Kulusuk Part 2 (the Seal Hunt)

The hunters who had invited me onto their boat were cousins called Kuluk and William. Only Kuluk spoke English, so after checking I was really, really sure I wasn't scared of seeing dead, bleeding seals up close the pair mostly chatted to each other and left me to my own devices in the back seat of the boat. This was a relief - there is a limit to how many times I want to have the 'where are you from/what are you doing' conversation. 

Soon after we set out, Kuluk shot an eider drake that was sitting on the water. Once we had sailed up to the body, he reached overboard with a long stick to which a large fishing hook had been tied to grab the bird and said 'Are you sure you're not scared? It's bleeding.' Resisting the urge to roll my eyes at him, I told him (again) that no, I was not scared. 'Ok. Get that plastic bag and hold it open.' I did as I was told, and Kuluk dumped the drake into the bag, before taking the bag with his free hand and throwing it behind one of the front seats of the boat. 'Those birds are especially delicious' he informed me. 

We sailed up to the edge of the sea ice, and after scanning it with enormous binoculars for a few moments, Kuluk announced that he could see a seal. He passed the binoculars to his cousin, who agreed with him and then handed the binoculars to me. I looked where he pointed and saw nothing but ice and the base of the mountains, but I nodded and gave the binoculars back. William then got into what appeared to be one of those white paper 'CSI suits' (for camouflage). After testing the ice with a large, metal-pointed wooden stick, he jumped out of the boat and Kuluk passed him a rifle. He set off across the ice, testing it with the stick before every step.

Kuluk said that it would probably be an hour before William made it across the ice to the seal, shot it and brought it back to the boat, so he sailed away to see if he could shoot any more eider. Several times, a group of three or four birds flew near the boat and Kuluk took aim with a shotgun, but he did not succeed in killing any. 

When we returned to the ice, William was waiting for us without a seal. It had noticed him and gone down through a hole in the ice, and although he had waited for it, it didn't come back up. A short while later Kuluk shot at a seal bobbing and down in the water, but he missed. 

We sailed round to a different piece of sea ice, and once again William got out of the boat to try and shoot it. The seal was much closer this time, so Kuluk stayed at the edge of the ice to wait for him. We saw William lie down to shoot, then heard the shot, but as he did not stand up we assumed he had missed, the seal had gone down through its hole and he was hoping it would come back up soon. Kuluk instructed me to stand up and keep a watch for the seal from the back of the boat while he looked out at the front, in case the seal swam under the ice and came up in the water near the boat. 'And take your life jacket off', he said. 'Seals are afraid of red.' Neither he nor William had been wearing a life jacket, but Kuluk had given one to me because 'the tourists get scared without one.'

While William still lay on the ice waiting for the seal to reappear, it stuck its head out of the water close to a small ice floe, a short distance from the boat. Kuluk carefully sailed up to the ice, climbed out and said 'Pass me the gun. The small gun.' I growled something under my breath about knowing the difference between a shotgun and a rifle, and passed him the gun. He shot the seal, and when he had sailed close enough to the body to reach it I had already retrieved the hook stick from where it was kept. He thanked me, and heaved the body onto the back of the boat. It was a ringed seal. 'There are two types of seal in this fjord, and this is the tastier one. But it is smaller.', said Kuluk. 

Because the seal was shot in the water, the blood billowed into a huge cloud, making it readily apparent why seals are afraid of red. Kuluk tied the hind flippers together with a type of noose, then tied the tail of the noose onto another piece of rope secured to the boat. He looked over at the ice and said 'William hasn't noticed us getting the seal. He's still waiting for it to come back. When he comes back to the boat, don't say anything, and I'll say we didn't see the seal come back up.'

William continued to lie in wait on the ice for about ten minutes, then came  back to the boat looking crestfallen. He sat down without noticing the seal carcass, and once he was in his seat there was no way he could see it. Eventually he stood up and turned around, looking for seals in the water. He must have seen the seal at that point, because he started to laugh, as did Kuluk and I. 

Later, William saw another ringed seal in the water, which he shot from the boat and tied to the back in the same way that Kuluk had done. At about half nine, after roughly six hours on the water, Kuluk announced that he was getting cold and we were sailing back now. However, not long after that he saw a seal quite far away in the water. We sailed nearer to it, navigating through many small ice floes, some of which scraped against the boat. 'Hey, this is like that movie with a boat in it', Kuluk remarked. When we had at last got close enough to the seal to shoot, Kuluk missed. On our journey back through the ice to the harbour, Kuluk received a text from Jóhanna inviting him and me to eat with her at the hostel, as she had bought and was cooking a halibut. If I wanted to eat it I had to pitch in 50 DKK (5 GBP) for my share, while Kuluk said he would thank her and pay by giving her the eider he had shot. 

The meal was delicious. The soundtrack to the meal was My Head is an Animal by the Icelandic band of Monsters and Men. On repeat. I am linking you this song in particular (http://tinyurl.com/na6zfqs) so that you can listen and have it stuck in your head until the end of time, just like I have to. 

Kulusuk Part 1

Kulusuk means black guillemot's breast  in both Tunumiit Oraasiat and Kalaallisut. The name refers to the appearance of the mountain near the settlement, and applies to the mountain, the settlement and the island on which they are located. In summer there is one dirt road which goes from the airport into the centre of the settlement, and in winter there are no roads at all - the only transport is by snowmobile or dog sled. When I arrived at the airport I managed to hitch a ride to the other end of the road with a local. The road had been ploughed out of the snow which had not yet melted, so in several places we seemed to be driving through a snow tunnel as the snow banks were a few metres deep. When we reached the end of the road, I was pointed in the vague direction of the hostel and left to climb up a hill, sinking up to my knees in the snow and trying to figure out which one of the houses was the hostel. 

None had a sign indicating that it was the hostel, so I went for the building which had several identical kayaks stored outside. This turned out to be a good guess. I met Jóhanna, an Icelandic anthropologist who runs the hostel in the summer to support herself while she does research in Kulusuk for her MA. In the winter she goes to university in Berlin. 'I've put a mattress out upstairs for you,' she said, 'but you can move it if you want - find the good karma!' I thanked her, and took my bag upstairs. The hostel had two rooms - a kitchen, eating and sitting area downstairs, and a sleeping area upstairs. The location Jóhanna had selected for my mattress was enclosed on three sides by two walls and the pile of spare mattresses, so I decided to leave it there. 

The toilet (like all rural Greenlandic toilets) was a large bucket with a strong black plastic bag in it, in a cubicle in the porch. The bag is taken away three times a week by a man on a 'chocolate tractor' (or in winter, a chocolate snowmobile). 

As I arrived in the early evening, by the time I had got to the hostel and got my stuff set up it was time to eat dinner. Jóhanna cooked us soup with mussels harvested from the shore that day. I'd never eaten mussels before, and they turned out to taste as unappealing as they look. 

In the morning Jóhanna made scones for breakfast, and left me with the hostel to myself as she was giving a tour of Kulusuk to a group of 16 Czechs who had flown over from Reykjavík for a day. The hostel had some books on Greenland out in the sitting area, so I decided to read until the supermarket opened at 10. First I read The First Steps, a graphic novel of the first settlement of Greenland (by the Independence I culture) based on what we know from archaeology. Then I read a collection of Inuit folk tales and mythology called A Kayak full of Ghosts. 

After that I wandered around until I found the supermarket. Everything that can't be fished, hunted or gathered from the sea or shoreline must be imported into Kulusuk, and the sea ice had not yet broken up enough to allow the ships from Denmark to come to the island for the first time since last year, so there was almost no fresh food and everything fresh was extremely expensive. I bought a packet of biscuits and some dried pasta and sauce powder to make lunch, and then continued walking around the settlement and the coast. 

The next day Jóhanna invited me to come on the tour, as she had a much smaller group. We walked around the settlement and visited the museum and the church. We also saw a traditional drum dance performance by one of the only people in Greenland who is still able to perform it, and finished the tour with a dog sled ride on the sea ice back to our starting point. 

In the afternoon, one of Jóhanna's friends asked if I would like to come on his boat when he went out to hunt seals. I will put the seal hunt in its own post for the benefit of people who don't want to read about seals being shot. 

Nuuk Boat Tour

Here is a map of the fjords around Nuuk, showing the places we visited on the boat tour. First we sailed up Kapisillit fjord and hiked across the thin bit of land separating the end of Kapisillit fjord from Nuuk fjord, to see the chunks of ice breaking away from the frozen sea and  being swept down the fjord. As the spring has been particularly cold this year, the sea ice was unusually intact. We ate lunch at the top of a hill, with views into both Nuuk and Kapisillit fjords. 

The end of Kapisillit fjord

A piece of ice in the fjord

After this we sailed round the end of the fjord to the settlement of Kapisillit, which means salmon in Kalaallisut. The fjord is known for the large quantity of salmon as well as other fish found there, and the main source of food and income for the settlement is catching and drying fish. We were invited into the home of a friend of our guide, who poured us all cups of strong black coffee and took us over to a world map on his wall so we could show him where we came from. Sitting around his dining table, the questions we asked each other (with our guide as an interpreter) turned into a kind of Compare & Contrast of daily life in Greenland, the UK and Hong Kong (the home of the other person on the tour). 

Our host asked us what we did for work. I explained about being on a gap year, and the work I did for the election before I came away on this trip. The host said: 'Yes, I heard about the election in Britain. I heard the Conservative won, and that is not good, right?' '...Yeah. That sounds about right.' I replied. 'But,' he went on, looking puzzled; 'If he won, most people must have voted for him, so why are they upset?' 'Well - no, actually...' I made an attempt to explain the stupidity of the First Past the Post system, which was made more difficult by speaking through an interpreter. Then he said 'If it doesn't work, why don't you just change it? Very strange.' and changed the subject. (Greenland uses d'Hondt List PR for its general elections)

After leaving Kapisillit, we sailed back down the fjord to Qoorqut, the location of a guesthouse and restaurant only accessible by boat. The restaurant is run by the children of the owners of the Thai restaurant in the centre of Nuuk. We met up with a group of people who had been on a fishing trip in the fjord with the same touring company, and ate chilli fried cod and red snapper which they had caught, as well as curried reindeer. 

By the time we left the restaurant it was fairly late, and the boat ride back to Nuuk was a couple of hours long. According to the timestamp, this photo was taken at 00:02. 

Nuuk Day 1

My first full day in Nuuk was a Sunday, meaning that most of the day was spent walking up and down every street in the city, looking for anything at all that was open - but in particular I was looking for the boat tours which are more or less the only tourist activity in Nuuk. And as the WiFi where I was staying cost 150 DKK (15 GBP) per day, I was hunting for hotspots. At about half 12 I found the National Museum of Greenland, but as it was not going to open for another half an hour I continued down the road and discovered a portacabin belonging to a tour company. Unlike every other shop and tourist office in the city, it was open. 

The weather on Monday was forecast to be too windy to go out in the boat, which only left me Tuesday free before I left for Kulusuk. While booking the tour, the shop owner asked for my email address in case there were any problems. After explaining that I had no internet access and giving my mobile number as a substitute, he gave me the code to the shop's WiFi and told me I could use it whenever I wanted. 

I returned to the museum, which had now opened. One exhibition showed a timeline of Inuit artifacts and replicas of living spaces; from their first settlement in Greenland in the 1000s, through the impact of Danish colonisation and up to the present day. The second exhibition contained information on the other cultures which have been found on Greenland: the Arctic Small Tool tradition (including the Independence I & II, Saqqaq and Greenlandic & Late Dorset cultures) and the Norsemen.

Although the lighting in the museum made it difficult to photograph the artefacts without flash, I did take pictures of many of the noticeboards as an easy way to record the information, and I can put them up here (or paraphrase) if anyone is interested. 

Always Read the Inflight Magazine

You might discover something like this:

The original paper is at http://tinyurl.com/oks5cgl

Archaeological records show that the first wave of Inuit migration to Greenland entered from Ellesmere Island to the northwest and spread down the west coast to the south, where they encountered Norse settlements. The Inuit settled in the southwest and spread up the east coast to settle, but left the north coast of the island empty. Another group of Inuit migrated from Canada in the 17th century and settled in the north - but as the Norse settlements in Greenland had disappeared by 1450, any European ancestry in this population must have come from the Danish colonisers in 1721 or later. The study showed that not only was it unlikely that European admixture in South Greenlandic populations was as old as the Norse settlements, but also that the admixture in the population of Qaanaaq (North Greenland) took place at the same point in time. 

The study compared the populations of Qaanaaq (North Greenland), Tasiilaq (East Greenland), and settlements in South Greenland. It showed that Qaanaaq is an outgroup - the population of Qaanaaq diverged genetically from those of Tasiilaq and South Greenland before the latter two diverged. This supports the dominant hypothesis that North Greenland was settled in a later Inuit migration from Canada. This hypothesis is also supported by linguistics: the Inuktun (Avanersuaq) language spoken by North Greenlanders belongs to the Inuktitut subfamily, as do the languages spoken by the Inuit in Eastern Canada. Kalaallisut (spoken in West and South Greenland) and Tunumiit Oraasiat (spoken in East Greenland) belong to the Greenlandic subfamily. A competing hypothesis is that North Greenland was settled by migrants from the east of the island - if this were the case, the latest split would be between Tasiilaq and Qaanaaq, making South Greenland the outgroup. 

The study also investigated whether the Inuit had interbred with the earlier Dorset (Tuniit) culture when they met in East Greenland. A DNA sample from the closely related ancient Saqqaq culture was used to represent the Dorset, and the study showed that this sample was no more similar to the samples from Tasiilaq (East Greenland) than to samples from any other Greenlandic population, indicating that there was no Dorset admixture in East Greenland. 

I had very little Internet access in Greenland so I couldn't access the blog, but I will hopefully put the rest of the posts about Greenland up later today. 

Húsavík, Þórshöfn and Grímsey

A quick post to let you know what I've been doing for the past [however long it's been since I last blogged], because there's nothing like forgetting you were meant to write something and then filling it up with pictures to finish in a rush.

I spent Saturay and Sunday in Húsavík. I went on a 2 and a half hour whale watching trip on a RIB. We saw a humpback whale and a blue whale - and got a much better view of them than any of the other trips out on sailing boats at the same time because we could follow the whales more quickly. In the afternoon I went to Húsavík Whale Museum, where I learnt facts such as:

On Sunday, everything in Húsavík was closed apart from the ice cream shop. I had one of these:

On Monday I took the bus to Þórshöfn. I was intending to spend a couple of days walking and birdwatching. When I woke up on Tueday morning it looked like it was foggy outside - but this turned out to be a fine spray of sleet, whipped up by 20mph North winds. Later the sleet turned to hail, and going outside felt like being sandblasted. The birds (sensibly) were nowhere to be seen. 

Yesterday I visited Grímsey, a small island which is the only part of Iceland to cross the Arctic Circle. This is the 16-seater plane I went in: 

It could seat 16 people. The cockpit was open throughout the flight which meant spending half an hour each way having to repress the urge to ask the pilot what each of the switches and dials were for. Once on the island, I walked all the way up and down one side of the island. Away from the airport and town there were thousands of puffins on the cliffs, but they were so shy that they flew away before I could get very close. There were also hundreds of ground nesting arctic terns which divebombed me while screeching their alarm call. I also crossed the Arctic Circle at the special metal pole in the ground and got a certificate:

That was a bit strange, as if it only exists at one point on the island and doesn't in fact go all the way across it. And as the Arctic Circle is moving about 100m northward every year, their special metal pole was probably in the wrong place anyway. 

This afternoon I'm flying to Nuuk in Greenland. My phone deal doesn't apply there, but I assume the hostels will have wifi so hopefully I will continue to blog. 

Stykkishólmskirkja

On Wednesday morning, I visited Stykkishólmskirkja. The church is on a hill from which you can see most of Stykkishólmur:

The location is so imposing that I wonder why it hadn't been used for a church before - the old church is on Aðalgata. The new church was consecrated in 1990. 

This short video (http://tinyurl.com/qxrayux - not taken by me) shows the interior of the church, including a painting by Kristín Gunnlaugsdóttir of a very Icelandic-looking Mary and Jesus. 

I stayed in Akureyri last night because the bus from Stykkishólmur arrived after the last bus to Húsavík left. After getting a takeaway fish curry for lunch, I've gone into a hostel near the bus station to borrow their cutlery and WiFi.