ILULISSAT GREENLAND – WHAT TO SEE & DO

The town of Ilulissat on Greenland's west coast is not just green. Its buildings are as colorful as red, blue, orange, purple and yellow crayons. They face Disko Bay, which brims with dazzling white and menthol-blue icebergs.

Most of these fanciful ice sculptures calved off the Sermeq Kujalleq Glacier. The most prolific glacier in the Northern Hemisphere, it generates so many icebergs that, if melted, they would supply New York City with water for one year.

They flow from the glacier along the 60-kilometer (37-mile)-long Ilulissat Icefjord just south of the town into the North Atlantic. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the fjord stretches from the Greenland Ice Cap to Disko Bay. With a depth of up to three kilometers (1.86 miles), the Greenland Ice Cap covers 80% of Greenland's land area.

We arrived in Ilulissat on an Adventure Canada High Arctic Explorer cruise, which departed from Kangerlussuaq, a former U.S. military base. Charter flights from Toronto brought us to Kangerlussuaq Airport – Greenland's primary flight hub.

Before boarding our ship to cruise north to Ilulissat, we photographed an airport sign that showed flying times to places around the world. We were six hours and 45 minutes from Los Angeles, but only three hours and 15 minutes from the North Pole!

Disko Bay icebergs

Located 350 kilometers (218 miles) north of the Arctic Circle, Ilulissat is the third-largest town in Greenland with a population of 4,700 people. Its name means "iceberg" in the Greenlandic language.

For closer views of the icebergs in Disko Bay, we donned flotation vests and boarded Zodiacs (rubber inflatable boats) to circle around the magnificent icy flotilla. They were formed from snowflakes that fell 10,000 years ago.

The most beautiful icebergs were turquoise, created from ice that was so compressed that it no longer retained air bubbles. Some were as large as islands.

Others were smaller but shaped like whimsical castles with spires and caves. When a passenger asked if we could explore one of the icy caverns, our Zodiac pilot declined with a warning: "Icebergs can tip or calve unexpectedly."

Circling and swimming fulmars and gulls captured our attention as we returned to Ilulissat. They couldn't resist the fish tidbits tossed from boats by fishermen as they cleaned their catches of turbot (Greenland halibut).

Greenlandic culture

As we explored the town on foot, we were astonished to see so many sled dogs. (Ilulissat has as many sled dogs as people.)

We were also surprised to see a woman wearing the Greenlandic national costume as she walked along the street. "I'm wearing it for my son's first birthday celebration," she explained. "We wear traditional dress at festivals, holidays, weddings and special occasions."

Ilulissat Museum

Another woman greeted us from her balcony as we walked to the Ilulissat Museum. A display inside allowed us to closely examine the brilliant multicolored beads on the shoulder covering (nuilarmiut) of Greenlandic women's traditional dress, as well as the floral embroidery on the costume's sealskin boots.

The museum is housed in the birthplace of Knud Rasmussen (1879-1933). The polar explorer and anthropologist was the first European to cross the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by dog sled.

Mummies and mythological monsters

Among its engrossing displays, we discovered tupilaq – mythological Greenlandic monster figures carved from animal bones, antlers and tusks. Equally mesmerizing, was an image of a six-month-old male mummy, one of eight 15th-century Inuit mummies discovered in 1972 at Qilakitsoq, a West Greenland archaeological site.

We also viewed exhibits on Greenlandic history, such as a drinking horn from the Thule ancestors of modern Inuit people, as well as models of traditional Greenland kayaks.

How to resurface a capsized kayak

Leaving the building, we were delighted to see a group of local people paddling similar narrow kayaks amid the icebergs in Disko Bay.

From the deck of our ship, we observed one of the kayakers practice a Greenland roll. This lifesaving maneuver allows kayakers to skillfully use their small oars to resurface capsized kayaks in the freezing water.

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