90 miles north, another town, this one with a slowly declining population but still harbouring an active fishing based community.
Maniitsoq (Sukkertoppen) & Hamborger Sund
Maniitsoq is a colourful carpet of houses and commercial buildings below rounded voluptuous rock hills, set behind a harbour formed from a breakwater which snakes out to join a few small islands. In the harbour is a marina, intended chiefly for the local fishing boats but one side of one pier lacks fingers, and we were able to comfortably moor here and avoid the wharf.
The urban arrangement leaves plenty of space but the classic Greenlandic houses seem nevertheless jumbled up, tied together by elevated wooden walkways.
The rocky shoreline is broken by the occasional boat ramp, concrete beaches with jumbles of landed dinghies, and ringed by a road empty of automobiles – here, the preferred motor vehicle floats.
We stayed here just a day, before pushing north once more though poorly charted channel routes framed by jagged peaks. Through Hamborger Sund, across the mouths of wide valleys tipping glaciers over from the ice cap above, past small local fishing boats towing even smaller dinghies, stopping for the night at roadstead anchorages found in little holes in the rocky coast.
Sometimes the cliffs are sharpened by glaciers cutting through them…
…sometimes eroded and curved, like the sugarloaf hills near a small village called Kangaamiut.
Sometimes the sky is clear and the rock stands in sharp contrast with rough detail…
…other times the weather closes in and fog descends to split the heights in two or to pool in valleys and shroud the nude rock lowlands.
When the fog spills out to sea, navigation is reduced to a scale of hundreds of meters commensurate with visibility: everything stills, and the wider world recedes as small details ashore – a low promontory, a standalone fishing hut – pass by silently and everything ahead is unknown.
