Greenland-A beauty beyond words

It’s truly hard to express what we saw in Greenland. Even my photos don’t do it justice. So many thoughts swirl in my head when I begin to describe this amazing country.

I’ll begin with our struggles to get over to Greenland. We were quite anxious after being stuck in Reykjavik for 2 days due to flight cancellations. While that would normally be a great place to be stranded, we didn’t get notified of the flight being cancelled until the afternoon each day.  This occurred after spending hours at the domestic airport each morning as the flight status changed hourly due to fog.  Luckily, the airline put us up in a hotel and fed us so we spent a couple hours in the late afternoons walking around Reykjavík. We longed to get to Greenland.   We finally arrived Thursday afternoon, flying over the waters of a fjord, crying out happily as we spotted one iceberg after another. Little did we know that in a couple hours, we would be boarding this zodiac to be whisked out to our camp. 

After landing in Greenland, we had to wait a couple hours as the adventure company arranged transportation and shuffled tours around. We had missed two full days of our tour and others had the same predicament. Ramon, the owner, came to transport us 70-80 km by zodiac through the fjords, weaving through icebergs. We marveled at the colors as some icebergs were white, others blue and others black, depending on the age and activity of the iceberg. 

It had been raining all day and it was no different on the 2-hour ride. My camera gear stayed packed away tightly in dry bags but I jeopardized my phone and hands for a few iPhone shots. It was very cold flying through the water in the zodiac, and luckily, the company gave us parkas to wear. As you can see with Troy in the photo below, we were very bundled up. 

We arrived at camp next to a glacier and proceeded to meet our guide and the rest of our group who had flown over via Denmark 2 days prior. We got settled into fixed dome tents late at night and had a nice pasta dinner cooked by our two guides Ester and Jorge. Since Tasermiut is a Spanish company, all of our guides came from Spain and spoke a lot of Spanish in our presence. It was fun practicing with them and interpreting occasionally for the group.  The camp was beautiful situated on the beach of the fjord. 

We got settled that night and took in the surroundings. We had mountains all around us, a glacier in front of us, blue-green water of the fjord and no civilization for miles and miles. Our only transportation was that zodiac which had left shortly after dropping us off. 

It was still unbelievable that we were actually in Greenland. Our eyes could not absorb fast enough. Our minds spun as we saw one beautiful and unique sight after another. Each place that we saw was worth the trip, struggle, and expense alone. Five days of that from morning to night gave us such happiness that a place on this earth existed and we were lucky enough to see it. I still haven’t processed what we saw and it might be months and many hours processing photos before I truly believe that I was there.  

I spend tonight in Reykjavik and leave Troy in Iceland tomorrow as I begin my trip back to the US. I will fly back to Orlando and spend the night in an airport hotel before heading to Long Island, NY to join Artie for a return to shorebird photography for five days. As soon as I return back to Florida, I’ll begin processing my camera photos and will post them along with stories of our adventure.