Day 3: Nuuk fjord

The boat trip I'd booked yesterday was due to depart at 9am this morning, from a place in Nuuk called the old colonial harbour. This was right on the opposite side of town to our hotel, so I set my alarm for 06.30 this morning so we had plenty of time to get up, investigate breakfast in the hotel and walk from one side of Greenland's capital to the other. The hotel breakfast wasn't quite as good as the one in Iceland yesterday, but there were bread rolls, cheese and coffee at least We finished it pretty quickly and were leaving the hotel by 07.45, climbing the hill from our hotel to the centre of town.

The boat trip was supposed to be 09.00 to 15.00, so we stopped at a small Spar supermarket to pick up some snacks, then continued on our way to what we hoped was the correct location.

When I'd purchased the tickets yesterday, they'd come with instructions to be at the old colonial harbour 15 minutes before the boat departed.

The slight catch was none of the maps we'd seen explicitly referred to any place as being the old colonial harbour. But we'd worked out which side of town the old colonial part was and could see there was a harbour there, so we were hoping for the best.

Here's a photo of me looking tired after two days of failing to get to Narsarsuaq

This old part of Nuuk looks really pretty, with brightly coloured wooden houses.

We climbed down to the harbour and found there was an office for the company we'd booked the tour with. Great, we must be in the right place, then! There was no one else around and the office was all shut up, but we were at least 30 minutes early. We sat down at some picnic benches to wait.

After a while two ladies arrived, opened up the office and began loading kayaking equipment into their car. But there was still no sign of any other passengers for the fjord tour and - more crucially - there was no sign of any boat.

I was worried that we'd ended up in the wrong place, despite our best efforts, so Tim went over to speak to the ladies. They explained that we were indeed in completely the wrong place and that the boat was departing from a place called "the tide steps" instead. Apparently they'd sent an email and an SMS about the change in location, but as we'd only booked at the last minute yesterday evening, we obviously hadn't received it.

We had no idea where the tide steps were so we were lucky that the ladies were extremely kind and said they'd drive us there. We just about managed to cram into the back of the car - Tim with his head ducked down under two paddles for the kayaks - and we got driven across Nuuk at speed. It turns out that the tide stairs are less than five minutes from our hotel, so we needn't have trekked from one side of town to the other!

Never mind, we made it to the right place and the boat still hadn't departed. In fact, there seemed to be some confusion about the boat. A small group of people departing on the kayaking tour first of all, leaving a larger group of people for the fjord. We started piling onto the boat, but it quickly became clear that there were more passengers than there were seats in the cabin. Oh dear!

We stood around for a bit while various staff members attempted to call a register. Both our names were on the list at least so that was reassuring, even if we didn't have a seat. I'm not quite sure what was happening because all the conversation was in Danish, but eventually a handful of us got moved to a much smaller boat where there was only room for five passengers and the captain. Our little boat then proceeded to follow the larger boat out of Nuuk harbour. Phew!

Before too long we had left the town of Nuuk behind and were travelling up through the fjord.

Nuuk fjord is the second-largest fjord system in the world.

Our captain told us that the fjord is so large, the entire Faroe Islands could fit in here

Regardless of size, it's a really beautiful place.

There were so many mountains - and so much snow on them.

There was space to sit inside the boat - which is where we spent a lot of the journey to keep warm - but we were able to go outside whenever we wanted to take photos.

And before too long I caught sight of something...

...Our first floating icebergs were just visible on the horizon.

Shortly afterwards the captain spotted something too and we all went outside to take a look.

It's tiny and in the distance, but you may just be able to spot a whale's tail in this photo

The captain stopped the boat and we hung around for a while, trying to get more sightings of the whale. There was a lot of pointing the camera at the sea and getting photos with no whale in them

Can't really complain with photos like these, though!

Every so often we'd see a sudden spurt of water and the whale would make a brief appearance!

Then we'd be desperately trying to snap a photo...

...before the tail disappeared under the water once again.

I don't know much about whales, but the captain told Tim it was a humpback.

It was really cool to see anyway

Once we'd finished whale-watching, the boat began to progress closer to the ice.

As you can tell from the photos, the chunks of ice we passed began to get bigger.

They also began to get closer together.

The captain explained that it's hard to know how far down the fjord they can get on any given day, because the quantity and position of the ice is constantly changing.

He also tried to explain why sometimes the ice looks white, sometimes blue and sometimes completely transparent. I didn't quite follow, but I think it was something to do with the amount of oxygen in it.

As we followed the other boat, we began to get glimpses of the enormous glacier on the horizon. The glacier spills down towards the sea and the chunks of ice break off to float through the fjord.