Day 6: Sisimiut to Ilulissat

The ferry left Sisimiut at 21.00 last night and we had another night of sleeping in our cabin. The sea continued to be much calmer than I'd expected, with the result that I didn't get woken up by any big waves during the night. The first thing I knew was when my alarm went off at 07.00, I looked out of the window and I saw.... an iceberg!

This was quickly followed by another iceberg which was absolutely enormous - probably bigger than the ferry!

Wow, that was quite a start to the morning! The ferry was just about to pull in to the town of Aasiaat.

The town itself didn't look anything special but there were some amazing icebergs in the sea around it.

We were able to spend the morning in our cabin, watching them from our window.

There were some small icebergs...

...and some really, really big ones.

We were supposed to check out of our cabin at 12, so we packed up our things and went out on deck to look at the views there as the ferry got closer to Ilulissat.

We realised other people had spotted a huge iceberg on the opposite side of the boat.

Wow!

This one was pretty impressive too

There were so many different shapes and sizes.

We went back inside to find out what was being served for lunch in the cafe. It turned out to be a choice of meat dishes with rice. Tim had pork in a paprika sauce and I had what seemed to be chunks of beef in gravy. We've been really lucky not to be served fish on this trip! We could still watch the ice through the cafe window as we ate.

The closer we got to Ilulissat, the more and more icebergs we saw.

Tim went out on deck again to get some photos of them.

It was quite surreal to see so much ice floating in the sea, but really beautiful.

The ferry arrived punctually in Ilulissat at 13.00 and we joined the queue to disembark. There was a shuttle bus waiting which drove us from the port to the hotel where we're staying. It wasn't very far so we could have walked it if we needed to, but there would have been a fair amount of uphill so the shuttle was nice  

We checked into our room, which at first looked pretty average.

Then we realised we had a view.

A view of the icebergs

We settled in to the room for a while before going out for a walk.  The town of Ilulissat has a population of less than 5 000 people and almost as many sled dogs.

We passed a few of them as we walked up towards some nature trails on the edge of town.

There were even some little puppies.

After about a kilometre of walking, we made it to the Ilulissat Icefjord area, which is a World Heritage Site.

There's a visitor centre here, as well as a handful of marked trails. We started following what I thought was going to be an easy one; the "Yellow Trail", which was marked with splodges of yellow paint on rocks and advertised as being 2.7km.

We started off and I was amazed to find that there was still snow on the ground in places.

The whole area was beautiful but the trail soon degenerated into an exercise in clambering over rocks and/or trying not to slip on mud and slushy snow.

At one point I was considering giving up and turning back. Tim went ahead a bit to check whether the path got any easier, before coming back to say that it was definitely worth continuing.

I made it over the rocks and wow, look at that view!

And look at that view  

The ice was absolutely stunning.

And there was so much of it!

It had definitely been worth continuing for this

While we were admiring the view we noticed that while we'd been climbing up on this difficult path, other people seemed to be walking on a much easier path lower down.

We decided to go down and investigate that instead.

We made our way back to the visitor centre, a rather odd construction whose roof you can walk on.

From there we started following the trail.

It was mostly much easier than the one we'd been on, although there was a bit of snow to negotiate in places.

We were walking towards the most incredible views.

And we were really lucky that it still seemed to be cold enough for the area not to be swarming with mosquitos. I'd seen reviews online from people who had had real problems with them later in the summer.

The further we walked, the better the views of the ice.

After half an hour or so we'd nearly got to the point at which the marked trail ran out. Before we did we turned one last corner...

Wow.

The views were even better from here, including of this iceberg so big it looks like it's an actual island.

I didn't fancy climbing over all the rocks to get right to the edge

But luckily Tim did and he took a video

It was a really magical place and it was hard to turn our backs on it and start walking back up to the hotel.

Eventually we did though, climbing back up past the visitor centre and down past the sled dogs again.

Today has been such an exciting day  And it's not over yet, because we're going on another boat trip this evening. But that may have to wait until tomorrow's blog!