Greenland is arguably the least green place I’ve ever visited, although it’s certainly not lacking in colour. Houses are painted London bus red, canary yellow and fuschia.
A sea of ice spilling out of the Ilulissat Icefjord, the largest icefjord in the world, is so blindingly clean-looking that it would make my meticulous mother-in-law weep for joy. Then there are the blues: deep midnight in the ocean and electric dragonfly blue where crevasses have formed on the icebergs.
I’ve always had an acute case of champagne ideas on a lemonade budget. So-called “expensive” destinations don’t scare me, and I’ve already visited Santorini, Mykonos, Copenhagen, Paris, Monaco and the Faroe Islands for peanuts.
My methods have become less extreme as I’ve grown up. I no longer hitchhike to the airport, for example, or spend the night on an airport couch before a 7am flight.
Greenland was the ultimate challenge. The cheapest tour I could find online cost more than £6,700pp, without flights. I did it for just over £1,500, with flights from Copenhagen included.
The best way to reduce costs is to create your own small, group tour, so I travelled with my partner Val and two friends. As a four, we could get self-catered accommodation throughout for under £50pp.
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We arrived in Ilulissat on what skiers would call a bluebird day. It may have been beautiful weather in the Arctic Circle, but in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, it was a different story.
Val and I had planned to arrive before our friends to go hiking, but the severe weather in Nuuk left them both stuck in Copenhagen for two extra days. Greenland, for all its merits, was an exercise in patience — and the importance of watertight travel insurance.
The hike that had lured us to Greenland early, thus avoiding the storm and bleak buffets at Copenhagen airport, runs north for six hours along the coast from Ilulissat to the hamlet of Oqaatsut. The land was open and immense, the scrubby moss and stone broken by occasional houses on stilts, the sea sprinkled with smaller icebergs like dandruff to our left.
Oqaatsut had no roads, a church which doubled up as the school, and far more sled dogs than people. The two restaurants in town were closed (we were the only tourists), and so the affable owner of our B&B let us into his (closed) hotel to make ourselves pasta.
Bleary-eyed, we awoke at 4am to watch the Northern Lights (AuroraReach is a helpful resource for this), but we convinced ourselves they were a hallucination. When we woke again, the sunrise had turned the icebergs golden against a peachy gradient sky like a Powerpoint background.
Kayaking around the icebergs was cancelled day after day due to the swell, so Val and I reverted to my favourite, free mode of transport: two feet.
Ilulissat has four marked hiking trails: red, yellow, blue and the World Heritage Trail, so we tried them all. Each gives you at least partial views over the icefjord, and icebergs calving and cracking ice isn’t a view you get sick of in a hurry.
The Icefjord Centre (allegedly designed to look like the wingspan of a snow owl), was so informative that I’m sure we could have aced a pub quiz on Greenland’s history, biology and glacier formations at the end. One day, knowing that the northern shrimp changes gender at age five will come in handy.
Some 47 hours later than intended, our friends landed in Ilulissat, just in time for a sunset boat trip around the icebergs. It was worth every penny.
The arches and shapes seen up close from the water were surreal, like stepping into a Studio Ghibli film.
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“How long will we be on the cruise for?” asked my friend Darren when I sent him the trip itinerary. Poor Darren.
The Sarfaq Ittuk ferry is a weekly passenger ship which runs from Ilulissat in the Arctic Circle to Qaqortoq in the south and back up again.
Most of the beds are in dorms, with some four bed cabins and suites, but it’s a far cry from a cruise. The meals were diabolically bad; the views diabolically good.
For the 38 hours we spent on board, we lapped up views of glaciers, the most uninhabited and sparse-looking mountains I’d ever seen, and nightly shows of the Aurora Borealis, free of light pollution, which left us in no doubt that we weren’t hallucinating.
On the morning of the second day, we docked for two hours in the little town of Sisimiut, where almost every house had a wooden sled outside. It was enough time for a decent leg stretch to stave off cabin fever, before returning to prison meals and a boat which lurched so dramatically we were constantly lunging for our wine glasses.
If you’ve seen The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, you’ll think you’ve seen Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. These scenes were actually filmed in Iceland, and the real Nuuk is much larger and much bleaker-looking. There isn’t much to do, although the Greenland National Museum is an excellent and a very thorough look at some 4,000 years of Greenlandic history.
From the city, visitors can also embark on some exceptionally rugged treks (although they weren’t a patch on what we’d done in Ilulissat.) Since flights to Greenland are regularly delayed, we threw ourselves into the spirit of things.
We hiked to apocalyptic-looking lakes where every last puddle was coated in ice, and joined in with what locals assured us was a Greenlandic tradition – spending all your money on the last day of the month at Daddy’s, the sticky, smelly local pub. As the rest of our trip had gone to budget, the indulgence could be allowed.
More incredibly, in spite of being in the ‘big city’, Nuuk’s population of just 20,000 didn’t create enough light pollution to stop us enjoying the Aurora Borealis each evening.
Where to stay
Anna largely stayed in self-catering accommodation booked via booking.com, averaging at £50pp per night, plus one night at Hotel SØMA in Ilulissat (from £80pp with breakfast.)
How to do it
Air Greenland flights from Copenhagen to Ilulissat via Nuuk, and from Nuuk back to Copenhagen , cost £800pp.
The Sarfaq Ittuk ferry cost £300pp for two nights in a four-bed cabin (all meals included). Tours (a sunset iceberg cruise booked via Inuit Café and museum entries in Ilulissat and Nuuk) cost £100pp total.
Anna spent nine nights in Greenland, with the essentials costing £1,580pp. She largely planned her trip using the Bradt guide to Greenland.
