Qaqortoq

Wednesday 31^st August 2016

Qaqortoq is the largest town in  Southern Greenland with a population of 3200. We dropped anchor in the bay just off the town at 7.30 am, in calm conditions with clear skies and the promise of a sunny day.

Tenders started taking people ashore from 8 am, and we headed out at around 9am, not sure what to expect. The town survives on fishing, with a large fish processing facility in town, as well as Greenland’s largest tannery selling fur from a range of animals.

Our first stop is the tourist information centre, which did not really offer an additional information to that which we had already received on the ship.

Neither of the two ports in Greenland have tours organized by Holland America, probably because the towns are so mall and the roads do not go outside of the town boundaries. There appeared to be a few small boats taking tourists out on privately organized tours. Much to our surprise, a second ship arrived in port and soon the town was saturated with cruise ship passengers.

One of Qaqortoq’s attractions is the stone carvings and sculptures that are scattered throughout the village, a project started in the early 90’s encouraging artists from Scandinavia to come and contribute to their work to the project. There is now a total of 24 works throughout the village.

We walked up to the highest point in town to get a view of the whole area, before heading off on a walk around the lake the adjoins the town, and most likely provides their fresh water.

Only a few people bothered with the walk along the lakeside, which was very scenic, but the flying insects became more annoying as the day warmed up.

When we arrived back in town, the temperature had now got up to 22 C, and it was a lovely day. We set about exploring the town a bit more.

There were a few small supermarkets in town, and this large one which had a department store upstairs. We went inside to see how the locals fared for food choice and were staggered at the range and quality of product on sale.

and upstairs in the department store !

We walked around past the oil fired power station, and a couple of local kids were out enjoying the sunny weather.

There are lots of colourful buildings in town, including the Church and lots of prefabricated homes that come from Denmark.

This Building made from a red/pink sandstone used to be the Public Bath House

Past the Church we came to the town square, which houses Greenland’s only fountain, and the busiest place in town, which was a café/pub which had limited free wifi

Next we visited the Fish market and were surprised to see all that was on sale was Minke whale meat and salmon.

We went past a sports clothing store.

Then we continued around the very scenic harbour front to the tannery.

Nothing in the fur department really tickled our fancy, and we couldn’t really see a $4000 polar bear skin fitting in with our décor back home.

There were lots of old boats around and this particular one offered a great opportunity for an enthusiastic renovator.

Having seen the whole town, we decided to head back to the boat for lunch. It was now around 1 pm and just over 4 hours was all that was really needed to take in the highlights of this very pretty town, that had a fair bit of industry (all related to fishing and hunting)

It has been a beautiful day, clear skies and nice and warm in the sun. If the skies stay clear we hope to see the Northern Lights tonight.

At around 11pm, we had a look out off our balcony, and to our amazement, the Northern lights were very visible.