“What was your favourite place?“, the question we were asked most when we came back from our round the world trip.
Most travellers would struggle to come up with an answer, how do you even define your favourite place? Is it somewhere you would go back to if you could tomorrow? Somewhere you could live? A place that you only experience once in your lifetime?
Our favourite was simple. A mutual decision without much thought. A destination that answered all of the above questions perfectly. A beautiful North Western town on the largest island in the world, around 220 miles North of the Arctic Circle. The small town of Ilulissat, Greenland. Of course, other places in the world made the ‘favourite list’ but Ilulissat Greenland had a very magical edge.
About Ilulissat
Sermermiut was a North Western Inuit settlement in the Disko Bay area of Greenland until 1850 when the last inhabitant moved to nearby Jakobshavn, named after Dane Jacob Severin who set up an international trade with Greenland.Jakobshavn has since been renamed Ilulissat, Kalaallisut for ‘icebergs’.
Ilulissat now sits in the Qaasuitsup Kommunia, a municipality that translates to ‘Place of Polar Darkness’. The population of Ilulissat is less than 5000 and what makes this town very special is there are just as many dogs as there are people. The UNESCO Ice Fjord sits right by the town and it has helped Ilulissat become the most popular tourist destination in Greenland. International flights have been offered from Reykjavik via Iceland Air since 2011.
Our decision was made a lot easier after we took part in a two-day Arctic expedition where we were transported to a hunter’s cabin in the middle of nowhere by Grenlandic Sled Dogs.
Unique and colourful
We started our journey to the Arcitc Circle on Air Iceland’s Bombardier Q200 which had 37 seats, giving us our first ever experience of flying on a small carrier. We took off from Reykjavik on a winter’s morning at 7am.
After two hours in the air looking at the most spectacular dazzling white canvas of the world’s largest island, we eventually landed on a pure white runway. One of the most magical moments of our lives was spotting a series of dog sledders at the base of the mountains as we were descending to land.
The airport sign in Ilulissat Greenland is as welcoming and colourful as the town itself.
The icy Arctic air was painful on everything, right down to our nostril hairs. It turns out that this part of Greenland was experiencing the coldest February on record with temperatures hitting as low as -45°C. If you have never felt cold like it, we can only describe it as unbearable, take a look at our swollen faces!
From the moment we met our hotel representative at the airport to the moment we left for our flight back to Iceland, everybody was so warm. We drove through the town on the hotel minibus and knew from this moment we were somewhere very special. The roads had been snow-ploughed and were towered by solidified 12 feet walls of ice. It was the quietest place on earth.
Some of the piles easily reached 12-13 feet.
The sun always looked like a hazy smudge like it would in a beautiful painting. Everything is buried in what looks like a massive dump of icing sugar. There is no sign of the ground or grass anywhere, even on the ploughed roads.
Architecture in Ilulissat Greenland
For over 4,000 years the Inuit community lived in varied accommodation, namely huts, tents and igloos.
The only materials available to build house came from incoming driftwood and the bones and fur from animals that had been hunted. In 1721, Hans Egede introduced a new colonial architectural style whereby wooden houses were exported from Scandinavia as timber kits.
Some of the houses have even catered for the thousands of sled dogs with colorful kennels in their yards.
Though the possibility of a fire seemed impossible to us as we stomped our way through 10 feet of snow, the town has a wonderful fire station.
The hospital is rather unique and noticable as it pops above the piles of frozen snow.
A lot of the houses in Ilulissat Greenland are built on stilts as most of the time the ground is frosted. The elevation also helps with the massive amount of snow dumped across winter.
A lot of houses we encountered here were almost completely buried as were many modes of transport.
No camper-van trip this winter in Ilulissat!
For the love of dogs
Not only is Disko Bay scattered with icebergs fresh from the Ilulissat Ice Fjord, it is also notorious for its population of thousands of pure bred sled dogs. The Greenlandic sled dogs have their own territories across the country that includes all of the towns in the East and only the towns above the Arctic Circle in the West.
There are strict cross-breeding regulations that owners must abide to. Once a sled dog leaves the Arctic Circle, it can never go back. There are hundreds of dog farms in Ilulissat Greenland and we saw many puppies wandering outside of homes and farmhouses. The most amazing representation of the dog population here are the noises, all day and night we heard distant barking and puppy whimpering which was simply beautiful.
Most of the town’s traffic glide by you with the delicate sounds of hard-working paws and panting.
This is a place where dogs roam free, puppies trot the streets and the larger dogs guard their territories openly throughout the town.
Fun eateries
Trying to distinguish beautifully coloured buildings as houses and those that operated as a commercial business was a fun challenge in below freezing temperatures. We’d find ourselves running into warm hotel lobbies just to defrost a little. The town has a wide variety of food offerings including Hong Kong Cafe who offer an Asian twist on traditional Greenlandic cuisine, such as ‘Whale curry’ as well as familiar oriental cuisine. We popped into Cafe Tutu which appeared to offer take away snacks. The exterior reminded us of something from a cartoon.
We also tried the town’s signature dish and biggest export, Halibut fish served with a delicious curry sauce and caviar at the Inuit Cafe. We ordered a plate of Whale meat, served up like steak and tastes really rich, a little like liver. Remember whales are mammals, not fish!
The National drink of Greenland
The best dining experience we could have wished for came to us on the night after missing ‘one of the most spectacular displays of the Northern lights in years’. We missed the phenomena after listening to our bodies after the exhausting dog sled expedition and we had fallen asleep at 8pm! Desperate to catch the lights the following night, we caked on the layers and stood outside of our hotel reception in the brisk evening chill. A bartender working at the hotel came outside and offered to drive us across the town to a less light polluted spot. How could we say no? Although we didn’t see the lights that night, we were invited back to the bar to experience a signature ‘Greenlandic Coffee’.
The bartender started to prepare the ingredients of the hot cocktail: a good whisky, Kahlúa, Grand Marnier (for burning), hot coffee and Whipped cream. She told us a magical story as she poured in each ingredient individually.
Then she lights a flame and tells us the story of how the Greenlandic coffee became the most popular drink in the country.
The Whisky represents the strength of the Greenlandic men.
The Kahula is poured in to portray the sweet dark eyes of Greenlandic women
The fresh coffee is heated up and blended in to represent the darkness of the polar nights
Whipped Cream is then spotted on top representing the floating icebergs.
The Cointreau is heated up as the final ingredient.
And at the very end, she did something incredible as she told us the end of the story.
“If they are lucky in their meeting, they will see the beautiful northern lights burning in the sky”.
Attractions like nowhere else on earth
The Ice Fjord sits as a gallery of icebergs right beside the town, and there are many viewpoints from land where you can see it.
You can also opt to take a boat through the fjord or fly over.
The hike offers a great viewing point at the top of some icy steps, or hotel advised us to go up there after our boat trip was cancelled.
The viewpoint, that sits behind the town’s power plant, also offers some of the most amazing views of the town.
The Ice Fjord can be seen from almost anywhere around Disko Bay, we were fortunate enough to see the shredded icebergs float by our hotel room at Hotel Icefjord.
The Ilulissat museum is one of our favorite in the world. It is a small humble house converted into a 3 floor informative space rich in historical information and a wide variety of exhibits. We spent around 3 hours in there and still couldn’t get enough. The museum is run by the municipality with only 5 employees and welcomes up to 10,000 guests per year.
There is a stunning local history exhibition where we learned all about the story of the Sermermiut hunting trade, archaeological discoveries such as soap stones which were traded from other areas of Greenland back in the prehistorical era and the 5000 year history of dog sledding.
There is a dedicated exhibit about the UNESCO Ilulissat Ice Fjord and how it influences flora, fauna and human life in the town. You also get to see centuries old Greenlandic clothing which is purposely warm and colourful.
One of the temporary exhibits on the 3rd floor displayed hundreds of news articles about Greenland and Global warming, there were also responding comments from local citizens on how it has personally affected them.
Few places in the world offer you a chance to glide across the Arctic Circle with a little help from hard-working paws. Expeditions are offered all over the town for a duration of 2 hours to 14 days.
We experienced a magical two days out on the sled seeing Greenland at its purest, untouched by humanity with some of the most incredible views of the Arctic ice.
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