Before I got too close to land, and while there were breaks in the cloud cover, I dropped to 1200 feet, where I could make out white caps on the ocean below. I tracked just offshore. With the cloud ahead seeming to be lower, it was more reassuring to be above the sea, rather than land, which has a habit of creeping up on you.
Checking out the sparse but green landscape was fun until the weather deteriorated. The forecast that morning said there would be a few scattered clouds around the airport at 600 feet. By the time I got close, the overcast cloud completely covered the sky at 600 feet. For the last twenty minutes I flew at 500 feet, through drizzling rain.
Before arriving over Reykjavík, on radio I was handed over to the airport control tower, which cleared the Sun to approach below the thick cloud. There were no other planes around. I had a clear view of the runway, which was reassuring. Despite the tiring flying, I felt a great sense of relief and joy at seeing the unique landscape of Iceland. For a fleeting moment I considered reaching out of the window so I could install my camera in a bracket above the cockpit and remotely photograph the spectacular approach. But the Sun was barely above the ground now, and flying was more important than tourist snaps.
After nine hours and ten minutes, the Sun touched down on the huge runway at 6.30 p.m. A marshal led her to a parking bay next to – to my absolute glee – a perfectly restored Catalina, the plane my grandfather served on in the Royal Australian Air Force, and the Qantas flying boat used on the Perth–Ceylon nonstop service. I felt like a chick tucking itself under its mother’s wing for the night.
I later photographed the Sun under the Catalina’s giant wing. Whether deliberate or not, the design similarity of the two craft, sixty years apart, was remarkable. The Catalina, which was based in Britain and owned by a tourism company called Plane Sailing, had been chartered by an English private school to transport a leadership group of students on an adventure trip. The Catalina had dropped them off at a lake in Greenland, where they were hiking for a couple of weeks, and would pick them up when they finished. It was an impressive project, although I wouldn’t have wanted to pay those school fees.
Reykjavík airport is close to the city, and I was quickly at a hotel and changed out of my flying overalls. The ‘old town’ has a three-screen art-house cinema and bar, which was not only very cool for its style and range of films shown, but also charged more for Icelandic films than Hollywood movies, such was the demand. I tried – and failed – to imagine selling that idea back home.
I walked the length of the city and found a highly recommended grill for dinner. They were proud of their beef, but, coming from Australia, with Iceland’s proximity to a vast ocean, I was more interested in trying the seafood. The crustacean bisque was probably the most delicious seafood soup I had ever consumed. There was another local speciality on the menu I wasn’t expecting; it was exotic, and ethically troubling, but I had to try it. The seared fillet of minke whale, served with mushroom, was delicious. I drew the line at eating a puffin, though.
With the brief sunset occurring around midnight, I still had plenty of time to look around. One of the best ways to see Reykjavík is on one of its new fleet of electric tuk-tuks, three-wheel vehicles that are like overgrown golf carts. My driver was a lovely young guy who was proud of his country. As we crisscrossed town, he gave me a lesson on Icelandic history – from settlement in the ninth century, to Danish rule, farming and fishing. In 1944, while Denmark was occupied by Germany, Iceland simply declared its independence. It was a very adroit move: Denmark had no power and Germany had bigger problems to worry about. So that was that.
Reykjavík has a population of 220,000, and its old town is small enough to be explored entirely on foot. The next morning I left the hotel with a pocketful of leftover euros. While the local currency was the Icelandic króna, I was hoping to use up the coins in a touristy place that catered to the cruise ships that often called by.
A few doors up from the hotel I came across a museum established by a University of Iceland academic. The entrance charge was eight euros. The exhibits were bottled specimens of penises and lampshades made from stretched whale foreskins. I had heard of the museum from the film The Final Member, which had screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival years earlier. It followed the academic’s search for the last missing penis for his collection – yes, he had one from every mammal, except one of us, a Homo sapiens. The whale penises were really very large.
Seven minutes later I had seen enough and began my search for a drysuit. A marine store at the docks had a couple, but the best one wasn’t in the right size, and the one that fitted was too heavy to fly in. I caught a taxi across town to a small kayak shop, which had an amazingly thorough range of drysuits at reasonable prices. Buying one in Iceland was going to be as easy as picking up a pair of board shorts in Bondi.
Spoiled for choice, I must have spent an hour trying on different suits before settling on one that was flexible and fitted well. It had one very vital feature: the full-length zip could be undone in flight, allowing use of the all-important red bottle. I felt an almost physical sense of relief at the purchase – which, with hindsight, I now think was a sign of my inner fear about the trip ahead.
The next destination was Kulusuk, a tiny island on the east coast of Greenland, and 700 kilometres away. It was the closest airport in Greenland to Reykjavík, and would be the starting point for my tracking of the Greenlandic coast over the following days. The weather looked good too.
Early the next morning I was at the airport. As I was filling out my paperwork, a smartly dressed older gentleman asked if I was flying the old silver seaplane. He had a few questions, and I explained my trip to him. He returned soon after and introduced me to his family. They had stopped in Iceland for a couple of nights, as they did every summer, on their way from the United States to Europe in their private jet. He told his grandchildren, daughter and son-in-law what I was doing. ‘This man is an adventurer,’ he said.
I was pretty chuffed.
22.
The Village at the End of the World
‘Ah, the serenity.’
DARRYL KERRIGAN, THE CASTLE (1997)
The five-hour flight to Greenland was smooth. One of the advantages of flying in near-freezing temperatures is that there is often less turbulence. There are few or no thermal updrafts caused by geological features or man-made objects on the ground, such as metal roofs, that heat the air above them. A drawback is that very few planes can land on snow, and it’s dangerous for seaplanes to land where there might be sea ice, as it can pierce fuselages and sink planes.
About two-thirds of the way, the cloud all but disappeared. As the Sun neared Greenland, what I feared at first was low cloud, perhaps even fog – which is impossible to land in, even for instrument pilots – turned out to be broken ice covering the sea to the horizon, a stark if foreboding white visual feast.
Kulusuk airport was hidden from view by a mountain. The US government built the gravel runway in the 1950s so it could access a radar dome on top of the peak. It left in the 1980s. The indigenous Inuit population of 250 now relies on the airport for supplies when ships can’t get through the ice, which is most of the year. A few adventure tourists exploring the Arctic region use it too. There is one rather basic hotel, next to the airport.
Flying in over floating ice and beneath the rocky, snow-covered mountains was thrilling. Sitting in the cockpit, I was no longer a short, balding, middle-aged businessman from suburban Melbourne, but a daring and resourceful pilot touching down on a remote landing strip skirting the Arctic Circle.
The temperature was about 9 degrees, which was warmer than expected, and the sky was clear and blue, the colour so vivid it felt almost unreal, like the work of a celestial painter.
My plan was to walk. It didn’t take long to execute. I walked from the airport to the hotel. I walked along the only road to the village. I walked around the village. I walked back to hotel. There wasn’t a lot to see, but what was t
here was interesting.
The humble village was set inside a small, semi-circular harbour. The houses were constructed from basic materials and had the same concrete half-ground floors I had seen in Iceland. Their timber top halves used a lot of plywood sheets. With only one supply ship a year, building materials would all have been planned for the one delivery. That led to the houses being built in the same style with the same roofing material. Most of the windows were the same size, either singles or in pairs. All the doors seemed identical. The only real point of difference was the paint jobs, which were all done in primary colours. White was used for window frames and nothing else. I never expected physical isolation to create such architectural homogeneity; I would have assumed the opposite.
There were lots of husky dogs, which power the residents’ primary form of transport for much of the year: the sled. Children were running around, playing and enjoying the outdoors. There were even a few trampolines; perhaps one year the transport ship had decided to bring trampolines for the whole town.
There was one store, one hotel, a church and many burial areas. The owners of the one public place to eat – the hotel – had to plan their purchase of supplies with great care. The nearest villages were over 500 kilometres away to both north and south, or on the other side of Greenland.
I spent one night in Kulusuk, the most isolated place I had been. Its rugged beauty was so unexpected that it became, for a time, the most culturally memorable stop of the trip for me, surpassing even the classic charm of Lake Como or the chaotic stimulation of Ahmedabad. Even though I doubt I will ever return, I will always remember the sense of community I experienced there. Very few pilots visit. I was glad I had decided to opt for multiple stops in Greenland.
Another beautiful clear sky greeted me at 6 a.m. I walked from the hotel to the airport, where the Southern Sun had spent a solitary night outside on the bitumen in front of the terminal. The helpful airport handlers sold me some of their snowmobile petrol, instead of the much more expensive and less desirable avgas. I started up the Sun and tried to manoeuvre her alongside the bowser, but couldn’t get close enough. We had to use a couple of jerry cans instead, and one of the tower staff kindly spent half an hour helping me transfer fuel to the plane.
I farewelled Kulusuk by flying off directly over the town. I snapped a few photos and levelled off at 500 feet, so I’d stay out of the way of an inbound commercial flight, although it was also a great way to enjoy the view. After clearing the area, I pushed the Sun up to a safer height. The GPS indicated that her ground speed had fallen by ten knots, which meant that the wind at the higher altitude was a five-knot headwind. This minor change in speed would add nearly an hour to my flight to Narsarsuaq, a town near Greenland’s southern tip. Well, there’s only one thing to do, I thought, and dropped back down to 500 feet and the favourable five-knot tailwind.
With the wind to my back, and the land – well, an ice-laden sea – closer to my feet, I enjoyed the ride immensely. The air was smooth and I looked down to see a few seals basking on ice in the sun. To my right was the landmass of Greenland, which rose brutally from the sea. More ice was visible than rock, and it literally towered above me. An hour out of Kulusuk, the tailwind dissipated. I climbed up to my planned 4500 feet, which wasn’t as exciting, and followed the coast most of the way. Reassuringly, the air-traffic controllers were in contact the whole way through VHF radio repeaters. I had expected to lose them a few hours out.
I could have flown across Greenland rather than go around it. But the ice cap that covers most of the country, which is five times the size of California and almost as big as Western Australia, reaches 10,000 feet high. Even with the sea full of ice, I felt more comfortable flying over water. I’d been watching the weather for a while, and the winds seemed to swirl around the top of the ice cap, which is a large heat sink that has a drastic effect on the surrounding atmospheric conditions. The coastline also offered spectacularly dramatic views.
About 120 kilometres from Narsarsuaq, I turned inland. Continuing to follow the coast would have added nearly a thousand kilometres to the trip. At 8500 feet the Sun was well above the ice cap. I weaved through several fjords and past green hills that would have looked at home in rural Victoria.
When I switched to the Narsarsuaq airport radio frequency, I couldn’t raise the control tower. I suspected the Sun was flying so low that the hills were blocking the signal. Most flights arrived from the north or the west, but I was coming in from the south-east. I didn’t like entering the airport’s 12-mile control zone without making direct radio contact first, but I didn’t seem to have a choice. I had at least spoken to the only other plane in the area, an Air Greenland Dash 8, whose pilot told the tower I was coming in.
The landing was simple. No one appeared when I parked – handling agents aren’t required in Greenland – so I just wandered into the terminal building.
Narsarsuaq was even smaller than Kulusuk. It seemed to exist only to serve the airport, which was a transfer point for helicopters, ships and boats going elsewhere. A tiny museum provided a brief history of the lush area, which gave Greenland its ironic name. The Viking Erik Thorvaldsson, known as Erik the Red, was banished from Iceland in 982 after provoking a fight that killed two of his neighbour’s sons. He moved to the uninhabited Greenland. When others followed, Erik allocated fjords to each family and kept the best for himself. It was like assigning rooms in a ski lodge: whoever arrives first usually gets the biggest room.
The airport, which was long enough for B-52 bombers, was built by the US military during World War II. A major transit base on the way to Europe, it was active for decades. Many of the buildings still there were built during the Cold War. I suspected there were way more dormitory rooms than the base would ever need now; the majority of beds were certainly empty.
I wandered down the only road to a dock where a few fishing boats and lots of runabouts were tied up. It seemed that nearly every resident had a little boat in the water or on a trailer. Teenagers in wetsuits were jumping from the jetty into the sea. University researchers were loading equipment onto a ship. Without much else to do, I helped them carry boxes and crates on board.
The sun was hanging just above the horizon, which meant it was dinnertime. After perusing the menu, I felt it would breach the spirit of the trip if I didn’t order the reindeer roll. Tastes like kangaroo, I thought, and I always thought that tasted like deer – oh, of course . . .
One of the remarkable aspects of the entire trip was my meteorological good fortune. From Australia to England, I lost only one day to bad weather. Since leaving London, I’d lost a day in Ireland. A week earlier it had been so bad in southern Greenland that planes couldn’t take off. A French couple flying across the Atlantic were stuck in Narsarsuaq for seventeen days. There isn’t a lot to do there. I don’t know if the marriage survived.
I was waiting at the airport tower when it opened at 8 a.m. the next morning. A Swiss airline pilot was delivering a high-tech four-seat Cirrus, the private aircraft equivalent of a BMW 7 Series. The Cirrus flies about 100 knots faster than the Sun, and he was transporting it from the United States to Europe. He seemed to be laughing at me without actually making any sound. Hey, I thought, while we can both land on water, I can do it more than once.
My plan was to follow a fjord to the sea. I would then fly north just inside the coastline and check out the fjords, lakes and glaciers all the way to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. There were some magical spots along the way, including a mountaintop that was so flat on the summit you could land a plane on it. I marked the location in case I ever returned.
Two hours into the flight, I realised I’d made a terrible mistake: my beloved cashmere jumper was still in Narsarsuaq. Light yet warm, and with a zip-up neck, it had been given to me by Tim for Christmas in Boston two years earlier. It had great sentimental and practical value. It was also the only jumper I had packed, so I seriously considered turning back. But the winds would have been against the Sun the w
hole way. Instead, I radioed the control tower and informed them of my sartorial emergency. They promised to send out a search party.
Nuuk is inside what may technically be a wide fjord. Or perhaps it’s a bay – I’m not sure. But it is protected from the sea, which is why it has the main shipping port for goods arriving in the country, and is Greenland’s biggest city. Transport hubs drive economic activity, which in turn attract people.
Air Greenland operates small Dash 8 passenger planes from Nuuk airport all day, and a new pilot was practising landing when I arrived. Made by Canadian manufacturer Bombardier Aerospace, the Dash 8s need the whole runway – which is carved into the side of a mountain, and a relatively short 3117 feet – to take off and land, which meant the pilot had to nail it, each and every time. For an amateur pilot like me, that was pretty impressive. If I had been a commercial pilot, I would have loved to fly Dash 8s for Qantas Link around regional Australia. It looked like real flying, planes with propellers connecting communities.
The Southern Sun was the airport’s only overnight visitor, and I tied her up next to an avgas storage tank. A tall man bounded over; he seemed happy to see me. Thomas Branner Jespersen used to be an air-traffic controller and now worked for Air Greenland as a ground handler. He was also a private pilot and owned a Lake Buccaneer, one of the most popular small seaplanes in the world. Greenland’s flying boat community had exactly one member, so Thomas was excited to see a flying boat in town. After a quick introduction, we agreed to meet for a drink after dinner.
Voyage of the Southern Sun Page 16