Confessing before I post: I’ve never been to Greenland* but I’ve a friend who posted photos from Nuuk, the capital city, this morning and inspired me to go down a Google rabbithole. I might have to go there before it becomes the 52nd state of the USA (after Canada, of course). By boat or plane from Copenhagen or Reykjavik. Just the fact that there are no roads in or out, except to the airport, would give it a strong ‘end of the Earth’ vibe that is somehow attractive to my inner Viking.

My friend posted a picture of a mummy that he’d seen in the museum—part of a group buried one on top of the other in a pile of rocks ( I can’t imagine graves are diggable in permafrost) preserved by the cold, dry climate. I read all about the lifestyles they revealed and the human condition to which I immediately connected. The poor little baby had had Downs Syndrome and an older lady, a late-stage brain tumour. These people were there, well, at a place starting with Q further north, tatooing their faces, scouring animal skins with their teeth, not cultivating any crops or importing bananas grown in thermal hothouses in Iceland, before the Vikings arrived.

Imagine: Greenlanders—Inuit and their forebears— have survived for over 4,500 years. No roads. No comforts. No supermarkets. No Amazon deliveries. Just wind, ice, the bounty of animal and bird products and pure resilience. It’s one of the longest continuous human presences in the Arctic, and somehow, people are still fishing, hunting, laughing, and texting under the midnight sun. That alone makes Nuuk sound like a miracle in motion.

My friend’s pictures revealed a landscape in which people, apart from him in the selfies, were pretty well non-existant. Nuuk is between jagged mountains and a fjord. To me being present in such a place is slow travel at its best. Imagine standing under the eery glow of the midnight sun; the boardwalk, the almost Scandi houses and the ice-strewn shore. It’d be incredibly cinematic and silent. It’s just you, the water, the mountains, and the sound of your own breathing. Sometimes a boat. Sometimes a bird. That’s it. A reset button.

Turn around, and you’d see the buildings of the city centre— gable-roofed mainly but apparently some glass-fronted as well, and one with a floating wooden facade modelled on the Northern Lights. Apparently they have some haute-cuisine restaurants (keto diets no problem) and boutiques where you can buy Inuit clothing. AND…I just wanted to type this word… a Kuntsmuseum—hopefully more inspiring than the phallalological (spelling? .. penis ..) museum in Reykjavik. As it’s similar to the German word for ‘art’, I assume you’d see sculptures and paintings.

Photo stolen from the Lonely Planet website with no courtesy whatsoever.