South Greenland

Fly from Keflavik to Greenland to embark LIVA at Qaqortoq, whose name means 'the white one' in Kalaallisut. It is the largest town in southern Greenland, home to around three thousand people on a hillside above a protected harbour. Either today or later in the trip there is time for a walk through the town, where the Stone and Man project has set over thirty sculptures carved directly into the rock, works by Greenlandic, Danish and international artists placed into the landscape rather than mounted on pedestals. Local craft workshops offer sealskin work, tupilak carvings and woven textiles.

LIVA makes south toward Nanortalik, 'the place of polar bears', the southernmost town in Greenland, set among a scatter of low islands at the continent's tip: a small, self-sufficient community, its colourful houses backed by peaks that rise steeply from the fjord. A walk through town and the open-air museum gives context to a place that has lived by fishing and hunting for generations. The greater scenery lies inland, up Tasermiut Fjord, often compared to Yosemite: a narrow arm of water flanked by granite walls that climb to spires and summits above two thousand metres, popular with climbers from around the world. The Sermitsiaq glacier descends to the valley floor, streaked with moraine, and lower tundra hikes pass through crowberry, cloudberry and Arctic heather. Helicopter access opens terrain that would otherwise take days to reach on foot.

Prins Christian Sund, 'Ikeq' in Kalaallisut, is one of Greenland's most scenic passages: a narrow channel rarely more than a kilometre across, cutting through the mountain spine of the south, separating the mainland from a large outlying island and connecting the east and west coasts. Walls of banded gneiss rise hundreds of metres on either side, waterfalls thread down from the plateau, and the water is dotted with bergy bits and growlers calved from glaciers at the channel's edges. Along the way there are hikes along the shoreline, tender cruises into the quieter arms, and a stop at Aappilattoq, a hunting community of around a hundred and seventy people on a rocky slope halfway through the channel, reachable only by boat or helicopter. At the end of the day LIVA emerges on the wild east coast.

Conditions permitting, LIVA spends three days exploring the fjords of the southern east coast, a very different environment from the west. The shoreline feels the East Greenland Current, which carries cold water and pack ice south from the Arctic Ocean, so the ice is denser and more variable and the temperatures noticeably cooler. Virtually uninhabited, with the nearest settlement 700 kilometres to the north, this is one of the most sparsely visited coastlines in Greenland, the quiet broken only by wind and the distant sound of calving ice. It is also some of the richest wildlife territory in the south: humpback and minke whales in the productive waters, harbour and harp seals on the floes, and white-tailed eagles working the cliffs. Polar bear, though rare this far south, is a genuine possibility on the east coast, and precautions are taken whenever ashore. The days are shaped by ice and weather: kayaking among icebergs at water level, hikes along the fjord margins, helicopter flights up to the ice-cap fringe, and tenders working the brash ice in search of wildlife.

The westbound return through Prins Christian Sund shows the same geography under different light. The passage is unhurried, with stops for hikes along the shoreline, tender cruises into the branching arms of the channel, and helicopter flights over the plateau above.

The inner fjord systems of the south offer a change of pace after the open coast. Sermilik Fjord has good hiking and glacier access, on a more intimate scale than the east coast. Continuing north, LIVA calls at Uunartoq, a small island whose natural geothermal hot springs have drawn visitors for centuries. The pools sit at the fjord's edge, warmed to bathing temperature by volcanic activity beneath the bedrock, surrounded by cold fjord water, drifting icebergs and granite peaks. Bathing here, warm water against a backdrop of Arctic scenery, is one of the more distinctive experiences on this coast.

The Norse called this place Garðar and made it the seat of Greenland's medieval bishopric. From the early twelfth century until the Norse colonies disappeared from the record in the fifteenth, Garðar was the spiritual and administrative centre of European settlement at the edge of the known world: a cathedral, a bishop's farm and a tithe barn, all built at a fjord-head at sixty-one degrees north. The ruins stand today in the grass above Igaliku Fjord, the cathedral's foundations traceable in the turf, the walls of the bishop's farm still identifiable. The surrounding land is unusually lush by Greenlandic standards, thanks to south-facing slopes that catch the long August sun. It is one of the more puzzling chapters in northern history: an ambitious settlement that, in the end, vanished almost without a trace.

Across Tunulliarfik Fjord from Igaliku lies Qassiarsuk, where Erik the Red established Brattahlíð, the farm that served as the base for Norse expansion into Greenland and, eventually, the first European landfall in North America. A reconstructed longhouse and a replica of Leif Eriksson's church give physical form to a history otherwise known mainly through the sagas, and the valley is still farmed, sheep grazing the meadows that once supported Norse cattle. At the head of the same fjord sits Narsarsuaq, with a very different, much more recent past: built from 1941 by the US Army as Bluie West One, it became a key link in the North Atlantic air-ferry route in the Second World War, with thousands of aircraft passing through and a wartime population of around four thousand American servicemen. The US Air Force held it as a Cold War refuelling stop before handing it to Danish control in 1958, and the village museum covers both the wartime and the Norse history. Nearby, the Qooroq ice fjord is a different spectacle: a narrow arm packed with calved ice drifting seaward, the glacier visible at its head.

Some days on this voyage are given over entirely to landscape rather than a specific site. Nordre Sermilik Fjord offers tundra slopes in late-summer colour and glacial valleys descending from granite peaks, with no scheduled programme beyond what the terrain and weather suggest. The hillsides are turning as the season shifts, patches of russet and amber appearing among the greens, the crowberry ripening. Hiking here is exploratory rather than directed, with no marked trails, and helicopter flights over the surrounding fjord and plateau give a sense of the scale of the country. By evening the vessel typically sits at anchor in calm, ice-free water.

The morning is spent at the Qalerallit glacier, one of the more accessible tidewater glaciers in the south. A tender cruise along the calving front brings guests close to the ice face, ten to thirty metres above the waterline with unknown depths below, and the face is active, with periodic calving audible well before it is seen. Later, LIVA calls at Narsaq, home to around fifteen hundred residents and one of the south's larger towns: a working community known for livestock farming, helped by one of Greenland's milder microclimates, and for nearby geology unusually rich in rare earth minerals. The setting of fjord and peak on every side is simply the everyday backdrop here.

Hvalsey Church is the best-preserved Norse structure in Greenland and one of the more historically significant buildings in the North Atlantic, its gable walls standing to full height on a grassy headland above Hvalsey Fjord. It was here, in September 1408, that the last documented record of the Greenland Norse was written, an account of a wedding, after which the colony disappears from history. After time among the ruins, LIVA returns to Qaqortoq for a final evening in port: coffee and cake with locals, a Greenlandic tradition of relaxed hospitality, and a chance to sample local produce, dried fish, tundra-raised lamb and crowberry preserves. The next morning, guests disembark and travel by vehicle or helicopter to the airport for a charter flight to Iceland and the journey home.