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| Sisimiut from the archeology walk |
I didn’t do this last night. By the time all the shenanigans with the variety show were over and I was mostly packed I didn’t have the energy to do more than fall into bed and then I had trouble going to sleep. I’m tucked up here in a corner of the Aurora Lounge. It’s chilly in here but it’s pretty hot elsewhere on the ship. It’s another beautifully clear day and the fjord is just like glass. We didn’t see anything coming in last night. It was dark after the variety show. Apparently there were some northern lights but they were very brief. I suppose I should start at the beginning of the day yesterday.
We opted to go on the ‘archy’ (archeology) hike in Sisimiut yesterday. It was in a totally different part of town than where we had ever been before. We didn’t get anywhere near the visitor centre or the lake where we usually hang out. It was foggy at the beginning of the day but the rocks were dry. It was another of those boulder scrambles broken up by boggy bits.
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| Not the easiest walking terrain |
This trip has been quite humbling for me. Until now I have relied on muscle memory and whatever latent fitness I still retain. Last year I was able to get wherever I wanted to go at whatever pace I wanted to keep. This year I don’t trust my footing. I trust my boots on dry rock but when it comes to taking large steps up I don’t trust my legs to get me up the distance so I’ve been holding onto rocks, relying on my poles, and placing my feet carefully. I find this whole process more than a little irritating. Besides the physical stop and go, the constant evaluating of what seems like each step is a lot of mental work. I want next year to be better so we’ll have to develop a plan when we get home. I know I’m not going to be able to do what I could when I was thirty but I want to be able to do better than I did this time. Enough whining - on to something else.
At the archeology site there were the remains of a couple of different kinds of dwellings. There was a round house next to a rectangular house.
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| Remains of houses |
Of course they were really just lumps in the ground but Aka said they were evidence of the ancestral Inuit and the contact with the whalers. Like the site we visited the other day, this was a year round dwelling place. They left us to make our own way back to town which was fine. Richard did a great job of route finding and once we got out of the boulders and the boggy bits, we made good time.
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| I noticed these on our way back |
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| Walking in Sisimiut |
We decided to go back to the ship, dump our packs, do some fluid balancing, and then head back into town to see if I could find some stickers.
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| Near the museum ship in the background |
We found stickers and more quiviut. Richard now has two quiviut toques. He wears the one I got for him last year constantly so now he can swap it out occasionally.
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| Nivi cultural educator and friends |
So I have relocated to the spa. There doesn’t seem to be anyone here and I’ll ask permission if someone shows up, otherwise I’ll just sit quietly and work. I went up to the Meridian Lounge and all the seats up there were taken and people were chatting. I have nothing against people chatting but I just need a place where I can be quiet in order to concentrate and that’s pretty hard to find at this point. If it was a bit warmer I’d go out onto the deck but it’s just above freezing and, while that might be okay for tea on the deck, I don’t think it would work for sitting down and using the keyboard for any stretch of time.
So where was I? Buying quiviut, right. After we got the toque, t-shirt and stickers we came back to the ship. Richard had a nap and I spent time out on deck watching them off load the garbage. Don’t laugh, I find that kind of thing really interesting. There was a guy with a crane truck and he was operating the crane with one of those hand held control panels. By the time I got there they had most of the garbage in a container and they were trying to pack it down so it wouldn’t fly away on the ride to the dump. One guy was scrambling around on the top of the garbage in the container.
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| Tamping and stamping down the garbage |
All of it was in bags and there was a lot of loose cardboard so I don’t think it was too gross. He’d stomp something down in one spot, then move to another spot and stomp on something else. In the meantime the crane which did have a hook on it was pressing down on various spots to try to compact the load. It was interesting how the arm of the crane went from a convex arc when it first touched the load to a concave arc at the operator applied more pressure. Evidently the guy doing the stomping and the guy operating the crane were communicating well or it could have resulted in squished guy on the garbage container. He didn’t have a hard hat either. Our zodiac guys always have to have a hard hat when they are working taking boats on or off the hook.
After a while the guy climbed down from the garbage pile and then the operator of the truck began to pull the container up onto the flatbed of his truck.
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| Loading up the garbage container |
It seemed to be attached with cables and it made an ungodly noise as it scraped across the pavement and onto the truck. The two guys talked for a bit and I saw a bottle of spirits change hands. Then the driver of the flatbed got into his cab and drove away.
That left the crane guy. He got the arm of the crane to pull itself in and then tuck away nicely in the back of the truck. Then he turned his attention to retracting the outriggers. I was surprised that he did the back one on one side and then the front one on that same side. I would have expected him to do both back and then both front. Then he hopped in his cab and off he went.
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| Packing the crane away |
I noticed a lot of gulls so I went over to the other side of the ship and watched them do their thing for a while. I couldn’t get any photos because they were too far away. I only got a picture of one bird on this trip, a very vocal raven on a roof by the Sisimiut museum.
After lunch Aleqa did her third talk of the trip. This one was about where she sees Greenland in terms of the world interest in the Arctic. Greenland only has 57,000 people but it is positioned right in the middle of whatever will happen in the north in the next 30 years.
We had a rather lengthly gathering with some great photos, official goodbyes, and an appearance by the captain who is a great guy and gave his sweater, name badge, and epaulettes to the auction in support of the Ayalik fund. The woman who won the bid on the sweater has been rockin’ it around the decks since she won it. I think that was an amazingly cool thing for the captain to do.
Last night after supper was the variety show and we finally got to do The Zodiac Song. I still think it would have been more effective for us to do it at a gathering early on to help set the tone for the voyage. It was a big hit as it always is. After that, it was a bit of a repertoire musical chairs. I had thought to do Stan Rogers’ Northwest Passage but then someone else had signed up for that. My second choice was Frobisher Bay but that was taken too. That surprised me because I don’t think that song is all that common. I decided to do Log Driver’s Waltz. Then it turns out that a trio of guys had practiced it so they did it again after I did it. They said that was good because by the time they did it everyone knew the chorus and could sing along. Near the end of the evening we had about 15 people up on stage to sing Northwest Passage. That was fun. Actually the whole evening was fun but then I had to go back to the cabin and pack. I got most of it done last night and I was able to finish this morning before the luggage had to be outside the doors at 7:00.
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| Mike B as cow in the variety show |
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| Julie Assistant Expedition Leader and friends |
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| Raven sharing his opinion |
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| Cloud around the mountain Sisimiut |
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