Ilimanaq, population fifty-five. A place whose name means expectations.
There’s a line in the plan for this trip, written months ago at a kitchen table in Tokyo, that says simply: this is the rest. We are not, it must be said, restful people. We had to schedule rest the way other people schedule a dentist. So we booked three nights at a lodge in a village of fifty-five people, a fifty-minute boat ride south of Ilulissat across the mouth of the icefjord, in a settlement called Ilimanaq, which means place of expectations.
Ours were modest. Whales from the window. Dinner in the oldest house. Nowhere, for once, to be. Greenland, before letting us have any of it, decided the getting there should be its own story.
The bay that closed overnight
We opened the blackout curtains on our last Ilulissat morning and stood there recalibrating. The night before, the fog had taken the bay away. Overnight, something had traded it for ice. Disko Bay, horizon to horizon, was packed solid, bergs and floes and rubble shoulder to shoulder, barely a lane of dark water showing anywhere. It genuinely looked like you could walk out across it for miles. The fjord had spent the night rearranging itself on a scale that makes you laugh out loud at a hotel window.
It had also, of course, parked itself directly across our route. Ilimanaq is fifty minutes south by boat, and the boat was somewhere out in all of that, finding a way through. The transfer ran two hours late just reaching us, and the fifty-minute crossing took the better part of two more, the skipper reading lanes through the pack the way a local reads back streets. We have taken a lot of transfers in our working lives. We have arranged considerably more of them. Greenland does transfers differently, and we mean that as the highest compliment we have.
Four hours, door to pier. The delay was not boring for one minute of it.
A village you arrive at by sea
There is no road to Ilimanaq. There is no road to most places up here. The sea is the highway, the pier is the village’s front door, and everything that exists in the place arrived across the water at some point: the cabins, the freight, the groceries, the guests, us. You feel the difference the moment the boat cuts its engine. A place you can only reach by water keeps a kind of silence that a place with a road has long since lost.
The lodge is a scatter of cabins on the rocks, each one with a wall of glass aimed at Disko Bay, each one quietly making more solar power than it uses and selling the surplus back to the settlement. A luxury cabin moonlighting as the village power station. We liked that. The manager gave us the story at the briefing, and it’s a good one: the lodge arrived in 2017 as half of a restoration project, the same Danish foundation that brought the village’s two eighteenth-century buildings back board by board, and the cabins were set down on the bare rock on steel feet, no blasting, no poured foundations, so that if they ever left, the hill would keep no memory of them. We liked that even more. And we liked, most of all, that the whole place runs on the understanding that the view is the entertainment and there isn’t going to be any other.
The first midnight
The first afternoon we did nothing much, on purpose, in the Arctic sun, which felt like training for the days ahead. Dinner in the old house, which deserves its own pages further down. And then, because the light doesn’t end here, neither did the day. We walked up the blue trail after dinner, not far, just high enough, and sat in the quiet while the mouth of the icefjord turned gold below us.
The wind dropped to nothing. So we put the drone up into the midnight light and met Ilimanaq properly, from the air: a handful of roofs on bare rock, the cabins strung along the shore, and beyond them the bay still stacked with the ice we’d threaded that morning, going silver and pink at its edges. Some places you understand from a map. This one you understand from the air at midnight, seeing how small the human part is, and how calmly it sits inside all the rest.
At one in the morning we were on our own balcony with the day refusing to end, and we finally understood hygge, the Danish art of warm contentment, in the last place we expected to meet it. Hygge deserves its own post one day, and it will get one. But the Danes keep a second word, a smaller one, and we’d like to submit it for immediate international adoption. Pyt. It’s what you say when a small thing goes wrong and you decide, out loud, to let it go. A shrug you can pronounce. Denmark once voted it the country’s favourite word. Somewhere a long way south of that balcony, the inbox was filling as we sat there. Pyt. We went to bed at two, in full daylight, entirely unbothered.
The slow day
The middle day had no boat, no guide, and no schedule, and it turned out to be one of the best days of the trip.
We slept until the light stopped pretending to be a particular time. We took coffee out to the terrace, and then a second coffee, and the second one lasted somewhere over an hour, because the bergs were drifting past in slow parade and a humpback was working the water just offshore and there was, genuinely, nothing else we were supposed to be doing. Dee did not check a single timeline. Tracey’s Oura ring, which had spent two weeks filing concerned reports about our sleep, recorded a day so calm it practically sent flowers.
There was no wifi, and we did not go looking for any. Two people who run a business across every time zone there is, unreachable on a rock in Disko Bay, exhaling on purpose. It took most of the day to remember how.
That evening, after dinner, we started up the yellow trail, higher than the night before, and flew the drone in the gold. And then we did something better than any of it. We rang home and turned the phone around, so the people we love on the far side of the planet could watch a midnight sun refuse to set. Walking back through the settlement after midnight, we set a camera on a rock for a timelapse of the sun that wouldn’t go down. It kind of worked. But the real footage was the two of us lying on the rocks beside it, doing nothing at all, running the quiet arithmetic of whatever mixture of hard work and outrageous luck lands two people from Tokyo on this exact shoreline at this exact hour, and coming up grateful either way.
There’s a walk you can take north of the village, up past Thule ruins and burial cairns to a hilltop where the whole mouth of the icefjord lays itself out. We did it, in the end, slowly. But we want to be honest about the terrace, because the terrace was most of what we came here to learn. You are allowed to do nothing in a beautiful place. The doing-nothing is not the gap between the real things. Some days it is the real thing.
The hill of four thousand years
The walk, when we took it, climbs through most of human history in Greenland.
Stone foundations from the Thule people, who came east from Canada eight hundred years ago and whose descendants were pouring our coffee that week. Older rings and graves from the peoples before them. Burial cairns where the stones have shifted enough that, in places, you can see who lies beneath. The bones stay where they are. This is not a museum. It’s a hillside people kept choosing, for four thousand years, for the same two reasons the lodge chose it: the hunting, and the view.
From the cairn at the top, on a clear hour, you can see the glacier front itself, sixty-five kilometres off, a thin white line at the end of the world’s supply chain of ice. Four thousand years of people stood on this exact hill and watched the same ice come down the same fjord. The village below is named for expectations. The hill is where you climbed to have them.
We stood up there a long time, two people from a city of millions, on a hill chosen by four thousand years of people who understood something about where to put a life that we are only beginning to. It did not make us feel small, exactly. It made us feel included. Late, and briefly, but included.
Dinner in the oldest house
You eat, at the lodge, in a black timber house that has stood above the harbour since the 1750s.
It belonged to the mission, to Poul Egede, the son of the missionary who founded modern Greenland on a misheard word, and who did the thing his father never managed and actually learned the language, properly, for life. For two and a half centuries the house did mission work, trade work, storage work. Then a Danish foundation and the lodge restored it board by board, and for three recent summers it did something genuinely strange: a two-Michelin-star restaurant from the Faroes moved in, and a village of fifty-five briefly hosted the most remote tasting menu on the planet. The restaurant has gone home now. The room remains. You sit in it and eat what the bay and the backcountry provide, and the walls are older than every country either of us has ever lived in. On our first night that meant a starter of apple and raw fish, sharp and clean and exactly right, then halibut and potatoes, with the midnight sun coming through the old windows and lying across the tables like it had a reservation. The second night, raw halibut, then Greenlandic lamb. The third, musk ox tartare and musk ox slow-cooked in red wine, our first musk ox ever and, we sincerely hope, not our last. And the potatoes, every single night, deserve a sentence of their own. This is it.
The food is wonderful. But the thing we kept noticing was the quiet around it. Outside the windows, the midnight light on still water. The village gone fully acoustic after the last boat, which is not so much a sound as the careful absence of all the ones we’re used to. We have eaten in some loud, dazzling rooms in our time. This was the one we’ll describe to people for years, and most of what made it was what we couldn’t hear.
The ice we said no to
There was an offer on the table for the last day, and it was a serious one. The ice sheet itself, reached by a strange and joyful sequence of all-terrain vehicle, open dinghy, and finally your own boots on the ice.
It helps to know what was being offered. What you stand on out there is not frozen water. It’s compressed snow, a hundred thousand winters of it, pressed by nothing but its own weight into something harder than most rock, three kilometres thick at the centre, heavy enough to have bent the island’s bedrock into a bowl. Drill into it and it comes up striped, a layer for every year, each one holding a sealed bubble of the air that fell with it. Scientists read it like tree rings. Near the bottom there is ice holding breath from a hundred thousand years ago, from a world before anyone had said a single word for ice.
We have spent two weeks photographing the far end of this. The icebergs we shot with Jonas at midnight left this surface as snowfall before the pyramids, took two centuries to reach the sea, and will spend a while longer drifting south as the most patient sculptures on earth.
We said no.
Not because the offer wasn’t extraordinary. Because the whales kept passing the window, and the ice had drifted in closer to the shore overnight, and our first cloudy sky in weeks had settled over the bay like a lid, and we could not honestly name one thing the ice sheet had that this window didn’t. Ten days ago we would have gone. We’d have packed the batteries and been on the dinghy before the sentence finished. That we didn’t, that we heard ourselves turn down the biggest set piece on the menu in favour of a chair we were already sitting in, is the clearest evidence we have that the lesson took.
The whales kept commuting past the window that last night, the way they had all along. We were not tired of it. We are fairly sure we never would have become tired of it.
That, it turns out, is what the rest was for. Not to recover from the trip. To remember how to stand still inside something beautiful without immediately trying to make it useful. We had to come to a village of fifty-five, at the far quiet edge of the inhabited world, to relearn the thing our whole working life is supposedly about.
On the last night there was no midnight sun at all. Just a flat grey sliver out over the water, the first night in weeks the sky hadn’t performed, as though the light had watched us learn to do nothing and decided to try it too. Ilimanaq is rock and moss and fifty-five people and one of the most beautiful views either of us has ever sat inside, a place that feels politely forgotten by time, and we mean that as the compliment of the whole trip.
The opposite of Tokyo. We expected to like it. We did not expect to need it quite so much.
Read more travel stories here:
The Night the Fjord Disappeared
