格陵兰：美丽却令人不安的议题

Photo by Visit Greenland / Unsplash

Greenland is a complicated topic here in Denmark. The former colony that is still treated a bit like a colony is something that inspires a lot of emotions. Greenland has been subjected to a lot of unethical experiments by Denmark, from taking their kids to wild experiments in criminal justice. But there is also a genuine pride a lot of people have here for the place and you run into Danes who grew up there more often than I would have guessed.

When the idea of going to Greenland was introduced to me, I was curious. Having lived in Denmark for awhile, you hear a lot about the former colony and its 55,000 residents. We were invited by a family that my wife was close with growing up and is Danish. They wanted to take their father back to see the place he had spend some time in during his 20s and had left quite an impression. A few drinks in, I said "absolutely let's do it", not realizing we had already committed to going and I had missed the text message chain.

A few weeks before I went, I realized "I don't know anything about Greenland" and started to watch some YouTube videos. It was about this time when I started to get a pit in my stomach, the "oh god I think I've made a huge mistake" feeling I'm painfully familiar with after a career in tech. Greenland appeared to have roughly 9 people living there and maybe 5 things to look at. Even professional travel personalities seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. "There's the grocery store again!" they would point out as they slipped down the snowy roads. I couldn't tell any difference between different towns in the country.

It reminded me a lot of driving through Indiana. For those not in the US, Indiana is a state in the US famous for being a state one must drive through in order to get somewhere better. If you live in Michigan, a good state and want to go to Illinois, another good state, one must pass through Indiana, a blank state. Because of this little strip here, you often found yourself passing through this place.

Driving through Indiana isn't bad, it's just an empty void. It's like a time machine back to the 90s when people still smoke in restaurants but also there's nothing that sticks out about it. There is nothing distinct about Indiana, it's just a place full of people who got too tired on their way to somewhere better and decided "this is good enough". The difference is that Greenland is very hard to get to, as I was about to learn.

Finally the day arrived. Me, my wife, daughter, 4 other children and 6 other adults all came to the Copenhagen Airport and held up a gate agent for what felt like an hour to slowly process all of our documents. Meanwhile, I nursed a creeping paranoia that I'd be treated as some sort of American spy, given my government's recent hobby of threatening to purchase entire countries like they're vintage motorcycles on Craigslist.

The 5 hour flight is uneventful, the children are beautifully behaved and I begin to think "well this seems ok!" like the idiot I am. As I can look down and see the airport, the pilot comes on and informs us that there is too much fog to land safely. Surely fog cannot stop a modern aircraft full of all these dials and screens I think, foolishly. We are informed there is enough fuel to circle the airport for 5 hours to wait for the fog to lift.

What followed was three hours of flying in lazy circles, like a very expensive, very slow merry-go-round. After the allotted time, we are informed that we must fly to Iceland to refuel and then we will be returning to Denmark. After a total of 15 hours in the air we will be going back to exactly where we started, to do the entire thing again. We were obviously upset at this turn of events, but I noticed the native Greenlandic folks seemed not surprised at this turn of events. As I later learned, this happens all the time.

The native Greenlanders on board seemed utterly unsurprised by this development, displaying the kind of resigned familiarity that suggested this was Tuesday for them. I began wondering if I could just pretend Iceland was Greenland—surely my family wouldn't notice the difference? But the pilot, apparently reading my mind, announced that no one would be disembarking in Iceland. It felt oddly authoritarian, like being grounded by an airline, as if they knew we'd all just wander off into Reykjavik and call it close enough.

We crash out in a airport hotel 20 minutes from our apartment after 15 hours in the air and tons of CO2 emissions only to wake up the next day to start again. This time, I notice that all of the people are asking for (and receiving) free beer from the crew that they are stashing in their bags. It turns out soda and beer, really anything that needs to be imported, is pretty expensive in Greenland. The complimentary drinks are there to be kept for later.

Finally we land. The first thing you notice when you land in Greenland is there are no trees or grass. There is snow and then there is exposed rock. The exterior of the airport is metal but the inside is wood, which is strange because again there are no trees. This would end up being a theme, where buildings representing Denmark were made out of lots of wood, almost to ensure that you understood they weren't from here. We ended up piling all of our stuff into a bus and heading for the hotel in Nuuk.

Nuuk

Nuuk is the capital of Greenland and your introduction to the incredible calm of the Greenlandic people. I have never met a less stressed out group of humans in my life. Nobody is really rushing anywhere, it's all pretty quiet and calm. The air is cold and crisp with lots of kids playing outside and just generally enjoying life.

The city itself sits in a landscape so dramatically inhospitable it makes the surface of Mars look cozy. Walking through the local mall, half the shops sell gear designed to help you survive what appears to be the apocalypse. Yet somehow, there's traffic. Actual traffic jams in a place where you can walk from one end to the other in twenty minutes. It's like being stuck behind a school bus in your own driveway.

To put this map into some perspective, it is only six kilometers from the sorta furthest tip to the airport.

But riding the bus around Nuuk was a peaceful experience that lets you see pretty much the entire city without needing to book a tour or spend a lot of money. We went to Katuaq, a cultural center with a cafe and a movie theater that was absolutely delicious food.

But again even riding the bus around it is impossible to escape the feeling that this is a fundamentally hostile to human life place. The sun is bright and during the summer its pretty hot, with my skin feeling like it was starting the burn pretty much the second it was exposed to the light. It's hard to even dress for, with layers of sunscreen, bug spray and then something warm on top if you suddenly got cold.

The sun, meanwhile, has apparently forgotten how to set, turning our hotel rooms into solar ovens. You wake up in a pool of your own sweat, crack a window for relief, and immediately get hit with air so cold it feels personal. It's like being trapped in a meteorological mood swing.

So after a night here, we went back to the airport again and flew to our final destination, Ilulissat.

Ilulissat

My new favorite airport

The flight to our final destination revealed Greenland's true nature: endless, empty hills stretching toward infinity, punctuated by ice formations that look like nature's sculpture garden.

Landing in Ilulissat felt like victory—we'd made it to the actual destination, not just another waypoint in our Arctic odyssey. Walking through the tiny airport, past Danish military recruitment posters (apparently someone, somewhere, thought this place needed defending), I felt genuinely optimistic for the first time in days.

Well you can sleep easy Danish military, because Ilulissat is completely protected from invasion. The second I stepped outside I was set upon by a flood of mosquitos like I have never experienced before. I have been to the jungles of Vietnam, the swamps of Florida and the Canadian countryside. This was beyond anything I've ever experienced.

There are bugs in my mouth, ears, eyes and nose almost immediately. The photo below is not me being dramatic, it is actually what is required to keep them off of me.

In fact what you need to purchase in order to walk around this area at all are basically bug nets for your face. They're effectively plastic mesh bags that you put on.

The Dogs

Our hotel, charming in that "remote Arctic outpost" way, sat adjacent to what I can only describe as a canine correctional facility. Dozens of sled dogs were chained to rocks like some sort of prehistoric parking lot, each with a tiny house they could retreat to when the existential weight of their circumstances became too much.

Now, I'd always imagined sled dogs living their best life—running through snow, tongues lolling, living the Disney version of Arctic life. I'd never really considered their downtime, assuming they frolicked in meadows or something equally wholesome. The reality was more "minimum security prison with a view."

The dogs are visited roughly twice a day by the person who owns and feeds them, which was quite the party for the dogs that lost their minds whenever the car pulled up. Soon the kids really looked forward to dog feeding time. The fish scrapes the dogs lived on came out of a chest freezer that was left exposed up on the rock face without electricity and you could smell it from 50 yards away when it opened.

During one such performance, a fellow parent leaned over and whispered with the casual tone of someone commenting on the weather, "I think that one is dead." Before I could process this information, the frozen canine was unceremoniously launched over a small cliff like a furry discus. A second doggy popsicle followed shortly after, right in front of our assembled children, who watched with the kind of wide-eyed fascination usually reserved for magic shows.

We stopped making dog feeding time a group activity after that and had to distract the kids from ravens flying away with tufts of dog fur.

Whales taste like seaweed

Obviously a big part of Greenland is the nature, specifically the icebergs. Icebergs are incredible and during the week we spend up there, I enjoyed watching them every morning. It's like watching a mountain slowly moving while you sit still. The visual contrast of the ice and the exposed stone is beautiful and peaceful.

Finding our tour operator proved to be an exercise in small-town efficiency. The man who gave me directions was the same person who picked us up from the airport, who was also our tour guide, who probably doubled as the mayor and local meteorologist. It was like a one-man civic operation disguised as multiple businesses—the ultimate small-town gig economy.

The sea around Greenland is calmer than anything I've ever been on before, perfectly calm and serene. All around us whales emerged, thrilling my daughter. However the biggest hit of the entire tour, maybe the entire trip, was a member of the crew who handed each of the kids a giant rock of glacier ice to eat. I had to pull my daughter away to observe the natural beauty as she ate glacier ice like it was ice cream. "LOOK AT MY ICE" she was yelling as they slipped and slid around the deck of this boat.

So if you've ever wonder "what is a glacier", let me tell you. Greenland has a lot of ice and it pushes out from the land that is covers into the sea. When that happens, a lot of it breaks off. This sounds more exciting than it is. On TV in 4K it looks incredible, giant mountains of ice falling into the ocean. Honestly you can go read the same thing I did here.

However that doesn't happen very often. So in order for us tourists to be able to see anything, we had to go to a very productive glacier. This means there are constantly small chunks breaking off and falling into the sea. Practically though, it kinda looks like you are a boat in a slushee. It's beautiful and something to see, but also depressing to see along the rock face how much more ice there used to be.

Back in town, we hopped on the "bus". Now the bus here is clearly a retrofitted party van, complete with blue LED lights. The payment system is zip tied to a desk chair that is, itself, wedged in the front. However the bus works well and does get you around. The confusing part is that you will, once again, sometimes encounter a lot of traffic. People are driving pretty quickly and really seem to have somewhere to go. You also see a lot of fancy cars parked outside of houses here.

Which begs a pretty basic question. If there was almost nowhere to drive to in Nuuk, where in the hell are these people driving. The distance between the end of the road and the beginning of the road is less than 6 km. Also the process to make a road here is beyond anything you've ever seen. Everything requires a giant pile of explosives.

Where did these vehicles even come from? Why does one ship a BMW to a place accessible only by plane and boat? More importantly, where was everyone going with such determination? It was like watching a very expensive version of bumper cars, except everyone was committed to the illusion that they had somewhere important to be. Everyone had dings and scrapes like crashes were common.

Grocery Store from the Sea

Anyway, as I dodged speeding cars filled with people heading nowhere, I decided to hop off the bus and head to the grocery store. Inside was less a store and more the idea of a store. There was a lot of alcohol, chips, candy and shelf-stable foods, which all makes sense to me. What was strange was there wasn't a lot else, including meat. Locals couldn't be eating at the local restaurants, where the prices were as high as Berlin or Copenhagen for food. So what were they eating?

When I asked one of my bus drivers, he told me that it was pretty unusual to buy meat. They purchased a lot of whale and seal meat. I had sorta heard this before, but when we stopped the bus he pointed out a group of men hauling guns out into a small boat to go shoot seals. The guns were held together with a surprising amount of duct tape, which is not something I associate with the wild.

I had assumed, based on my casual reading of the news, that we were mostly done killing whales. As it turns out, I was wrong. They eat a lot of whale and it is, in fact, not hard to find. If you are curious, whale does not taste fishy. It tastes a little bit like if you cooked reindeer in a pot of seaweed. I wouldn't go out of your way for it, but it's not terrible.

The argument I've always heard for why people still kill whales is because it's part of their culture and also because it's an important source of protein. When you hear the phrase "part of their culture" I always imagined like traditional boats going out with spears. What I didn't imagine was industrial fishing boats and an industrial crane that lifts the dead whale out of the water for "processing". Some of the illusion is broken when your boat tour guide points out the metal warehouse with the word "whale" on the side. "Yeah the water here was red with blood for a week" the guide said, counting the cigarettes left in a pack he had.

Should you go to Greenland?

It's a wild place unlike anywhere I've ever been. It is the closest I have ever felt to living a sci-fi type experience. The people of Greenland are amazing, tough, calm and kind. I have nothing but positive experiences to recount from the many people I met there, Danish and Greenlandic, who patiently sat through my millions of questions.

However it is, by far, the least hospitable to human life place I've ever been to. The folks who live there have adapted to the situation in, frankly, genius ways. If that's your idea of a good time, Greenland is perfect for you. Maybe don't get emotionally attached to the sled dogs though. Or the whales.