We woke to a silent glistening welcome, a field of mammoth icebergs; we’d arrived at Ilulissat, on the west coast of Greenland, known as the ‘birthplace of icebergs’ - Sermeq Kujallek. This huge river of ice is also known as Jakobshavn Glacier. It is the most productive glacier, not only in Greenland, but in the Northern Hemisphere. It pushes out 20 million tonnes of ice each day which all then floats and grinds into the Ilulissat Icefjord and to Disko Bay; they say that it was one of these icebergs that the Titanic hit.
After breakfast we donned wet weather gear (it was raining and chilly) and lined up to climb aboard a zodiac to take us ashore. Once off-loaded at the gorgeous wee port, a bus ferried us through the quaint busy little town of Ilulissat to the beginning of a boardwalk which leads you through marshy tundra and lichen covered boulders to the UNESCO World Heritage Icefjord to gawk at an immense corridor of icebergs (48km long). The fjord was completely choked with huge bergs, the majority of which were much bigger than our ship.
We hiked about 1.5km along the boardwalk to get a better/closer view.
Once the icebergs make it out of the fjord, they are carried by currents north along the west coast of Greenland only to then be swept southwards along the coasts of Baffin Island and Newfoundland. Magnificent ice monsters too huge to describe.
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