Spouting and snorting and flipping its enormous tail, it was almost as though a humpback whale was giving us an escort to his glittering ice cave as it emerged from the waves alongside our boat. Towering walls of ice surrounded us as we entered Disko Bay on a small boat tour from a town clinging to the Greenland coast that’s a whale-watching paradise and whose name Ilulisssat, literally means icebergs in Greenlandic. Titanic chunks of white ice streaked with brilliant blue float everywhere in the water, fed by mountainous glaciers which date back at least to the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
We’ve arrived on Seabourn Cruises’ expedition ship Seabourn Venture carrying just 200 guests on the first leg of an epic voyage exploring the historic Northwest Passage across Canada’s Arctic to Alaska. And Ilulissat with a population of just 5,000 is by far the largest settlement we’re going to be visiting on the three-week adventure.
Read all about it in The Cruisington Times.