“Is the seal sleeping?”

“How high are we above sea level?” asked a middle-aged woman, as the zodiac carrying her and a half dozen other high-end tourists skirted along the icy shoreline toward their landing point by the outlet of another monolithic glacier. My husband, the tour guide, frowned and his mouth opened and closed, but no words fell out. How can I respond to that? he wondered.

This is just one of his collection of mind-boggling questions asked by rich tourists who flock to remote parts of Greenland to part with their money extremely efficiently. The remotest parts of Greenland have thousands of kilometres of mountainous and crenulated fjord coastline that is entirely uninhabited. Almost all of it lacks coastal bathymetry maps or navigational charts and there is no infrastructure. So the remote, spectacular Arctic scenery is generally accessible only to the very rich who can afford the equally spectacular cost of visiting Greenland on small, boutique cruise ships each summer.

My husband loves this job…obviously. He visits parts of Greenland that few people, even Greenlanders, ever experience. And for the most part, he meets interesting and diverse people. But commonly he also encounters people, even whole groups, who arrive in Greenland with not the faintest idea of what to expect before they arrive.

A particularly trying tour group all arrived in Greenland with no warm clothes and one of their number burst into tears on learning that there would be no internet connection for the duration of the journey. On seeing whales for the first time, one asked, “Will they attack?” And seeing a seal lying lifeless on a pier by the side of a recently arrived fishing boat, the successful hunter nearby preparing to butcher it, a tourist asked, “Is it sleeping?”

So sometimes, just sometimes, he can’t help himself.

In the tiny settlement of Kulusuk he had delivered the group ashore to explore for themselves for an hour or so while the crew prepared for the next leg of the voyage. With a few minutes to himself, he took photographs of the colourful houses from the rocky shore where fishing boats rocked in the bay. A pungent smell drew his attention to three fat, fluffy husky puppies feeding on something amongst the rocks, their little faces red, caked in blood. Taking a closer look, he saw they were tearing at the dismembered remains of a couple of dolphins, the butchered heads cast aside after a hunting trip.

As he walked back toward town, a particularly irritating member of his tour group was coming the other way and saw him packing his camera back into its case. She hurried toward him asking, “What did you see down there?”

“Um…” he replied, “well there are a couple of dolphins.”

“Really?!” she responded excitedly, and hurried past him down to the shore.