Clay slept from about 7:30pm last night to almost 7am this
morning! I was rudely awakened at 6:50am or so by a monstrous lower leg muscle
cramp! When it was over I fell back into bed and Clay proceeded to tell me how
rough the sailing had been and he hadn’t slept all night. He sure did lay
quietly for almost 12 hours then! It has been an exhausting trip somehow. The
yoga teacher was talking about it. She thought it was the 6 lost hours of sleep
over the past couple of weeks coupled with the low gray skies and though we’ve
seen the sun, it hasn’t really been shining on us when we’ve been able to be
out. We’ve just had a lot of clouds and precipitation and although we’ve been
weeks above the Arctic Circle, no aurora borealis because of low clouds and
precipitation. With all the lights on the ship, I don’t know if you could see
the aurora anyway. That has really been the only disappointment and it is
weather. You get what you get.
We were still moving slowly when I looked out. The TV’s nav
map was broken. The bow cam showed it was 38F and the Shackleton was before us
in a cove surrounded by a small town of colorful houses arrayed up the
hillsides. It was not raining, but rain was forecast all morning with an
expected 10F or so degree temperature rise. It was partly cloudy with some low
clouds. The town of Sisimiut has a crooked triangular peak towering over it and
in the misty clouds it looked like Whoville from Dr. Seuss. The clouds mostly
cleared up over the course of the day and more blue sky and sunshine and the
weird mood went away.
We had been advised during the briefing that we should check
to tender schedule and try to avoid tour times since they take precedence. Clay
went and checked and we were shooting for 10 to 11am or noon to 1pm. Last
tender back is 5pm and we sail away at 6pm. We went to breakfast in the main
dining room a little after 8am. I had banana buckwheat pancakes. That was new.
I don’t think I like buckwheat. It looked like tiny buckshot in my pancakes.
After we went up to Palm Court and used the big binoculars to scout the lay of
the land and tenders and shuttle buses. Since it seemed to be clearing and not
raining, we decided to head on ashore if we could get in the cabin. Peace was
just finishing up so we got our teeth brushed, got suited up for the cold and
possibly the rain and headed out before 10am. We took the mid-ship elevators
directly down to deck 4 and walked right out onto a waiting tender with about
15 people who were already there. That seemed to be too good to be true and it
was as they were just holding that tender for a soon to follow tour group! It
was still a very short wait and they all got off together too. The tiny harbor
was well sheltered. The tendering was fine. The going ashore from the tender
was a little tricky. Tim Soper told us they had leased some kind of floating
barge to act as a tender platform ashore and they had. It was fine but there
was a very rotten, flimsy, bent looking wooden ramp/footbridge tied up between
the barge and the shore that they had to limit 1 to 3 people at a time
crossing. It still swayed and bent and flexed when I was alone on it! That
slowed things down both loading and unloading, but it was fine. The shuttle bus
was welcome because while it was a short walk between things, the uphill grade
was steep. We walked back down. There was a shuttle bus waiting when we got ashore
so we boarded. It didn’t leave until the next tender had unloaded. We just
waited. The first stop was the Sisimiut Museum. We had originally booked a
complimentary community visit here that was cancelled due to a lack of
transportation. The tour department instead issued us free museum tickets.
Since we were there, we got off. The 2nd shuttle stop was a shopping
area/Post Office. I had already dropped Mom’s post card at Serenity reception
not realizing we’d be at a Post Office later. Oh, well. The first thing I had
seen on the Sisimiut City Map they were handing out ashore was a store called
Qiviut. This is the Inuit word for yarn made from musk ox undercoat. We have
seen it everywhere since Nome but not at Pond Inlet. We knew it was expensive
and hadn’t seen a lot of yarn for sale but high priced knitted goods. The
briefing last night told us to look for it as it would be a good product to buy
here since a lot of what they make here we can’t bring into the US. It turned
out that the Qiviut store was on the grounds of the cluster of buildings that
made up the museum. We heard the organist playing in the old church and saw a
mask dance demonstration as well as a peat house and the oldest kit house from
Denmark in Greenland (I think that is right.). There was a whole room dedicated
to the polar bear that came to Sisimiut in 2014 and hung around the airport,
when he headed for town he was killed. It was evidently a pretty big deal and
his skull was there. We bought what we were told was enough Qiviut wool to knit
two neck gaiters. The yarn was at 65 Euros for each but the knitted gaiters
were 169 Euros, so I thought we were saving money. Clay considers it the most
extravagant yarn purchase ever. Both. Clay also asked and got t-shirts put out
on the porch there. He bought one. I
don’t know what part of the museum the building across was but they put out
vanilla crème and chocolate crème filled doughnuts for us. The expedition guide
for that corner asked us to help ourselves. Clay had a vanilla half (they were
cut in half) and I passed. After we came by on the way out, I had a chocolate.
As the guide was telling how and where to go now, she pointed out that the
Senior Center across the street had just put out a sign inviting us to visit
for music, arts & crafts and snacks. She felt bad that they were putting
this on for us and no one was going over. Can’t have that. We carefully crossed
the street. An older man sitting at a picnic table outside saw us cross and
read the sign and he ran up and gestured us to the back door. It was a mud
room/cloak room. We tried to take off our coats and shoes. He practically
dragged me on through the next 2 rooms and past the kitchen into a room filled
with elderly Greenlanders. One man was playing music. There were women sewing,
cutting out fur pieces, beading and I don’t know what else. It looked like they
were trying to sell what they were making. There was one woman who spoke some
English and she struggled to tell us about what they were doing and to feed us
Greenlandic cakes and coffee and tea. She couldn’t say no. We ate a buttered
slice each. Then she pointed out the round slices and said they were made with
eggs (ours hadn’t been) and her friend sitting at the table had made those
round ones. We didn’t go back for seconds to their disappointment but it was
too much! Clay drank a cup of tea and I a cup of strong coffee mostly because
we didn’t get a bottle of water to take ashore and we were thirsty. We wanted
to make a contribution to defray their costs and help their center. Clay was
looking for something like a donation box and a woman wearing a seal skin came
up to him and he handed her our bag of leftover DKK. She seemed surprised but
took it. She probably didn’t even realize what he had handed her until we were
gone. He had managed to leave his coat in the cloakroom and a cheer went up in
the room we had left. We still aren’t sure if they were cheering because we had
visited or because we had left! As we left another shuttle bus was coming to a
stop across the street. We went over and got on for stop 2.
We didn’t find anything in the grocery store, sporting goods
store or fish market except fish smells. We didn’t go in the Post Office but
starting walking back down to the harbor. I found a unique long sleeve knit top
with silhouettes all over it of ulu knives, ice bear heads, whale tails and
what I was told is an old Greenlandic woman’s head. I thought it was
extravagant. Clay said it was about $65. I broke my rule about new clothes and
I’m wearing it. I like it. I found it in the very back corner of a store called
Anuni. They had some unique locally themed fabric patterns in coats, pants,
scarves, and tops as well as some women’s t-shirts. The problem was that the
store was well back from the road even though it was probably as close to the 2nd
shuttle stop as the Post Office. It was on the other side of the road and we
walked past it to the cemetery before turning around and seeing the side porch
of it with a rack of shirts and a stack of shoe boxes. We walked back and even
then, the stuff visitors would be looking for was buried back in the farthest
corner from the door. I got lucky. We walked on back downhill carefully since
it was a surprisingly busy street for a town of under 6000 and there were no
sidewalks. We went in a bookstore/office & art supply store and one other
store along the way selling Greenlandic jewelry. There were some nice gold or
silver local design pendants but I didn’t need anything like that. We stopped
at the boat house of the museum that we had missed earlier. We turned before
the harbor and walked along the water way. We went in the Artists’ Workshop and
the Spar store. We checked out the qajaq (kayak!) club. We walked back and got
on the next tender back to Serenity. The sun was shining, there were blue skies
visible and the Serenity was surrounded by hundreds of birds.
We went to lunch at Tastes to close them down at 2:30pm. As
I type these notes up and consulting the local map we got ashore, it seems we
missed a great photo opportunity across the bridge from the town to the
airport. It shows a statue on a point of land and has a photo of a statue of a
fisherman in front of a ship in the cove. It looks like it was taken on the
other side of where the Shackleton is sitting. If we had noticed it before we’d
have made a point of walking over there! Of course, the map also shows there is
a statue at the point of land where we visited the qajaq club and we didn’t
find a statue there, of course we weren’t looking for one so maybe it was there
and we missed it.
We went to the last expedition recap & briefing at 5pm.
That was a bit sad. The end really is in sight. We met a new member who has
been diving and operating an ROV from Shackleton all during the trip! He is
going to give a presentation sometime on the way to New York and that is
exciting. At 5:30pm, they asked everyone to go to decks 12 & 13 forward to
have a champagne toast to Shackleton’s departure. Shackleton had moved beside
and nose to us as we sailed away and it stayed behind! It was rather anticlimactic.
Dinner was 6pm at the main dining room. We didn’t like
anything on the menu and both ordered from the mainstays section. Clay had
ribeye steak which he wasn’t wild about and I had a surprisingly moist chicken
breast. We had another 40+ minute wait for our meal. Clay says he is going to
ask not to be seated there anymore. It is too bad.
Tomorrow we are in Nuuk. (Say Nuke.) It is the capitol of
Greenland. Today we got the message that our excursions’ departures had all
been moved forward by about 15 minutes. It won’t matter that much and they
probably won’t leave early anyway since every one has been late. Anyway. Clay
has an early start and at the briefing they warned that this $250 excursion
should be properly name fjord cruise and not whale watching cruise. Exactly
what Clay has been saying as he worried about this since we boarded Serenity.
But he never did look up the cancelation deadline, so he’s going now. At
12:20pm to 4pm or so, we have Panoramic Nuuk together.
We are sailing south along the West coast of Greenland again
and being on the port side we have been in view of the coast. During the day
today, we mostly had a view out to sea.
photos
photos
