Greenland – Part 2 – Paamiut & Qaqortoq

In Part 1 of my Greenland travels I arrived in the capital Nuuk, it’s only a two hour flight from Iceland, and continued north across the Arctic Circle to Ilulissat, the iceberg tourist centre of Greenland. Then I returned to Nuuk and continued south to Qaqortoq, the big city of the far south of Greenland, and Paamiut, a much smaller settlement mid-way between.

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▲ Those brightly painted buildings are definitely part of the Greenland urban scenery and Qaqortoq is a good example.

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▲  Fredens Kirke or Church of Peace dates from 1909 and it’s the first thing you see as you arrive in the centre of Paamiut.

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So why are you going to Paamiut I was asked? Well it’s half-way between Nuuk and Qaqortoq and an opportunity to add a smaller settlement to my itinerary. Nuuk, Ilulissat and Qaqortoq were the first, third and fourth largest places in the country, with around 1200 to 1300 people Paamiut was down at number 10. I stayed in the Hotel Paamiut and ate in the hotel’s Café Tamu which seemed to be the only place in town to dine. If you wanted a beer or even a bottle of wine you’d have to head to one of the very well stocked supermarkets. In fact I was consistently amazed how well stocked Greenland’s supermarkets – Brugseni or Pissifik – were. In the Brugseni fruit section in Paamiut they even had pomegranates on offer!

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 ▲ Museum, Paamiut – the town’s museum features half a dozen buildings dating from 1838 and of course there are some fine kayaks on display.

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▲ Loise Petersen seal fur teddy bears – but my favourite museum exhibit was this charming little collection of teddy bears. Where can I buy one for my grand-daughters I immediately thought and then noticed that the photograph of Ms Petersen surrounded by her creations was taken in 1955!

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All the way from the Paamiut Airport through the town and on to the seashore New Cemetery is 3.4km, you cannot put many kms on a car in this small town. There’s a lookout watchtower from which you can indeed look over the town or you can walk towards the airport and climb a hill for a view of the Greenland Star, an 1857 ton trawler which ran aground in 1984 and has been quietly rusting away ever since. Your first thought, since it looks very complete sitting there, 40 years later, is why couldn’t they refloat it?

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▲  Flying between Paamiut and Qaqortoq you can see the  Sermiligarssuk Glacier above Jakraviyk, spawning icebergs into the fjord. The adjacent fjord, without a glacier, is ice free. Further inland, Greenland is all white – ice and snow – but along the coast there’s always plenty to see, like Australia there’s a lot of uninhabited scenery below, but empty as Australia may be there’s very often some trail or track or even road going from somewhere remote to somewhere else remote. Here there’s simply nothing since there is absolutely no road connecting a settlement with any other settlement.

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▲ Vision – Insight, Stone & Man, Aka Høegh from Greenland

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The 30 Stone & Man sculptures and reliefs are scattered around Qaqortoq, the programme kicked off in 1993 and more works – all by artists from Greenland or the Nordic countries – were added until 2000. And presumably all by men since there’s no mention of Stone & Woman! The biggest group are on the rock face beside the tourist office and directly below the Hotel Qaqortoq, they’re easy to find using the Stone & Man leaflet.

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I stayed in the very central Hotel Qaqortoq.  Places to eat – choose from the brasserie in the hotel, Kunguak which is more café and take-away than restaurant, Tamasssa which opened only days before I arrived and the Thai (they get everywhere) Inbox Cafe by the docks.

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◄  Hans Hedtoft life ring, Church of Our Saviour, Qaqortoq

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The Qaqortoq museum is in a fine old building and Knud Amundsen (red room) and Charles Lindbergh (and his wife?) (blue room) both stayed there about the same time. There’s a second museum building, this one concentrating on the Viking farming story. The museum has interesting exhibits about the 1959 iceberg (or bad weather?) sinking of the Hans Hedtoft, a 2857-ton Danish ship on its maiden voyage which went down after departing Qaqortoq on its way back to Europe with the loss of all its 95 passengers and crew.

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There was no sign of any wreckage until a solitary life ring washed ashore in Iceland nine months after the sinking. That lone remains from the disaster is a reminder that it’s looked upon as the Titanic of Denmark or Greenland.

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▲ Church Hvalsey – it’s only half an hour or so by boat from Qaqortoq to Hvalsey – pronounced Valsey – a Viking-era church, built in the 13th century which has survived in remarkably good condition. It’s unclear when and why the Norse period in Greenland, which started in 982, ended, but there’s certainly a record of a marriage between Torstein Olafsson and Sigrid Björnsdóttir taking place in the church in 1408. Although the church is the best preserved of the farmstead’s structures there are remains of a number of other buildings including a banqueting hall, livestock pens, a storage area by the water’s edge and an enclosure for visitors’ horses.

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▲ The Hvalsey church is the best Norse ruins in Greenland – there are more than 500 Norse ruin sites in South Greenland – and the building’s survival is due to the high quality of its construction, some of the stones weigh four or five tons.

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▲  Uunartoq Hot Spring – Miki Jensen of Innovation South Greenland organised a trip to the hot springs, about an hour and a half by boat from Qaqortoq. Our group included Miki’s son Uno, his friend (and the boat’s first mate) Pilu, Qaqortoq’s mayor Malene Vahl Rasmussen and her friend Mia Rasmussen, plus the boat’s skipper of course.

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We cruise past the fairly large settlement of Alluitsup Paa – it actually gets a write up in my 2005 Lonely Planet Greenland guide – and then a small abandoned settlement, before we arrive at the very pleasant hot springs. Iceland has lots of hot springs, are there any others in Greenland? The water is a pleasant 38℃. There’s nothing else there apart from a couple of changing huts, but several other small groups also turn up. There’s a second hot spring pond a little down the hill and a third, but without much water in it.

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◄  Pilu and Uno continues down to the sea for a chilly ‘challenge’ dip, there’s a rather nice beach with icebergs as a backdrop. When we’re ready to depart there’s a pause on the boat while Miki and Pilu perform. They had a band called Small Time Giants and established themselves in Denmark and also made a couple of Texas appearances, performing in English got them more gigs? They play ‘Island,’ but don’t go on to ‘All Hope Abandon’ about the sinking of the Hans Hedtoft. Its final Morse code message ‘We are sinking slowly’ appears in the song.

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So we sail back past the abandoned settlement again and Alluitsup Paa and then into a zone of trapped icebergs, they will all have melted by September.

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Coming this way in the morning we passed an iceberg with a hole which was showing signs of breaking up. This time we lean on one, scrape some millions of years ice cubes off, the usual iceberg fun.

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▲ Approaching the east coast of Greenland from the Qaqortoq-Keflavik flight – the flight has only been operating for a few weeks and it clearly hasn’t caught on yet. In the 76-seat Icelandair Dash 8-400 there are just eight of us on board, including the two flight crew and two flight attendants. Just four passengers, so few that they ask us to shift to the back to balance the aircraft. The first part of the flight is great, there are indeed ‘farms’ down there although each one seems to be just one building. Then it’s mountains peaks-snow-ice followed by glaciers and fjords down to this view of the east coast.