Kangerlussuaq

Let's have a quick look at Kangerlussuaq. It's a small town that has grown around Greenland's main international airport. The airport has the longest civilian runway in the country and is located at the end of a fjord, where the winds are relatively subdued. What does Kangerlussuaq mean? "Scary fjord", from the Greenlandic kangerluk (fjord) and -suaq (big, deep, formidable, scary). The Greenlandic language is no-nonsense and to-the-point.

Kangerlussuaq and the airport are indivisible, because there isn't much else in the local area. Which is awkward, because there are plans to extend the runways at Nuuk, the capital, and also Ilulissat, which is Greenland's chief tourist destination on account of the icebergs. When that happens Kangerlussuaq will no longer have a raison d'etre, but it seems wrong to abandon such a large facility.

How did Kangerlussuaq Airport come to be? War, and the threat of war. Back in April 1940 the Germans overran Denmark, which meant that Denmark's foreign possessions became part of the Third Reich as well. In practice the Allies stepped in. Britain invaded and took over the Faroe Islands, and also Iceland, which was almost entirely independent from Denmark at the time but we invaded anyway so that the Germans couldn't.

Technically this was wrong of us, but in return for having to pretend to like corned beef and Tommy Trinder the Faroe Islands and Iceland got new roads, new harbours, new runways, plus masses of bored and lonely British and American servicemen. That must have been incredibly awkward but that is another topic for another time.

Things went slightly differently with Greenland. The United States wasn't happy with the idea of Britain interfering with its sphere of influence, so we didn't stick our oar in. Canada set up a base in the south of the country, but the US wasn't particularly happy with that either. For a year Greenland existed in a kind of legal limbo, theoretically part of the Axis but in practice too remote for Germany to exploit, until in April 1941 the US ambassador to Denmark, a chap called Henrik Kauffmann, signed a defence treaty that gave the United States the right to set up military bases. In doing so he overstepped his authority, because the Danish government continued to exist and the King of Denmark remained in Denmark, but in the long run there were no hard feelings and he was pardoned at the end of the war.

And so in late 1941 the US built a series of bases in Greenland, codenamed Bluie West and Bluie East depending on their location. This all happened before the US formally entered the Second World War. The rationale was that the bases would extend the reach of the US Navy and make it easier for the USAF to transfer lend-lease aircraft to Europe. This does raise the question of whether the United States provoked the Second World War purely so it could get its hands on Greenland, and I imagine there are people on the internet who believe that to be the case. Construction of Bluie West 8, which became Kangerlussuaq, began in September 1941, and was completed in January 1942, a month after the Pearl Harbour attack. It can't have been easy building a runway in Greenland in Winter.

Bluie West 8 was particularly useful for ferry flights. The flights typically took off from Presque Isle Army Air Field in Maine, before heading east over the Atlantic via Gander to their destination in Scotland. However the distance from Gander to Scotland was just over two thousand miles, which was too far for heavily-laden transports and almost all fighter aircraft.

In contrast the US-Greenland-Iceland-Scotland route had a longer overall distance, but the hops were shorter, so long-range fighters could complete it. Have you ever read about Glacier Girl, the P-38 that was dug out of Greenland's icepack? That was lost during one of the US-Greenland-Iceland-Scotland ferry flights. Poor weather prevented it from reaching Iceland, along with a B-17 and a bunch of other P-38s, so the flight leader turned back to Greenland, but he got lost.

Low on fuel, he elected to belly land on the ice, after which the aircraft was covered in snow and forgotten about for years. The internet is cagey about exactly where in Greenland Glacier Girl came down, and I don't blame them because souvenir hunters would probably pick the place clean.

Why Bluie? The internet says that it was a US codeword for Greenland, but the codeword doesn't appear to have been used outside the context of the airbases. Perhaps it was just a random word plucked from a book. Perhaps someone in the Government felt that Greenie would be too obvious and Spaciegrey would never catch on.

Germany still attempted to militarise Greenland. They set up a series of weather stations on the east coast. After initial success the venture ended in a series of skirmishes that left one Danish and one German soldier dead, so not even Greenland escaped the destructive influence of war.

In the post-war years Bluie West 8 became Søndrestrøm Air Base, after the Danish name for the local area. The issue of place names in Greenland is a fascinating one that I'm going to ignore completely because it's controversial. In 1992 the US left, although there's still a military presence, mostly the Danish Arktisk Kommando (just visible in the top-right of the next image). The US and Canadian Air Forces still use the place occasionally:

The US also maintains a base at Thule, in the north. It's pronounced Tool. Throughout the Cold War Greenland was a vital part of the United States' early warning line, but advances in technology have meant that radars in the continental US can do the same job. Furthermore the greater range of post-war airliners means that Kangerlussuaq quickly lost its importance as a refuelling base, so unlike Gander in Newfoundland it never really had a civilian heyday. As far as I can tell none of the civilian flights airborne on 11 September 2001 were diverted to Kangerlussuaq. They went to Gander instead.

Did you know that there's a whole subgenre of accidental noise albums? They're albums that have been automatically uploaded to YouTube and Spotify, but the uploading process went wrong, so the albums are totally corrupted and changed, e.g:

Even the Amazon previews are corrupt, because the whole process is one-click automatic and no-one noticed. It's entirely possible that by the time you listen to the video above someone has fixed it, but it reminds me of The Talos Principle, a video game set long after the demise of the human race. I can tell that the upload is corrupt because I'm human, but what about them (gestures to robot overlords; alien successors; pan-dimensional scientists; rocks and stones; water underground). What about them? How can they tell that the upload is wrong? I'm digressing here.

Kangerlussuaq's fuel is stored in a bunch of tanks just outside town. They're topped up by ship in the second half of the year and used up in the spring and summer. While I was there Kangerlussuaq smelled a bit like Morocco - dust and unburned fuel - but perhaps the cars are in need of repair. It apparently costs a fortune to import a vehicle. Perhaps because of this Kangerlussuaq has a high concentration of Toyotas and Volvos. Sensible, sturdy cars:

The purple car is a Lada Niva 4x4, which is still in production. It actually looks pretty cool. During the Cold War my hunch is that the USSR had at least two missiles aimed at the base, one at the runway and one at the fuel storage. There's a harbour down the road, but it's icelocked during the winter months. Perhaps there was a missile aimed at the harbour as well.

Would anyone have survived a nuclear strike? Given Kangerlussuaq's bowl-like geography an airburst would have been super-effective, and anybody who did survive would have faced an eighty-mile trek to Sisimiut, assuming they didn't die of burns or radiation poisoning first. They would presumably have to integrate with the local population, and perhaps hundreds of years later Brazilian scientists would be puzzled by the blonde, sarsaparilla-craving inuit of Sisimiut.

There are still traces of the US presence in Kangerlussuaq today:

Should I drop a sick Deus Ex reference, or not? That game came out more than twenty years ago. Most people reading this would be baffled.

The US National Science Foundation struck a deal to continue using Kangerlussuaq in support of its science missions after the USAF pulled out, although I have the impression that this has been cut back by successive US governments. NASA still uses the airfield for research into climate change, and when I was there I spotted a Kenn Borek turboprop DC-3 conversation that, as far as I can tell, was supporting NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland project:

But I could be wrong, because that blog post is two years old. Someone else might have hired the plane. If Greenland's ice cap melted away the results would be catastrophic for coastal areas in the lower latitudes, but Greenland itself would be relatively safe.

The colour scheme reminded me of Mirror's Edge(tm).

For most visitors Kangerlussuaq isn't a destination, it's a delay. I imagine that the majority of visitors only leave the airport terminal to see what's outside. International flights arrive at 10:40, and the local flights are scheduled for the afternoon or early the next morning.

The town itself is split in half by the runway. The civilian airport side is in the photograph at the top of this article. It has the main supermarket, the civilian hotels, the post office, and the main restaurant, which is part of the hotel. Technically there are two restaurants. There's a cafe that serves surprisingly good food and a posher restaurant that I didn't visit because my trousers were filthy.

I'm tempted to say that after hiking for six days anything would taste okay, but the lasagne and musk ox burger were legitimately good. The lasagne in particular. Pulled musk ox is tasteless but the same is true of all pulled meat. I'm not a fan of pulled meat. It was a bad fad that needs to die out.

The meals came to around 16-17DKK, which is about £18, which is not cheap, but you're paying for the fact that it's in Greenland. Ordinarily I wouldn't post a picture of lasagne to the internet but this lasagne is in Greenland.

You have to walk along a curved road to reach the southern, military side of the base. Apart from a few neat-looking summer houses it's mostly made up of utilitarian blocks, like a low-poly 3D game:

Datsun. It's been a long time since I saw that name. The Polar Bear Inn in the top image has been closed for several years. Online maps show a Thai takeaway in the same block, but it's not there any more. Instead the takeaway seems to have moved into a mini-market across the way. There appeared to be a bar that opens at 20:00, and some kind of grill house, but I couldn't tell if they still existed or not. Out of town, to the south, is Restaurant Roklubben, which requires a reservation. I've never been to a restaurant that requires a reservation and I felt that Greenland is not the place to start.

There were a couple of huts on skis. I wonder if they were prefabricated research stations that were built to be airlifted into place.

That fact that no-one has swooped in to take over the former site of the Polar Bear Inn doesn't bode well for the local economy. Especially given that online shopping is still very basic in Greenland. But then again I went in May, just after COVID ravaged the world, so perhaps the conditions aren't typical. Greenland largely sailed through the COVID pandemic - eleven thousand cases, 21 deaths - and when I went neither Greenland nor Denmark (nor London, for that matter) enforced any COVID restrictions, although I did have to prove that I had been vaccinated at the Air Greenland check-in desk in Denmark. I didn't have to prove it very hard, but I did at least have to make an effort.

The southern edge of the town is marked by a bridge, beyond which is Lake Ferguson, which I didn't visit:

The western edge is connected by road to a harbour, and thence the defunct Kellyville, which is a ten-mile walk away:

The northern border of the town is a cliff face and the eastern edge is connected by a long road to the Russell Glacier. The hotels in Kangerlussuaq offer tours to the glacier and the surrounding area. I took a four-hour tour which approaches the glacier but doesn't go on it, which I felt best given that I was recovering from the arctic circle trail at the time:

Some people might baulk at the idea of flying across the Atlantic to check out a melting glacier, but as mentioned passim I am a documentarian, so I can get away with that sort of thing. This is a fantastic excuse that works in all situations. Have you ever seen a photo-essay about prostitution in Cuba? There's a cottage industry of photo-essays about prostitution in Cuba. And South-East Asia. Just google "photo-essay prostitution cuba" or "south-east Asia" or whatever. The fiction is that the photographers are raising awareness of prostitution, but in reality they're maximising their return by sleeping with prostitutes and getting a photo-essay out of it while being paid to do so by the UN or whatever. I admire that kind of chutzpah.

I'm digressing wildly here. Apart from the tours, the hiking, the surprisingly decent food, the flights, is there anything else in Kangerlussuaq? Not really. There's a post office just outside the airport from which you can in theory send a postcard, but it has odd hours, and when I popped my head around the door there was no-one inside. It seemed to be aimed at local people who needed a secure postbox.

There's a Canada Goose store and a couple of tourist souvenir shops. Greenland has a limited domestic manufacturing base, so there aren't all that many souvenirs. I brought back some Danish tea that I could in theory have got in Denmark. I also found some shell cases, which I could have perhaps posted back, but it struck me as a bad idea:

A mixture of 30-06, 6.5mm Swedish, .22, and a couple of .222 cases.

As mentioned earlier the only airline that flies to Greenland is Air Greenland. Its main route is Copenhagen -> Kangerlussuaq all year round, with Reykjavik -> Nuuk in the summer. A return ticket from Copenhagen is around £500 if you book in advance, and on top of that you have to budget £200 or so for an internal flight from Kangerlussuaq when you get there, because you can't just hop on a train. There are no trains.

The airport at Nuuk is under redevelopment, which in theory makes sense given that Nuuk is the capital and most populated town, but Nuuk itself has a limited range of things to see. There's a cinema and a small shopping mall. A few hiking trails. A ferry runs up the west coast (about £200 for a bed, more for an enclosed cabin), but only once a week. Perhaps it will be joined by a second ferry when Nuuk's runway is extended. Greenland's major tourist destination is Ilulissat, which has icebergs. It's on the ferry route, further north than Kangerlussuaq.

The ferry doesn't visit Kangerlussuaq, so presumably if the airport is downgraded visitor numbers will plummet. If the airport is turned over to the military or closed entirely Kangerlussuaq would presumably have to be dynamited and bulldozed into the ground, because it would otherwise become a wasteland. Which seems a shame given the existing infrastructure, but what to do with it? Even if the road to Sisimiut is completed there will be very little reason to visit Kangerlussuaq, not enough to justify the expense of maintaining a road. I'm glad I'm not in charge of Greenland's infrastructure.

And that's Kangerlussuaq. If you want check it out you could cover the whole town in a day, or two days if you do a couple of tours and have a meal at Restaurant Roklubben. Despite the Second World War connection I don't recall seeing anything about the town's history. There's a museum, but when I was there it looked defunct, but again I went a month before the season begins.

Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq, with Air Greenland

Off to Greenland. It has the surface area of central Europe, with a human population that would only half-fill Wembley Stadium. Imagine if one of Level 42's songs was featured in Stranger Things, so the band decided to reform with Mark King's son on bass, and they did a concert in Wembley Stadium. That's about how many people live in Greenland. From October to March Greenland is one of the few places on Earth where you can step out of the main international airport and have your nose freeze off in five minutes and die of hypothermia shortly afterwards.

Greenland is a fascinating place. It has one cinema. One! The language looks like ammassassuaq and erinarsortartoq and naalakkersueriaaseq and ullaakkorsiutit. Geographically it's a giant puzzle. It rarely makes the international news. With such a massive area you'd think it would be the battleground of empires, but its chief resources are rocks, peat, permafrost, and ice, so the world has largely ignored it. Famously Donald Trump tried to buy it a few years ago, for reasons known only unto himself.

What to do with it? Why remain? Why not evacuate the population to Denmark? From a British perspective Greenland is mind-boggling because we have nothing remotely comparable. The Falkland Islands? St Helena? But they're tiny. Greenland is massive. Canada? Not technically ours any more. Australia? But Australia has television programmes and skyscrapers and famous people. Greenland is silent and mysterious. About the only Greenlandic thing that most British know is the word anorak, which is Greenlandic for anorak.

Oh, and the short film. The one from Gravity. What was it called? Aningaaq. It was set in Qaarsut, a couple of hundred miles north from Kangerlussuaq, which is Greenland's main international airport:

A couple of years ago I visited Hong Kong. It was my first long-haul flight. And my last! Because the world was struck by a global pandemic a few months later. In 2019 the thought of global air travel grinding to a halt sounded like the plot of a techno-thriller, but it actually happened in real life. On the eve of the pandemic I wrote an article on ultra-long-haul air travel - one of the most popular articles on this blog - but with the passage of time the article now feels like a relic of a bygone era. A time when travel bloggers criss-crossed the world so that they could write about criss-crossing the world.

In response to the pandemic the world's airlines eliminated their long-haul services. British Airways sold off its once-mighty fleet of Boeing 747s. Airbus ceased production of the giant A380, which was economically marginal even at the best of times. A few airlines still fly the four-engined Airbus A340, but a mixture of COVID and economic reality killed off the large quadjets. Their day has passed, just as the days of tri-jets passed in the 1990s. The future belongs to twins of various sizes.

I was going to say "various shapes and sizes", but unless you're very attentive most modern airliners look the same. They are safer, more efficient, generally better than their ancestors, but there's something slightly dull about them.

Air Greenland's one and only long-haul airliner, an Airbus A330-200. No matter how bad your job is, you don't have to load cargo containers into an Airbus A330 on the apron at Kangerlussuaq Airport in the snow. Unless that *is* your job, in which case you walk tall.

I thought I'd write about my trip. I flew from Copenhagen in Denmark to Kangerlussuaq with Air Greenland, on 16 May 2022. My goal was to try the Arctic Circle Trail, a hiking route that runs from Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut. In particular I wanted to see what it was like in May. I'll write about it separately but for the record I made it about twenty miles before realising that people who go in July and August have the right idea. On the positive side there were no mosquitos.

Air Greenland's livery is fantastic. I'm not sure if the bright red paint is designed to make the aircraft stand out against snow, but it can't hurt. The bulk of Air Greenland's fixed-wing fleet consists of short-haul turboprops that shuttle between Greenland's scattered settlements, sometimes in appalling weather. The country has no motorways, very few roads, very few navigable inland waterways. A giant ice cap covers the middle of the landmass, splitting off the major towns from the few settlements on the east coast. In winter the temperatures are occasionally low enough to freeze water in mid-air, so Air Greenland is an essential public service.

At the airport I spotted this plane. It's a modernised Douglas DC-3 owned by Kenn Borek Air. Technically it's a Basler BT-67, a turbopro conversion of the DC-3. It might be part of NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland project, but I can't be sure.

Air Greenland's fleet is mostly helicopters, which are used for passenger flights and search and rescue. The company also has a sleek Beechcraft King Air as a flying ambulance - Greenland's only hospital is in Nuuk, the capital - and seven DeHavilland Dash-8 turboprops, which seat 37 and are essentially flying buses. Flying trains? Every day they shuttle between Greenland's settlements, sometimes several times a day. They're a vital part of Greenland's infrastructure, akin to the local flights that criss-cross Australia. I learn from the internet that Air Greenland's last fatal accident was in 1973, a helicopter crash, so they obviously don't hire dummies.

The flight to Greenland was packed. This is Air Greenland's bag drop / check-in area at Copenhagen Airport. The airline suggests that you arrive three hours before the flight, and that's a good idea - the people of Greenland have a lot of luggage.

Air Greenland's only large airliner is an Airbus A330-200, which was brought into service in 2002, alongside the company's existing Boeing 757. The 757 was sold off in the early 2010s, leaving the A330 to soldier on by itself. As of this writing Air Greenland is awaiting a brand-new A330-800 as a replacement for the -200. It was ordered back in December 2020 so it should arrive imminently.

The A330-200 is a longer-range variation of the original A330-300, with a shorter fuselage but the same amount of fuel. However Air Greenland's -200 has a passenger-dense configuration, with 30 business class seats and the remaining 258 economy, so it carries more or less the same amount of passengers as any other A330 but over a greater distance. I assume Air Greenland needs the extra range in case Kangerlussuaq Airport is snowed-in, because the nearest diversions are Keflavik, in Iceland, or alternatively Gander in Newfoundland, which are both about 800 miles away. Greenland doesn't have any other civilian runways long enough to accommodate the A330.

Air Greenland's A330-200 has a standard 2-4-2 layout. From left to right AC, DEFG, HK. This is the flight back to Copenhagen, which had a lot of empty seats. Obviously no-one wanted to leave.

What is the A330? It's Airbus' small transatlantic model, akin to the Boeing 767. Introduced in the late 1980s. I like to think of it as an updated A300, with a similar configuration but a much longer range. About the only thing the A330 is famous for is the fact it shares its wings and fuselage with the four-engined, super-long-range A340, which was designed alongside it.

While I flew across the snowy wastes of Greenland did I crave "4 engines 4 long haul"? No, I did not. Instead I imagined how I would survive on the ice, given that I had a bunch of hiking gear but no fuel. Could I power my stove with human fat? Could I skin the other passengers and make a suit out of their remains? Would a human suit scare off polar bears, or attract them? These thoughts and many more swirled through my mind.

To date the A330 has had two fatal crashes in thirty years of airline service. One of them was Air France Flight 447 of 2009, which was caused by a iced-up speed sensor during a flight over the Atlantic at night. The rest of the aircraft was functioning perfectly, but in the absence of any kind of visual reference the pilots became convinced that the aircraft was plummeting nose-first into the ocean. In reality it was flying straight and level, so when the pilots pulled the stick back they made the aircraft stall, so it essentially belly-flopped into the sea from a starting height of 35,000 feet. There were no survivors.

Air France 447 is often used as a case study in over-reliance on automation, and although professional sources are non-partisan, internet people tend to use it to bash Airbus in particular. From their point of view Airbus pilots are computer operators, not pilots. That narrative has waxed and waned over the years, although Boeing's recent troubles with the 737MAX have made it abundantly clear that overreliance on automation is an industry-wide phenomenon. I'm digressing here. Let's talk about Greenland again.

Air Greenland's big jet operations are unusual. The flight from Copenhagen to Greenland felt more like a small regional hop than a trip across two-thirds of the Atlantic. Greenland is a dependent territory of Denmark, so the flight exists in a grey area whereby it's simultaneously internal and international (they stamped my UK passport; I'm not sure if that happens if you're a member of the EU). As you can see the A330 at Kangerlussuaq has stairs rather than a jetbridge.

Air Greenland has a simple app - Club Timmisa - but I checked in at Copenhagen and Kangerlussuaq the old-fashioned way, face-to-face, and ended up with a printed boarding pass.

The flight leaves Copenhagen at 10:00 and arrives in Greenland at 10:40 local time, almost but not quite catching the sun. On the way back it leaves at 11:55 and arrives at 20:55. What was the flight like? Internally the A330 has the same look and feel as the A320, e.g. light and airy, with colour-changing mood lighting. After putting away my carry-on bag I settled down and had a look at the in-flight entertainment system, which felt more advanced and was more responsive than the seatback unit in British Airways' A380:

It had an odd selection of films that included the above, plus Batman Begins and some kind of romantic comedy. Is Christian Bale a good fit for Batman? Only time will tell. I wondered if Tolkien consisted of J R Tolkien shouting "no, I will not let you make a film of my life" for ninety minutes. Or if it was ninety minutes of J R Tolkien painstakingly reconstructing the proto-Celtic word for "carry" by studying ancient historical texts from Ireland and Wales. Who knows.

There were also some albums. Queen's Greatest Hits, off the top of my head. And some mobile games. The one I tried hadn't been ported properly - it was designed for a portrait screen - but in general given that the flight was only four hours I didn't bother with the entertainment system. On the way out the moving map didn't work:

And yet the pilots managed to find their way, so perhaps they had their own map. After settling down the stewards offered me a drink and a rye bread snack, and then on to the main meal, which was a cold pasta salad:

As far as I could tell there was no other choice of meal in economy - this was it, although I imagine there was a tick-box during the booking process if you were vegetarian. Greenland is perfectly fine if you're vegetarian, but the terminal area is unsentimental about hunting:

You don't get displays like that at Bristol Airport. I can imagine some people seeing the UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE logo and thinking "this is good", and then seeing a man holding a dead deer and thinking "this is bad", and then realising that the people are Inuit, so "this is good", but they're hunting, so "this is bad" and, bang, that person's head would explode. Incidentally the little sideways H-shape in the bottom-left is a traditional Inuit knife, which is used by the ladyfolk to scrape meat from musk ox skins. Imagine having to tell your wife and kids that they won't be having tea for the rest of the week because daddy was a bad shot. That must hurt.

Was the salad any good? Some of the chicken was a bit tough. Beyond that it filled a hole; I can barely remember it. On the positive side it was nicer than British Airways' "full English breakfast", which was a heck of a thing. As I hiked through Greenland I pondered the chain of work involved in assembling that salad, and the airliner, and the infrastructure that supports it all. There's something primeval about Greenland. It's a glimpse of a world where humanity never appeared, where animal life in general is rare.

Do I have anything to say about the seats? I don't remember if they reclined or not. A chap across the way had a nap by resting his head against the entertainment screen, so perhaps they don't. Which would make a certain amount of sense given that Air Greenland's transatlantic flights take place exclusively during the day.

How wide were the seats? I don't know, and Air Greenland doesn't say. BA's A380 seats were noticeably wider than a typical low-cost airline, but the A330's seats felt quite tight with the tray table down - I was essentially immobilised in my seat - and I wouldn't have fancied being in the middle row. I was lucky to sit in the right-most row of two seats, with a window seat on the way back to Copenhagen.

The bulk of Air Greenland's fixed-wing fleet consists of these DeHavilland Dash-8 turboprops. Qarsoq is Greenlandic for "arrow".

The airstrip is also home to the Dansk Arktisk Kommando, and is regularly used by C-130s of the US and Canadian Air Forces, including this C-130 with skis. There's also a substantial USAF airbase at Thule, seven hundred miles north. Incidentally Tulugaq is Greenlandic for "raven".

After arriving in Greenland I went to Greenland:

Greenland is real. There's no land ownership, so you can in theory walk anywhere you like and pitch up a tent. But the terrain is a lot tougher than it looks, and a lot of it is boggy. The supermarkets sell .22 rifles and there are almost no major chain stores. I imagine that service personnel who are stationed there for months on end must get sick of the place, but it has an arresting ruggedness that's fascinating in short bursts. If nothing else it's a fantastic destination if you're a photographer, wildlife spotter, plane spotter, or you just like being out in the open by yourself, and you're reasonably sturdy.

What was it like on the way back, a week and a bit later? This time the moving map worked:

The meal was cold potato salad and some kind of meatballs:

A 500ml bottle of Coca-Cola costs 49DKK in Greenland, which is £5.60. That's about $7. Not cheap. A word about the cost. Air Greenland is Greenland's only scheduled airline, and return tickets from Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq average around £500, but if you want to go any further than Kangerlussuaq you also have to budget another £200 for an internal flight. And of course you have to get to Copenhagen, or alternatively Reykjavik during the summer months, because Air Greenland also has a route from Reykjavik to Nuuk.

I was drawn by the Arctic Circle Trail - a hiking route from Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut, on the coast - so I didn't need to book an internal flight, but if you want to see the icebergs at Ilulissat, for example, you'll have to add on this expense. Plus the hotel, which is not cheap.

I didn't begrudge Air Greenland's prices. The company must run on a very narrow economic margin, moreso than other airlines, with the complicating factor that if it goes bust Greenland itself will collapse; presumably the Danish government would have to step in and provide some kind of basic air service. What happens if the airline's A330 has a hard landing and is out of service for two months? No more Coca-Cola, and anybody in Greenland will be stuck there.

I'll write about Kangerlussuaq separately. The airport is a legacy of the Second World War. When Demark was overrun by Germany in 1940 Greenland technically became part of the Third Reich. But the Danish ambassador to the United States took it upon himself to sign a defence pact between Greenland and the US, which resulted in the US having an extensive military presence in Greenland throughout the Cold War.

The US eventually pulled out of Greenland in the 2000s, and there has long been a plan to nix Kangerlussuaq Airport in favour of extending the strip at Nuuk, the capital. Greenland's main tourist destination is Ilulissat, on account of the icebergs, but a scenic ferry runs up the coast, so tourists who enter via Nuuk could save a bit of money on internal flights by taking the ferry instead.

Without the airport Kangerlussuaq wouldn't have much of a raison d'être, but it seems a waste to abandon such an extensive facility. But when I visited there were several large empty buildings, including the defunct Polar Bear Inn, so I imagine a mixture of COVID and general economic malaise hasn't been kind to the local economy. Kangerlussuaq has all the problems of a typical remote town in the UK or US, magnified by the fact that you can't simply get on your bike and look for work because the nearest town is a ten-day hike across a boggy wasteland.

The Arctic Circle Trail doesn't necessarily require a major international airport. Hikers could just as easily land at Nuuk, then fly to Kangerlussuaq internally, or take the ferry to Sisimiut and walk the trail in reverse. Furthermore Kangerlussuaq doesn't have much in the way of natural resources. The major local attraction is a glacier, but aome tourists might be uneasy with the idea of taking a major international flight to see a glacier. Will they bulldoze Kangerlussuaq, or just leave it to the elements? If nothing else it will be a fascinating ruin. A real frontier town, like in the Wild West.

Greenland is a conundrum, too large to abandon, but what to do with it? Air Greenland's in-flight magazine is surprisingly ambivalent about climate change:

The terrain isn't conducive to trees - there's a small proto-forest just outside Kangerlussuaq, but it was planted into the 1970s and will not be an actual forest for around two thousand years. The ice cap is slowly melting, which will eventually play havoc with house prices in Bermondsey and Woolwich, but ironically Greenland itself will escape most of the flooding.

It's entirely possible that after the rest of the world has destroyed itself the Inuit of Greenland will rise to become masters of what remains of the planet. For the next post I'll write about the Arctic Circle Trail.