and gently dipped it into the water before dragging it quietly through the school of Ammassak below. He slowly pulled up the net with about a couple dozen fish suck in its grasp.
Illi flipped open a large plastic bag and dumped the wiggling fish inside before navigating the boat back over the school of fish and repeating the process. Before long he had an entire forty-pound bag full of fish.
We spent the rest of the morning walking around the coastline, hopping over streams of glacial runoffs as they made their way to the open ocean. Thick moss, grass and lichens covered the rocky shoreline, providing a soft place to take a small nap looking out onto the fjord, with the icebergs floating in the distance. Karim woke me up after about thirty minutes, it was time to head back into the boat and explore some of the largest icebergs in the area.
We sent the drone flying over the icebergs as we meandered through them making our way back towards Kuummiut; the scene was spectacularly beautiful. The fog burned off from the ocean’s surface and the sun illuminated the bottoms of the icebergs, contrasting them against the dark ocean floor. The ice displayed a spectrum of light blue hues, uncovering the depth of the icebergs below the surface, with edges jetting straight towards the bottom of the ocean.
Back in Kuummiut harbour, Illi unloaded his catch with a crack of a smile and bid us farewell, hauling the bag of fish over his shoulder as he walked up through the settlement.
Karim and I stopped at the Pilersuisoq to pick up some goodies for lunch and went back to our house. I was exhausted. While my headache had subsided the exhaustion had most definitely set in and after getting only about halfway through lunch I crawled into my sleeping bag and slept for four hours. I awoke at around six in the afternoon and while Karim was still asleep I started sorting and backing up my photos from the past two days. It is still a strange feeling to be using my work computer, the very device that sits at my desk every day in the office, now in remote eastern Greenland—I do genuinely love this semi-digital-nomadic life.
We did not leave the house until around ten-thirty at night, just as the sun was low in the sky, shedding warm light onto the mountains to the east of the settlement. We walked over to the fjord and took the drone out for an hour or so, taking it high above the fog that was quickly approaching Kuummiut from the sea for a miraculous sunset as the sun dipped below the high stony mountains behind the settlement. It was just before midnight when we walked back to the house, and although it was getting colder outside, dipping just below freezing, it was still light out.
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