After a short stop in Goose Bay we were ready to take off for Narsarsuaq on the south east part of Greenland. When we arrived to the very nice Irving FBO at the Goose Bay airport we met some very tired personnel there. It turned out that during the night a Boeing 767 had had to divert to Goose Bay during its flight from Cancun in Mexico to Great Britain. The reason for the diversion was that the lavatories had become full somewhere between Canada and Greenland, not everyday you hear such a reason. When day has landed back in Canada and got more fuel and emptied the lavatories they were slightly over the crews allowed working hours and they had to remain in Goose Bay. Now the small FBO who normally takes care about small aircrafts up to 20-30 passengers had 300 of them running around on the apron in the middle of the night without any planned accommodation and only dressed in shorts and T-shirts, the temperature was only 8 degrees Celsius! Good job Irving handling this interesting situation!

Ready for takeoff inbound Greenland

The flight over to Greenland is a nice experience, you really get the feeling that you are far away from most of the civilization, there is only the ocean ahead and after a while you approach Greenland with its stunning nature. The Greenlandic coastline in the south-west consist of sharp mountain peaks rising up from deep fjords with green-blue water. In the fjords you see white and blue icebergs slowly floating along with the currents from one of the many places where the glaciers reaches the sea and breaks loose into chunks of icebergs. Beautiful! Narsarsuaq is an old air force base built in the late 30’s, beginning of the 40’s. At times during the Second World War there were over 5000 people living in Narsarsuaq, today there are only 150 people there in a few houses, a hotel and a small shop.

Icebergs in different formations

We met Lukas and Phillipe that were preparing there expedition across the Greenland icecap. They were just about to start crossing the icecap from the southwest up to the northeast towards Thule using only skies and kites (a kite is like a small parasail that is used to pull them along the ice). That is a distance of 2200 km! You can read about their adventure at http://www.x-pedition.at.

After the landing we got invited to a birthday party that was held for one of the guides. Suddenly we mingled among 15% of the Narsarsuaq population! =)

Narsarsuaq is connected to the outside world through a few flights from Reykjavik and , Copenhagen plus some domestic cities in Greenland. One connection is through a helicopter connection via Nuuk. We met up with the helicopter crew Christer and Thomas that flew in from Nuuk in their huge Sikorsky helicopter. We knew Christer since before and it was really fun to hear them telling all the stories about helicopter flying in Greenland, I can promise that that is not an everyday job! Thanks for showing us around and taking care of us Christer.

Just close to Narsarsuaq there is a glacier within walking distance, therefore we took a trekking tour there, we started pretty late in the day and we had to keep up the pace in order to be back home before darkness. I can promise that we fell easily asleep that night… Again, the nature surrounding Narsarsuaq is stunning!

Trekking through the Greenland nature

Reached our trekking destination

View from above

The east coast of Greenland when leaving for Iceland

The next stop is Reykjavik on Iceland, more about that in the next blog!

Over and out

Written by Henrik

Posted by: Peter Sinabell
Wellcome in good old Europe !

Posted by: Peter Sinabell
Wellcome in good old Europe !

Posted by: Helena Malm
Inte länge kvar till svensk mark! Tack för allt vi fått att läsa och titta på här hemma. Välkomna%

Posted by: Lena Gardholm
Trevligt att fått följa er på den beundransvärda resan. Jag kommer att sakna era bloggar och bilder, men ni är så välkomna hem igen.

Posted by: Anna Rogö
Kul att fått följa er på trippen världen runt, speciellt intressant med alla bilder som ni visat. Ha det bra sista biten och välkomna hem!