Yes! Below I will write about my recent travel to Greenland, having yet again realized how flaky my memory is. Or its more like a big, overflowing wardrobe, where stuff lies in heaps, dusty and intertwined. You look for a fresh pair of socks and WOAH! there they are, these wonderful snakeskin green-purple leggings that you bought in 2000’s and never seen since – there they are, crumpled and lackluster, but nevertheless oh so dear.
Let me try to get hold of some of these leggings.
Destination
In an unexplainable quest to visit ever more remote places of the earth this summer I went to Greenland to trek the Arctic Circle Trail (aka “ACT”).
Its probably the only multi-day route in Greenland that is a) accessible and b) marked, so it was an easy choice.
But it turned out to be less remote than I thought.
Day -2 / Prep
As I tried to stuff the venerable Penguin 60ltr I discovered that it disintegrated along the seams and the inner surfaces have become kind of oily. So welcome, a brand-new deuter AirContact Pro 75+10!
And Penguin goes to the backpack Valhalla..
Interestingly, this time I had much more stuff for a 8 days trek than a few years ago. What fit in 60ltr back then, now fit in 75ltr just barely.
Its inflation, stupid..
But something came extra:
- Iridium phone + extra battery
- 22000mAh powerbank + 11000mAh (reserve)
- Mosquito net + cap
- A toothbrush
- But mostly the stuff that took a lot of space were prepackaged meals that I went so heavy on this time
- (its a joke about a toothbrush)
Day -1
I took a plane from Frankfurt to Copenhagen on SAS that cost 270€ both ways. I rose early and arrived to Copenhagen around 11:00 on August 1st. The hotel in Kastrup was about 1.2km away from the airport so I walked, having put the 23kg deuter for the first time. Ominously, it felt really HEAVY and it didn’t sit very well. At the end of these 1.2km I felt like I’m ready to camp and light a stove check in. YOU ARE NOT EVEN ON THE TRAIL YET!, I was catching breath at reception. A receptionist spoke to me in danish and ended this internal struggle.
After lying absentmindedly on the hotel bed at around noon and having watched the The Ballad of Buster Scruggs to the end on Netflix I found a Lyme scooter at the station and took to the city.
Day 0
It was a good idea to arrive to Air Greenland check-in counter an hour in advance: the line to bag drop-off was long and there were a few fellow backpack-travelers among clearly Inuit-looking people who took longer as they were sometimes asked to rearrange baggage to fit into 20kg weight limit. Luckily my 22.5kg backpack was allowed in (I smiled at the male staff, must have helped).
I was seated near a young woman that was going to Nuuk for her first job assignment after studies. She would have worked on a policy to combat substance abuse in Greenland’s towns and settlements, I thought that’s kind of cool.
Reading the plane’s magazine this article caught my attention. Its about Greenlandic guy who run the ACT in 37 hours and skied in 14.
Arrival in sunny Kangerlussuaq around 10:00.
1st surprise: IT IS HOT. It felt like +25C with a windstill and sunny skies.
2nd surprise: There are no mosquitos. (The kind man who picked me up half-way to Kellyville said “Oh, there are no mosquitos in August. Its just the Greenland Fly, lots of them. They come in August – any day now. They stay for 10 days, and then they’re gone. They only attack your face, and it swells like that!” – he showed with his palms) OKAY.. good news mosquitos are gone:D
3rd surprise: A polite note in the backpack about lighter and mosquito spray being confiscated as fire danger. For meager admin fee of 835DKK I can have them both back. OKAY I thought, may be not. Keep it.
Strangely Frankfurt airport didn’t feel so prickly and let it pass, but danish guys were on the spot. I think they even opened the Tranglia burner and inspected it for fuel (it was empty and clean).
They packed everything back nicely so no complaints otherwise. Next time I’ll leave them a note too.
4th surprise: A sizeable supermarket right across the street from airport selling almost everything you might need for a hike. I bought 1ltr of spiritus for fuel and a lighter for 20DKK to compensate for confiscated one. Last time in Iceland getting spiritus proved to be a problem, I had to scavenge at the huts.
Despite noticeable portion of backpackers on the flight, I seemed to be the only one heading to the trail with the rest waiting for transfer to other places.
Greenland Fly
The Fearsome Greenland Fly turned out to be a small and somehow elegant pitch-black fly (I thought it’s was curiously very black, like vantablack) that looked quite innocent, until one of it landed on my arm (OH HOW CUTE, I thought) and sucked a drop of blood in what seemed to be like half a second. The bite swelled and itched in a strong and rather pleasant way for several days. I was then just scratching it for pleasure now and then (oh yeah!)
Having read reports I hoped to take THE taxi (there is only one in Kangerlussuaq), however it happened to be broken on the day, so I headed to Kellyville and so to the start of the ACT on foot.
Around half-way a driver stopped by and offered a ride – he brought me right to the trail head and saved me about 8km of walking.
In general people were quite friendly.
There was no good water for the stretch from Kangerlussuaq airstrip to the start of ACT, good that I hitched.
