Bob:

We were up early to watch our ship tiptoe into the fjord that leads to Qaqortoq. It looked to me as if the Captain deliberately waited until sunrise to make his final approach, and when we saw the the iceberg sitting in the fjord just outside the Qaqortoq harbor I could see why he was exercising that degree of caution. Icebergs do deserve a high level of respect as the radar or visual sighting only shows 1/10th of the iceberg, the other 9/10ths lie beneath the water and can extend out unpredictably in any direction.

I guess I had been expecting a flood plain or something of the kind, but the fjord had moderately high, rocky walls on either side that stood out quite clearly from he relatively calm, blue waters. The walls were typically the height of a medium-sized hill, but were very rounded on top with none of the sharp edges I tend to associate with mountains. I expect that was the effects of the ancient glacial sheet that had covered the rocky spurs and gradually ground them down over the centuries. The bare rock was, however, accentuated by a green patchwork of sparse, low-lying vegetation that allowed us to see the surface contours and fissures very clearly.

Monika:

Bob:

As we passed some oil storage tanks on port side of the ship and came in sight of the town proper, we saw one of the defining attributes of Qaqortoq, which was the inhabitants tendency to paint everything. The oil tanks had imaginative designs on them and were some of the best-looking oil tanks I have ever seen, as far as that goes. The houses in the town were all brightly and colorfully painted, reminding me of the "Tidy Towns" of Ireland or the French-Canadian villages in Canada. It made for a cheerful impression, and I expect that the color contrasted nicely with the ever-present snow during the winter months.

Our ship anchored about 8:00 a.m. and we were tendered on shore with a lifeboat a bit after 9:00. At the dock we saw a true welcoming committee comprised of young girls in their complete Inuit regalia handing out good maps of the town and a list of scheduled activities. Of course, a couple of thousand folks from the ship thronging ashore tended to overwhelm the capacities of the tourist center at the wharf, but the townspeople had opened up their meeting hall, churches, and even the community day care center for us to look at.

Monika:

Bob:

We prefer to walk in the morning when we have the most energy, so we postponed a thorough visit in the town in favor of walking up to the rocky headlands to our right. On our way out we stumbled on the community day care center that was having an open house for visitors, and on impulse we stopped in to visit. It was a pretty little place of 4-5 rooms and a tot lot outside with absolutely some of the cutest children we have ever seen. The children stared at us with big, round eyes, almost as if we were from a different planet, but when you consider I was covered from head to foot in neon blue plastic and had a bright red headband around my head crowned by a black and yellow-striped stocking cap, they may have just been reacting to the absurd color combination. In any case, they were quite secure with their caregivers and absolutely unafraid of us and willing to pose for pictures and so forth.

I looked over the shoulder of one little boy reading a story and saw that each picture page was opposite a page of text in both Inuit and Danish. A caretaker explained that the nursery school was conducted in Inuit, which is the mother tongue of 80% of the population, but the kids all learned both Inuit and Danish in regular school. English is offered and taken by many as a third language, which explained why all the high school students we met later greeted us in English, although even they couldn't stop giggling about my outfit.

Monika:

Bob:

Resisting the impulse to sit down and read to a couple of those adorable children (I don't speak Inuit or Danish!), we continued walking uphill looking for the trail. We never found it, so we started bushwhacking our way up across the stones, ponds, and moss to get to the top of the ridge. The rock, lichen, and moss scenery was stark but not barren, and the walking was quite unlike anything I had ever done in my life. That was because in any low spots the moss, ferns, blueberries, crowberries, and whatever else was growing down there had grown into mats 6 inches to a foot deep. You never quite knew if you were stepping on a moss-covered rock, a clump of vegetation as soft as a down mattress, a layer of moss just barely covering some water, or some ferns that were just barely covering a hole in the ground. Due to the extraordinarily uncertain footing, we learned to quite literally take it one step at a time when in those low, wet areas. However, when we were walking on the thick part of the carpet of vegetation, it was so soft that it felt like we were walking on a green cloud. The only experience I've had that even comes close to this was walking on some foot-deep grass in southwestern Ireland during Wanderung 9, but this layer of soft, tundra-like vegetation was much more extensive.

However, that type of walking was also extremely strenuous, so we finally took to the rocky spines to work our way up to the ridge top. Aside from being covered with lichen the rocks gave predictably stable, albeit uneven, footing. Our walk, of course, became more of a rock scramble at that point, but we did make it to the top. At the end of the ridge overlooking the harbor we had great views of the Crown Princess in the harbor and the town of Qaqortoq below us.

Monika:

Bob:

Crossing over a saddle we had a chance to view the fjord on the other side of the ridge that featured tall, snow-cloaked mountains at its head. Those mountains looked very majestic but also very, very cold! We chose to circle back around the harbor following the contour line of the ridge top, and along the way met a local resident picking the blueberries and a small, black berry that we later learned was a "crowberry". She said that they were both good to eat and that she was going to make marmalade from them, which sounded good to me.

Monika:

Bob:

Finding a trail back down the mountain was as difficult as (not) finding one on the way up, but we finally chanced on a water-supply pipe that ran from a pond downhill to the uppermost homes, and there was the faint trace of a trail beside the water pipe. Getting back down onto the streets of Qaqortoq we wandered throughout the town for the next couple of hours, seeing the sights and stopping in to window-shop here and there. As we reached the mouth of the small stream which feeds into the harbor from the lake on one side of Qaqortoq, we chanced on a demonstration of kayaking. Two guys gave demonstrations of the Eskimo roll and of using a single kayak to rescue a second person from the water. It was skillfully done, but I was surprised at the very thin-bladed wooden paddle that they were using.

Monika:

Bob:

The people we met along the way were uniformly friendly, usually greeting us in English because with our outlandish garb and cameras hanging from our necks they must have immediately known we were from the Crown Princess. I was of course taking pictures and the kids were so enthusiastic about being part of my pictures that they literally jumped into the frame. A group of young boys, in particular, leapt one by one into the foreground of a picture of the old church I was taking, so I zoomed in on them and just took a group portrait shot. When I turned on the viewer and showed it to them, they seemed very happy about it.

In general, the children seemed uniformly happy and well-kept. When school let out around 3 p.m., we had a flood of youngsters and teenagers thronging along the major streets around the harbor. Even the teenagers were friendly and polite to us, which to me bespeaks emotional security and a good rearing in manners by their parents. More surprisingly the teenagers also seemed to be very kind and understanding of the younger children. The teenagers dressed, however, like teenagers all over the world in tight jeans, fashionable jackets, and so forth. Quite a few were even walking along with cell phones glued to their ears, which in a town only about a square kilometer in size struck me as funny. I mean, walkie-talkies would probably be good enough to cover that distance and would make it considerably cheaper for the parents to pay the monthly phone bill, but these were, after all, teenagers, and the cell phones were no doubt "cool".

Monika:

Bob:

The old church, by the way, looked very nice inside as well as out. It was clean, fresh, and clearly still being used for weekly services. We even saw the life preserver that was the sole remnant of the Danish supply ship that sank off Greenland in the 1970s. It was surrounded by memorial wreaths which served to remember the crew that was lost with the ship. One curious decoration was a detailed scale model of a sailing ship that was hanging from the ceiling of the nave near the entrance, but I'm not sure what the story behind that was.

The town square had a fountain in the middle and several very nice-looking cottages at the edges. They looked old, but I wasn't certain exactly how old. Nearby was an old meeting hall where we watched a slide show given by a naturalist and a native drum dance. The naturalist was Kenneth Hoegh, and his slide show explained how the little southwester corner of Greenland had a sub-arctic climate where bushes like willows and even birch trees could grow. Most of Greenland, of course, is either high arctic or low arctic climates where musk ox, caribou, arctic hare, arctic foxes, and polar bears roam, but vegetation is very scant. He also identified the bushes with small black berries that we had been walking on or around for much of the morning as crowberries, and told us they contained a lot of anti-oxidants and were therefore quite healthy. One curious tidbit was that by law dogs below the arctic circle were considered as pets and subject to the usual anti-cruelty restraints, but above the arctic circle dogs were considered as working animals and could be treated as such when used to pull sleds and so forth.

The drum dancer was a man in his 70s who looked and certainly danced like a much younger man. He sang or more accurately chanted a song in honor of his daughter while rhythmically beating on the edge of a drum. We asked questions after his performance, and he clarified that drum dancing was done for entertainment, for social status competitions, and shaman trances. The drum dance competitions were used to settle disputes without resorting to force, but apparently losing such a competition would result in such a loss of face that some folks committed suicide as a result. But the reason the Christian missionaries had prohibited the drum dancing was its use by the shaman in the old religion, which I guess has been pretty much stamped out although our translator left it just a bit open as to whether out in the boondocks somebody might still be performing the old rituals and dances.

Monika:

Bob:

By that time it was after 3:00p.m. so the last performances of the two adult choirs performing in the Gertrud Rash Church and the Children's Folk Dance group that was performing in the school gym had already ended. It was a shame to miss those events because they featured performers in their native customs, but we just ran out of time. So we walked a block or so uphill to take a quick look at the lake and then ambled back to the dock where we were ferried back to our ship. We had a wonderful, if exhausting, day in Qaqortoq and were impressed not only by the stark and severe but strangely beautiful landscape, but also by the cheerful, sturdy, intelligent and friendly people we found there. After seeing the town and the Inuit folks, even if very briefly, I can understand a little better how they have survived and even prospered in one of the world's harshest climates. I was also very happy to see the Danish minority to be equal participants in the life and politics of the country and fully accepted by the majority, at least as far as I could tell. All in all, we had a wonderful day in a very intriguing little (big?) corner of the world. As one lady we talked to later so aptly put it, "I don't know what I was expecting from Greenland, but Qaqortoq wasn't it!

But boy did we pay for that day of walking later! I was so sore and stiff that I had trouble getting up from the dinner table that evening, and my calf muscles in particular kept trying to cramp up during the night. Still, even after we exited the fjord the seas were relatively calm and that helped us sleep through the night.

Monika: