With Arctic cruising turning into more and more fashionable, Greenland is the most recent vacation spot to obtain the highlight. The territory inaugurated the brand new Nuuk Airport with a four-and-a-half-hour direct flight to Newark in 2025, making it extra accessible for vacationers searching for an intrepid polar expertise. It additionally guarantees one thing that Antarctica cannot: individuals. These will not be untouched landscapes however ones that, for hundreds of years, Indigenous and settler communities have discovered methods to stay in regardless of the extremity of the weather. It was a privilege to satisfy them and study of their methods of life, which feels uniquely essential at this second.
Logistics nonetheless pose a problem. A whopping 80 % of the landmass is roofed by the Greenland ice sheet, which means that, to get from one aspect to the opposite, your greatest wager is to go round. Unlike fashionable ports of name elsewhere within the Arctic, like Svalbard or Reykjavik, which have already got well-established tourism infrastructures, there’s the palpable sense that the vacation spot remains to be growing its choices. Small tour operators inside every port are rolling up their sleeves to accommodate the growing quantity of worldwide arrivals (in 2024 guests to Greenland hit an all-time excessive of 150,000, almost triple the nation’s inhabitants) by creating new land excursions and in-town experiences. But expedition cruise vessels, with their capability to maneuver by way of shifting climate circumstances and thick ice sheets, are nonetheless probably the most sensible option to navigate the nooks and crannies of Greenland’s 27,000-plus miles of shoreline and to attach tiny communities the place roads and airports merely do not exist.
In Igaliku’s case there are extra buildings and sheep than the 30 individuals who stay right here, most of whom are descendants of Anders Olsen, a Norwegian service provider, and his Greenlandic spouse, Tuperna, who made their dwelling right here within the 1780s. Like a line of hearth ants coming into unfamiliar terrain, my fellow vacationers and I file out of our tenders and towards the UNESCO-anointed web site of Garðar, a Norse settlement on the outskirts of present-day Igaliku. Awaiting us is Garðar’s official tour information, Arnajaraq Bibi Bjerge, the city’s schoolteacher and a mom of three, who leads us by way of Garðar’s tall grasses and dandelions to the stone stays of the primary cathedral on the North America continent (circa 1126). We pay attention intently as Bjerge shares historic factors of curiosity earlier than asking our most burning query: What is life like in a city of so few individuals solely reachable by boat? Says Bjerge: prepared the kids for varsity, educate college, have a tendency the livestock, relaxation, and repeat. As totally free time? “We play cards,” she replies, as if it had been the obvious reply on the planet.