Icebergs have more in common with Instagram than you might expect. With both, what you see is only 10 per cent of what’s really there. For every towering wall of blue-tinged ice, every Viennetta-slab of pristine, swirly white, every pebble-dashed shard scraped from the base of a glacier floating on top of the frigid waters, there’s a far larger monolith, lurking beneath the surface.
Greenland, the vast island with two-thirds of its landmass above the Arctic Circle, is one of the very best places in the world to see icebergs. Head to the Ilulissat Icefjord – a Unesco world heritage site on the country’s crenellated west coast – and you can’t move for the things. This is the home of Sermeq Kujalleq, one of the fastest-moving and most active glaciers in the world, which calves a hard-to-comprehend 35km cubed of ice into the sea each year.
The view from my window at the town’s Hotel Arctic; multiple icebergs. Scattered across the bay as I walked the winding, wind-blown trails that snake around the fjord; myriad icebergs. And when taking a small boat ride between Ilulissat and the tiny village of Ilimanaq; a veritable gridlock of icebergs, through which our craft had to slalom and sometimes nudge our way.
So if icebergs are on your to-see list, go to Greenland. The only more productive glaciers in the world are in Antarctica, and – for those of us living in the northern hemisphere – that’s significantly harder to reach, requiring flights right to Argentina’s southern tip and then days at sea. With one-stop flights via Reykjavik and Copenhagen, getting to Greenland appears to be a veritable doddle. Yet, like Instagram and icebergs, journeys to and around Greenland that seem simple on paper can turn out to have hefty lurking unknowns, ready to deal your holiday plans a Titanic-style scuppering.
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Travelling here is a logistical challenge. Human settlements are few and far between – the population is a minuscule 55,000 in an area 10 times the size of the UK – and aren’t connected by roads, making flying the primary means of getting around. Currently, all but one of Greenland’s airports are tiny – think buildings the size of village community centres perched at the edge of runways the length of suburban cul-de-sacs. This requires airlines to use small propeller planes, and combining these with regular fog means flights frequently don’t run as planned, and delays can last from a few hours to a whole day.
Greenlanders themselves are sanguine about this. But as a tourist with limited time, it’s hard to stay so zen if your plans are thrown into disarray. I sampled a stress-free alternative to a trip constructed around flights, instead hopping along the island’s coast on an expedition cruise with Norwegian line HX (Hurtigruten Expeditions). With no settlements inland – 80 per cent of Greenland, basically the entire interior is an ice sheet – it’s the perfect destination for this type of travel.
As we cruised along the more-populated west coast we interspersed days spent in towns, where we learnt more about Greenland’s human history and its Inuit culture, with weighing anchor in deserted bays, where we headed out on RIBs (rigid-hulled inflatable boats) to experience its monumental natural landscapes. One day we buzzed up close to the face of a blue-tinged glacier, hearing the deafening cracks of the ice shifting as it prepared to calve.
The next, guillemots flitted low over the water and glaucous gulls soared high overhead as our boats hugged a coastline of multi-coloured cliffs before landing on a deserted beach. Here we hiked across the stark, moody shore backed by tree-free mountains, spotting a family of Arctic foxes playing in the distance before taking the polar plunge, splashing into the teeth-chattering waters right next to a mini-iceberg. The weather scuppered our plans to kayak, but instead, we helped onboard marine biologist Tim Lardinois with a citizen science project, taking samples of fjord water for researchers studying plankton, and later examining some of these tiny monsters under the microscope back on board.
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Life on HX’s Fridtjof Nansen couldn’t have been more comfortable. My stateroom had all the understated style you’d expect from a Scandinavian company, restaurants served up Nordic flavours, and every space, from the lounges and bars right down to the onboard sauna, had extensive glazing, allowing me to admire the epic scenery from every angle. On sunny days I made the most of the exterior observation decks, the pool and hot tubs too.
While this ship’s hardware is exceptional – there’s a high-tech science centre, and it’s one of the line’s two fully hybrid powered vessels – the guest experience also pivots on the crew, in particular the expedition team. This group of guides have qualifications in everything from marine biology to geology, ornithology to archaeology, creating a great mass of multi-discipline expertise you can mine during tours and through lectures or informal chats while the ship is underway.
Everything ran like clockwork, with a crew well practised in dealing with extreme weather by always having a plan B. My fellow guests had cruised here from Iceland, spending three days at sea on the way. As a time-poor journalist, I was flying in and out of the capital city, Nuuk, to sample part of their 16-day itinerary. Rather ironically, it wasn’t on board the ship that my trip hit its own metaphorical iceberg, but off; my international flights in both directions were delayed by 24 hours by bad weather.
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Happily, the situation is about to improve. On 28 November a new airport terminal and runway will open in the capital, allowing flag carrier Air Greenland to use an Airbus A330 – your traditional wide-body jet aircraft – on the route. A combination of the new runway, new landing technology and larger, less weather-affected aircraft should allow more international flights to run as planned. Two more new airports are due to be completed by 2026, in Ilulissat and Qaqortoq.
Knowing that its guests prefer action-packed landings to days spent at sea, HX has chosen to partner with Air Greenland, flying passengers in and launching sailings for next year from Nuuk, and using the time once “wasted” on sea days to sail further north than ever before. The ship will explore the Kane Basin in the High Arctic Thule region, calling at some of the most remote communities on Earth.
With the cruise industry almost synonymous with overtourism, I question whether these visitors will be welcome. Laali Berthelsen, HX product manager for the region and born-and-bred Greenlander, speaks of the need for controlled expansion. “We want more tourism, but not mass tourism,” she says. Current visitor numbers hit only a modest 100,000 per year, with the majority currently concentrated in the south and west coasts. Expedition cruising bears limited relation to its mainstream big sister. With Fridtjof Nansen’s maximum passenger capacity at 530, small communities are at a lesser risk of being overwhelmed, and the HX ships attempt to use local suppliers where possible, bringing direct economic benefits to the places they visit.
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HX is also offering pre and post-cruise stays, spreading that tourist spending further into the local economy. One of the options is in Ilimanaq, a tiny settlement a boat ride from Ilulissat, where tourists are a way of keeping the village alive. With a population hovering around 50, the settlement was in danger of collapse – the government would only supply services to places with a population of over 45 – when the local council, a Danish foundation and a Greenlandic tourism company came together to develop a solution. Ilimanaq Lodge opened in 2017; with 15 architect-designed cottages sitting at the edge of town overlooking the water, and two heritage buildings turned into the reception and restaurant.
While the experience sometimes felt discordant – the luxurious A-frame lodges with glazed front walls have hot showers, yet some of the village houses don’t have running water – the project has brought extra employment to the area, with locals offering tours of the village, guided hikes and dog-sledding adventures.
I wandered among the close-packed, brightly-painted wooden houses with guide John Geisler, passing the tiny school, which teaches just four children, and the village nurse’s hut. Then we stood by the football pitch, and he told me that on 21 June, Greenland’s National Day, the whole village will come together for a kick around and a cook-out – even the oldest inhabitant, a 93-year-old who has lived her whole life here.
As I sat on the deck of my lodge late that night watching the icebergs bob slowly in the bay under the golden gleam of the midnight sun, I decided that if increased tourism in Greenland can help keep communities like Ilimanaq alive, maybe its benefits will outweigh its disadvantages. Yet, like any iceberg, it needs to be approached with caution.
HX’s 2025 Greenland cruises start from €5,133 (£4,268), for a 10-day Serene Greenland itinerary departing in August. All-inclusive pricing covers accommodation, meals, drinks, onboard activities and most excursions; travelhx.com
