Until now Glacier Bay in Alaska was the most impressive place I’ve ever seen, along with Doubtful Sound in New Zealand. Prins Christian Sund, at the southern tip of Greenland, is now another one of those places and may now actually be the most impressive place I’ve ever seen. It makes most other places look like Kansas.
There were majestic glaciers coming down from the Greenland Ice Cap. There were mountain ridges that resembled serrated knives and mountain peaks like spear points.
For my Dutch readers: It reminded me of a landscape Maarten Toonder might have drawn. I saw hanging glaciers that spawned numerous waterfalls. In any other setting they would be major attractions but here they were merely interesting details in a much grander context.
And then there were the fantastic looking ice bergs. I spent much time on the sky deck, the top of the ship and best place from where to appreciate the grandeur. But I also tracked seven or eight miles running from one end of the ship to the other. It was tiring but it was difficult to choose a time to go inside because, just when you thought you’d seen it all there was something even more spectacular to behold.
I took more pictures than ever and none of them look like they are able to capture the place; it’s hopeless.
At the beginning of the day the weather was gray and rainy. But that created the impression of how magnificently forbidding this place can be. Towards the end of the day the sky broke and the late day sun and clear air created very sharp images.
About one out of three times this cruise must be skipped because of fog, or icebergs blocking the channel. There were two bergs at the entrance of the narrowest passage but our captain carefully floated our sixty thousand ton ship past them.
There are sometimes helicopters scouting ahead whether the ship can go through. There was a copter flying past our ship at one point.
Even if the rest of the trip is a failure, today made it all worthwhile. Nothing else matters.
Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.