Day 27 - Nuuk, Greenland

A visit to Greenland might be as close as you ever come to the edge of the world.....

Greenland is the world's largest island and only 15 percent of it is NOT frozen year-round. The center of the island is permanently covered with a blanket of ice that is two miles thick in places.

Nuuk is the capital of Greenland and about 16,000 people live there. The native people are Inuits and they look a lot like Eskimos. Other people live there too.

Nuuk claims to have what is called the world's oldest rocks...possibly 3.8 billion years old. The Inuits make jewelery that is suppose to be made from these rocks.

I was worried about this port because we had to take a tender in, town was up the hill about a mile away, and how cold it was going to be.

The tender service was very, very slow because there was only a small platform at the port to step on before a set of stairs to climb. This meant that one tender had to get all their passengers off before they could load passengers back on that wanted to go to the ship. To add to the problems there were people that thought it was a good idea to go to the port with their wheelchairs. It took the whole crew that were working at the port to get these people out of the tender and up the stairs. Then they had to do the same thing to get them back to the ship. The captain of the ship had asked that they would not go but they did.

There was a Christmas store right there at the port. Dennis and I found a Santa Clause we liked and we bought it. The sales clerk could not find the correct box for it but found a box that we could use but "St. Nick's" head stuck out.

Sharon didn't want to climb up the stairs to town so she and the box sat on a bench. There was a lot for her to see and she really enjoyed watching the people. We were glad that we had gloves to wear but it really wasn't as cold out there as they told us it would be.

Dennis and I went up into town but there really wasn't much to do. A lot of the stores were closed or empty that probably would have been open during the tourist season.

We did enjoy just walking and looking around. It felt good not to be on a tour.

Once we got back to Sharon, she convinced us that we needed to get in line for the tender. We were glad that she did because the line was backed up to about 3 or 4 blocks. There were thousands of passengers waiting in line. It was just unbelievable. We waited a hour and a half before we were able to get on a tender.

That evening we enjoyed the beautiful scenery as our ship sailed away. It was just so breath taking. We have seen ice chunks floating in the water but no whales.