Today is our first landing in Greenland, and we are in the picturesque Keyser Franz-Joseph fjord, surrounded by glacier-moulded mountains and what turn out to be fast moving huge icebergs, the largest of which is 3-4 times larger than Le Boreal.
It’s a leg-stretch 45 minute walk with armed naturalists – apparently the polar bears are just as hungry in Greenland – that turns into a 2 hour amble up and down a smallish hill. Other than some much needed weight-bearing exercise, we see a still-white Arctic hare or two. It could have been the same one, but we saw it twice. Otherwise pretty quite on the wildlife front – the main difference between a fjord in South Georgia Island, for example, and the Arctic fjords is that the Arctic fjords do not seem to support the necessary food stocks for mammals and birds. In Drygalksi fjord in South Georgia, fur seals would bob up out of the water to check out passing monstrosity, and petrels and sea birds would be flying around the ship. Here – nothing. No hauled out seals, the occasional fulmar or kittywake, but otherwise…nothing but icebergs, bergy bits and towering mountain ranges.
As we make our way down the fjord after the morning walks, the local Greenland authority calls the ship to tell the Captain not to proceed as planned further down the fjord. We have had no internet or reliable satellite phones since entering the fjords in Greenland, and have no choice other than to turn around back the way we came, and try a different route to get to our intended destination – Scoresbysund, a large Inuit settlement. This will take all of the afternoon and most of the night. On the way in the evening, there are some short-lived spectacular reflections of the mountains in the fjords.
