Morning Cruising Greenland's Fjords, Afternoon Ashore in Nanortalik

We saw lots of icebergs and Fjord walls up close.

We could have gone straight to Nanortalik, but the captain chose an unnecessary diversion through the fjords to the east of our destination. He arranged for us to enter the fjord at sunrise and cruise slowly for five hours to Nanortalik. Here’s that route spelled out on cruisemapper.com:

The ship’s location is mapped constantly by the website, but lost signal in some of the narrow and tall fjords. Hence you see the blue line going across land at times, drawing a straight line between readings. We saw some amazing icebergs and got a glimpse of one glacier that is calving into the ocean, although we saw no calving. That would have been a remarkable coincidence. Here is that glacier and a couple of the more impressive icebergs:

Our “shore excursion” in Nanortalik was “self-guided.” In other words, we were transported by tender to the pier and left to walk around on our own, with no one to tell us what we were looking at or answer questions. The same will be true tomorrow in Qaqortoq. So here are some pictures from walking around Nanortalik. This is the main street:

Below is the Nanortalik Museum. Actually, it’s just the gift shop. The museum is really a collection of buildings spread about nearby. By this time, Rita had decided to return of the ship.

This church was not part of the museum:

Outside the church, I met a delightful couple from Ottawa. We shared our love of Montreal and our disappointment that Quebec City was cut from the Neptune’s itinerary after booking this cruise. The husband took this picture of me with his wife:

After a couple hours of walking around, I decided to climb the rock behind the museum with the flagpole on top. Here’s a video montage:

Back on the ship, we missed all the lectures and had a birthday dinner for me in Manfreddi’s Italian restaurant on Deck 2.

During dinner this sunset was happening outside our restaurant windows:

Then it was time for Rita to go to bed and me to spend a couples writing next week’s “Real Estate Today” column that is due Friday afternoon. That was why this blog post wasn’t finished until Friday afternoon!