How much does it cost?!

Qaanaaq, a town of almost 700 people, is the second most northerly settlement in Greenland at just over 77 degrees north. People who leave rarely return. It’s not because Qaanaaq isn’t beautiful and a wonderful place to be. It simply costs too much. A return flight from Qaanaaq to Nuuk will set you back about three thousand dollars. That’s without even leaving the country. If you add a return flight to Denmark, then you’re looking at six thousand dollars return. For Greenlandic university students, most of whom study in Denmark, this means they might never return to visit their families during their studies. A ship recently visiting Qaanaaq brought a crew member who had grown up there. He’d left to become a sailor and could never afford to return. This visit home – a couple of days when his ship called in to port – was the first time he had seen his family in twenty years.

Flights within, and to-and-from Greenland are some of the most expensive flights you will encounter. If you travel to Copenhagen from Greenland, you may as well include the rest of the world in the trip. That’s exactly what my husband did last time he travelled to Copenhagen, taking the opportunity to travel to Australia and back as well because it made financial sense. Coming the other way, the prices are a formidable barrier to most tourists.

When we moved to Greenland, friends and family from various parts of the world were thrilled at the idea of visiting us, just as they had in other parts of the world we’d moved to. Typically, we move and then have a stream of visitors for the next year or so. So when we moved to Greenland, we braced ourselves. But this time it wasn’t exactly an onslaught. People wanted to come, but faced with the price of flights, only those prepared to take a very deep breath and put a whole lot of money where their mouth is ultimately stepped off the Dash-8 aircraft in Nuuk. Money is definitely not everything – in fact it’s not much to speak of – but while money won’t buy you happiness, you won’t get a flight to Greenland without a whole lot of it.