Arctic travel requires patience, I reminded myself as I waited in a queue for a hotel voucher at Keflavik ariport. We were stuck in Iceland – again – our connecting flight having never left Nuuk because of winter blizzard conditions. Of course it’s nice to get home, but being stuck in Iceland isn’t so bad. The food is good, the hotels are good, everything works. Being stuck in Kangerlussuaq is not quite as good.
Kangerlussuaq is the main international airport in Greenland. When I say ‘international airport’, it’s probably not what you imagine. About 500 people live there in a community that exists solely for the airport. Kangerlussuaq is a former US military airbase, built during the second world war. The site was chosen for the very stable weather. Now this is where Air Greenland’s single airbus flies in and out of, met by a fleet of 40-seater Dash-8’s that ferry people from towns and settlements up and down the west coast. Bad weather on the coast means frantic rescheduling to gather people to Kangerlussuaq to meet that one flight.
Athough weather is the usual culprit, it’s not always the case. In one spectacular incident a few years ago, the airbus was out of service for a period because an airport worker drove a pickup truck too close to the plane on the airstrip. The entire truck was sucked into one of the airbus engines. The driver escaped unharmed. The engine not so much.
If you get stuck in Kangerlussuaq, as probably everyone who lives in Greenland has been at one time or another, there’s not much to do. Inside the airport building is a dilapidated, depressing hotel. Outside, you can see about everything – a few small tourist shops, the supermarket, the post office – in about ten minutes. Well, in summer you can drive out to the edge of the inland ice on Greenland’s longest road – twenty five kilometres – and even go hiking and camping on the ice cap, or go in search of muskox. Umm…okay, that is all I can think of, but both of those things are definitely worth doing.
Although less likely, it is still possible to get stuck in the summer. This past summer I was 2 days delayed getting to Ilulisat for a 4 day visit. When I finally arrived, my bed and breakfast host related the story of her friends who had previously flown from Ilulisat to Kangerlussuaq to meet the connecting flight to Copenhagen for a week’s summer holiday. They became stranded in Kangerlussuaq by storms. After five days, she told me, they gave up and flew back home to Ilulisat. This punchline launched her into peals of cackling laughter that left me wondering if they were still her friends.
