Best Ways to
Get Around Greenland
Find out how to trek across Greenland’s tundra, watch out for wildlife and explore its rugged coastlines for yourself.
Greenland may be a country that offers plenty of fascinating sights for the intrepid traveller, but getting from A to B here – like many frontier destinations the world over – is not always straightforward.
The Best Ways to Get Around Greenland
The main obstacle is the vast Greenland ice sheet, which measures some 660,000 square miles and covers around 80% of Greenland’s surface area. Because of the ice sheet, Greenland’s interior is inhospitable and practically impassable, except from the air. There is nothing here except snow, ice and rock, an untamed and barren landscape visited only by climate scientists and the occasional daring mountaineer.
Our favourite way to get around Greenland is via a small expedition ship, accessing some of the most remote and seldom visited areas of the country. There are a few options for tourists to consider.
Travelling by land
Even along the habitable coasts, travel is difficult. There are no roads between Greenland’s various settlements – only within them and around them – while railways and inland waterways are non-existent. With vehicles out of the question, travelling by air or sea are the easiest ways to get around, although there are other transport options available for the more adventurous.
Dog sledding has been the preferred method of transportation for the indigenous Inuit for millennia, particularly in the more northerly parts of the country. You can still jump on the back of a sled today and watch the musher work his team of Greenland dogs (a similar breed to huskies) as they bound over the snow, an authentic experience that is quintessentially Greenland. Dog sledding is so popular here that sled dogs outnumber humans in some settlements.
Snowmobiles are another common form of land-based transportation here, but aside from short tours, both snowmobiling and dog sledding are only really viable on Greenland’s west coast, which is much more densely populated and ice-free than the more rugged east coast. East Greenland offers a more authentic wilderness experience, and many parts of the region pose significant obstacles to overland travel due to the difficult terrain and vast distances between population centres.
Travelling by air
Domestic flights in Greenland are the realm of either the national airline, Air Greenland, or one of the many helicopters which operate here. As with towns and villages, the airports and heliports here are concentrated mostly on the west coast, with only a handful in the east. There are just two main settlements along the entirety of Greenland’s east coast: Tasiilaq, just below the Arctic Circle, and Ittoqqortoormiit, which lies further north at the entrance to the largest fjord system in the world, Scoresbysund. Air travel is a viable transport option if travelling along the more touristic west coast, but in the east you’ll be much more restricted in your choice of destinations.
Connections can be made all year round, but air travel presents two main drawbacks for the Greenland tourist. The first is its price, as chartering air transport is much more expensive than hopping in a boat or ship and following the coastline. The second is the marked difference in the way you’ll experience Greenland’s natural wonders; although the island’s incredible frozen landscapes stretching off to the horizon make for an awe-inspiring sight from the air, it is only from down below that you can appreciate the intricacies of natural ice sculptures, the glint of sunlight on frigid waters, and the hard eyes of a muskoxen or polar bear trained upon you.
Book your
Expedition
Book your East Coast Greenland Wilderness Expedition with Natural World Safaris.
Travelling by sea
The best way to explore Greenland at its most magical, where land meets sea, is via a small ship. Make sure to choose one with a hull that has been ice-strengthened to the highest classification, which will allow the ship’s experienced captain to safely navigate Greenland’s ice-choked coastal waters. Using these small ships as a base, you’ll be able to sail further into the extensive network of fjords that lie along the coasts, each one offering opportunities for exploration and new discoveries just around the bend.
Small expedition ships are also faster and more manoeuvrable than their larger counterparts, allowing you to sit back and relax as you travel between destinations overnight. Depending on the season, there may even be a good chance for you to see the Northern Lights when the sun dips below the horizon. Greater speed and accessibility means that passengers aboard small ships will be able to see more sights and enjoy a wider range of activities than those travelling by land, air or larger ship.
This type of expedition cruising enables you to really get to the heart of wild Greenland, allowing for greater intimacy with the seagoing mammals that can be spotted while on deck, including humpback and bowhead whales. Sailing close to shore, you’ll be able to scour the landscape for terrestrial animals, like the reindeer and muskoxen that graze Greenland’s tundra. A bevy of birds can be seen roosting along the cliffs that drop into the sea, with your ship the perfect venue for a spot of twitching: here there are guillemots, puffins, auks, terns, gulls, eagles, fulmars and kittiwakes, to name just a few species.
Some people are put off by the term “cruising”, but this type of expedition travel allows for plenty of active adventure as well, with days spent onshore hiking over the tundra. Accessing seldom-visited landing sites that are only really accessible by ship, visitors have the opportunity to explore the landscape, traversing hill and meadow while looking for the hardy mammals that make their home here. Muskoxen, Arctic fox, Arctic hare and collared lemming are often seen.
Stepping ashore will also allow you to appreciate the vegetation that carpets much of Greenland’s tundra. Although trees grow in just one area – the Qinngua Valley on the southernmost tip of the country – there are over 500 species of flowering plants, horsetails and ferns in Greenland that make a traipse through the tundra a pleasantly picturesque experience. The stark beauty of this land is softened somewhat by the native flora, with the ubiquitous ice and stone combining with bursts of colour that make for fantastic photographic opportunities. There is also a tremendous sense of verticality here in Greenland that can only truly be experienced when hiking through the landscape, with pillars of rock and precipitous mountains rising into the sky everywhere you look.
There is no country on earth with a lower population density than Greenland. The vast majority of its territory shows little to no sign of human habitation, allowing you to get to the heart of the true meaning of wild. But despite the forbidding mountains, sheer cliff faces and gargantuan icebergs, this is not an entirely unforgiving land. Aboard a small expedition ship you’ll be able to sail along its coastlines and through its countless fjord systems in search of spectacular scenery you won’t find anywhere else, exploring large areas of this remote destination and getting close to its wildlife and wilderness.
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