I woke up nice and early feeling pretty refreshed. My breakfast in the teepee was mostly German bread with ham, cheese and coffee.
Julia and I were both ready quickly and weren’t certain if we had forgotten something important. While we were packing, one of the huge icebergs in the bay split in half pretty spectacularly and sent waves rocking the kayaks that we had placed in the water. There was loads of slush in the bay when we left. Our group seems so multicultural, particularly because Rosa’s English isn’t super strong, so those of us who speak Spanish or French are conversing quite a lot in those languages as well.
It was a great morning paddling. We covered 13.5km in the morning, stopping for a pee break at a beach. Our route was a zig zag – up the fjord, round a corner and then back up the next fjord between looming mountains with steep sides that plunge into the water and straight down into the depths. The water is a turquoise so beautiful that it’s difficult to describe.
I can’t believe Greenland has such fantastic weather and such beautiful water. I could have been in a tropical paradise.
Our lunch picnic stop was a pretty amazing beach guarded over by a large iceberg. We were greeted by a baby reindeer too.
After lunch we had another fairly big journey. I rounded a corner and saw a large glacier reaching down to the water at the end of the fjord. The distances are monumental and totally misleading – I would have guessed it was a couple of hours away but Ruben said it would have taken more than 7 hours to reach it!
There wasn’t quite as much variety in bird life as I would have guessed. We paddled close to a cliff with seagulls nesting with tiny chicks. I took this photo of Ruben with them…
… And crashed to a dead halt when I hit this iceberg!
We had to slalom through an ice slush field which was a lot of fun. Such slow going compared to open water.
During a break we saw a huge swell roll up the beach caused by a large iceberg break up.
We got our first view of our local glacier. A real variety of blues and 30-40m high. During the afternoon I had been picking up small chunks of perfectly clear ice and eating it – so amazing to hold this ice, older than civilization, in the palm of my hand. Mind blowing really.
Our campsite for the night (ended up being three nights) was a flat-topped moraine hill above a very flat stoney beach. We had to hump and dump the kayaks a long way from the water to make sure that a combination of high tide and swell from glacier calving couldn’t wash up the beach and take them away!
After setting up the larger tent with Julia I had a refreshing wash in the river. We had a lovely veggie pasta dinner and then I watched a gorgeous peaceful sunset over the distant mountains listening to the glacier rumbling. My left wrist had pretty bad tendonitis by this point. Didn’t impact paddling too much but lifting and carrying things was a real challenge.
Ruben dishing out dinner
Very exciting ❄️💎💙 👍🏻 x
LikeLike