The Rough. Real. Remote. fieldnotes part 6

The past two days of heliskiing have definitely made us feel that the forces of nature can make you grow as a person, but it’s also nice to get on the ground and take in everyday life here in Kangaamiut.

While we had the luxury of flying into the village on a helicopter (thanks to Arne’s great connections and history of heliskiing), Kangaamiut is usually only accessible by boat from nearby Maniitsoq. So life out here is shaped more by the sea, land, and sky than anywhere else we have seen up here so far.

We hung out in Kangaamiut and just enjoyed meeting people on the one main street that runs through town. People were so friendly and informal, and we had good fun strapping a couple of kids to Stefan’s board and teaching them a move or two.

Kangaamiut
The village sits at the mouth of the spectacularly rugged Eternity Fiord where, throughout the history of the settlement, fishermen from Kangaamiut have been providing food for the villagers.

Something about the nature here means that adventures in Greenland inspire insight, and they give us a way to explore and challenge our personal limits.

And in Kangaamiut, as in so many other villages around Greenland, there’s an extra layer to all this, and that layer is the roughness of life in the Arctic and how adventures run in the blood of the locals.

Everyday life
Meeting the students and teachers at the local public school taught us a lot about what it means to live in a tightly knit community like this – but we also learned that a lot of these kids move away to get an education and a job.

Of course there are also jobs here in Kangaamiut. People work in the fishing industry, they work in public administration, and they work as artisans and bonecarvers. But urbanization definitely is part of the reality for small-town life in Greenland. This means that more and more jobs are moving to bigger towns and more people are following the jobs.

Tourism, however, is on the rise in Kangaamiut, and people come here to heliski, watch humpback whales, visit the Eternity Fiord, and experience the hospitality and – we have to stress – the absolutely amazing, locally produced food that they serve.

The fantastic food
We ate so much good food in Kangaamiut we should have started our own food blog to convey the brilliance of the cooking found in the kitchen of our hosts at Kangaamiut Tourism. But we will have to settle with telling you that there’s no way you can miss out on the seafood, the reindeer, the muskoxen, the eider ducks, and everything else that Jensine, Per, Barnabas, and all the others will serve you.

A fitting end to an epic adventure
All great things come to and and. And in Kangaamiut, just before boarding Maniitsoq Tour Boat’s small boat and going to Maniitsoq for our final night, we were privy to one of the most moving experiences of our epic Arctic Circle adventure.

Local musician Efraim Olsen invited us to the local church to hear a performance by him of a hymn, written to praise the village ,and sung by the church choir.

You’ll hear that song as the soundtrack of the Settlement Songs episode, and it was a fitting way to end our three days in the village.

Kangaamiut truly is rough, real, and remote. And we love it.