On another day, we cruise by Zodiac to ogle the icebergs up close, as if visiting a sculpture park. There’s a dynamic stillness to them that appeals to our innate craving for both stasis and movement. Every shift in cloud and sunlight paints a different palette: pink and blue bergs in the golden evenings, then, on cloudy days, the grey skies are indistinguishable from the grey sea, and the horizon becomes invisible, the icebergs seemingly suspended like meteors in a zero-gravity cosmos. But the most jaw-dropping specimen is a jagged mass of compacted ice that has become translucent blue and looks like a gigantic sapphire.
As our boat weaves among these icebergs, there’s something eerie and faintly overwhelming about their gargantuan, silent inertia. Still, they’re significantly smaller and more numerous than they used to be, now that global warming is melting their source glaciers. Saqqaq locals say temperatures are getting colder, the air more misty, the weather – it snowed here in August 2024 – harder to predict. But despite its diminishment, the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier here calves more than eight cubic miles of ice into the sea every year. During dinner, we have a view of these ice mountains from the camp’s dining tent, where Irish chef Philippa King knocks up Greenlandic cod, beurre blanc sauce, broccolini and shallots. Later in the evening, I fall asleep to the sound of squawking geese and icebergs breaking, their gunboat-salute explosions soundtracking the night.
In the morning, we’re joined by our guide, Siisi Jensen, a bubbly young woman from Saqqaq, and take a boat to Qullissat, a ghost town on the northern coast of Disko Island. For 48 years, it was a coal mining settlement, until 1972, when its remaining 500 residents moved out. They left behind multicoloured and now structurally precarious timber houses. Even in its dilapidation, Qullissat is hauntingly picturesque, especially with the low sheet of brooding cloud that partially obscures the sweeping hills behind the houses. In a kitchen turned informal museum, I peruse the bric-a-brac: a rusting turntable and shelves lined with 1960s food tins. Qullissat’s mining community included a few foreign workers – Danes, Swedes and Brits – which is unsurprising given Greenlanders’ history of hospitality towards outsiders. It’s a culture partly underpinned by survivalist pragmatism. Jensen tells us that when Dutch whalers came here in the 17th and 18th centuries they were encouraged to date the local women in order to diversify the shallow gene pool. “So it was OK to cheat,” jokes Anika. We fall into a discussion about colonisation. “The Danes and Greenlandic people – we are such cultural opposites,” Jensen smiles. At social gatherings the relatively voluble Danes talk over each other or converse in pairs at the dinner table, whereas at Greenlandic “kaffemik” socials, an individual speaker commands everybody’s attention.
