Voyage North - a photo essay: (16) Nuuk

Nuuk is the capital and largest city in Greenland, containing almost a third of the country's population. We had a surprisingly short stay scheduled there (half a day) so I had booked on a guided bus tour, to get an overview of the whole place, intending to visit at least the museum afterwards. However, the arrival of the buses was delayed and the weather was misty, with cloud down to very low levels and raining much of the time. Nuuk is not a picturesque place - at least not in that weather.

The fjord and mountains may well be beautiful on a fine day, but we saw a lot of murkiness!








These photos were taken though a bus window, sometimes a moving bus, and they give a glimpse of thefamiliar ingredients of a Greenland town: the coloured wooden buildings; the red (usually) Old Church (I didn't get a picture of the white New Church); the city graveyard, to the same design as the others we saw (on this occasion on the outskirts) . . . and so on:

We also saw a small-boats harbour. Few people in the city own a car, as there's very little use for it. You can get around the city's roads by bus or taxi and can reach a lot of it by boat. For the majority of the year it's more useful to have a snowmobile and/or dogs and a sled. Professional people, with the income to own private transport, would most likely have a boat and a snowmobile. Boats are moored in small harbours and there are parking lots on the outskirts for snowmobiles. Very few houses have land for parking boat trailers or snowmobiles, though sleds can be kept on roofs, or propped against side walls.

The redeeming feature of this trip was our guide, a mixed-heritage woman with a Danish mother and an Inuit father. Her main job was a government recruitment consultant, hiring specialist overseas medical personnel (mostly from Scandinavia and Germany) to work in Greenland on fixed-term contracts, as there is a shortage of highly skilled local people. In addition to this, she works a second job in the summer as a tourist guide, and in the winter as a barmaid - clearly someone of great energy and purpose! She was unsympathetic to the culture of welfare dependency, saying that if you want to work, there is work. But she also talked about the problems, especially in the poorer parts of the city, with excessive alcohol and tobacco use; these being among the many contributory factors to the worrying increase in cases of TB infection across Greenland, as well as in Nuuk itself.

She talked also about the economic and housing issues . . . they're like any capital city anywhere! Most people rent their homes, you have to be very well-paid to buy, there are economically poor areas with sub-standard and run-down housing, there are nice middle-class suburbs, and there are very wealthy areas, often overlooking a picturesque stretch of the fjord, with expensive, individually designed large houses. Rents aren't cheap - as in any capital city - but your rent does include all your utilities and local taxes. She also explained that, gradually, the smallest settlements are depopulating and people are moving into the larger towns and cities, so rural subsistence is swapped for urban unemployment. East Greenland is particularly impacted, and West Greenlanders regard them a bit as slow-paced country bumpkins. For all that it's a northern-latitude land, and part of Denmark, it really has to be regarded as a 'developing country', and our expectations as tourists had to be tailored accordingly (the tour bus - in fact a rather ramshackle school bus -  that turned up late . . . they'd just forgotten to come).

Our guide also talked most interestingly of trying to keep traditional Inuit ways alive even in the city. 'The Inuit way is that everything has a season. You have to gather when things are in season and make them last, because they won't be in season again for another twelve months.' She explained that her father had taught her to shoot, that she had a hunting rifle and a reindeer hunting permit. She shoots her quota during the very short season, has three large freezers for the butchered meat, and, 'That feeds me and my family for the year at very low cost and it means I can afford to buy an imported duck for Christmas.'


At the end of the tour, I decided that I didn't want to walk round the town and back to the ship in the cold and the rain, and my two consecutive late nights of photography out on deck were catching up with me; so I took the bus back to the ship, had a light lunch and a long siesta!