![]() ![]() We have found Jack London’s “white silence.” There are only the shutters of Nikons and the clunk-clunk of the ship’s engines as passengers gather on aft decks, huddling together for warmth of body and soul, feeling transitory, diminished before the enormity of nature’s mountains. As we sail the Sound, these ageless granite giants rest no more than two miles away on either side of the vessel, not quite touching distance but close enough to marvel at their size, their endurance, their testament to indelible timelessness.īefore the massive Rocky-mountain peaks, the 1300 passengers, noisy and jaded like me by too many cruises, have become hushed. While the ship is a respectable ten stories high, the mountains-in a competition the vessel can never hope to win-soar nearly to skyscraper levels of 4600 feet. Cradling the ship are granite mountains, stolid witnesses to innumerable ice ages down their sides glaciers have dutifully marched to the water, calved, and, receded, leaving tell-tale black scratches as if clawed by the world’s largest polar bear, extracting painful revenge against the mountains.Ī dash of cloud and a touch of fog poise themselves, like a bride’s veil, parting here and there to reveal the bold beauty of the granite mountain faces. For once, he was right.Įntering the channel from Greenland’s west coast, our 61,000 ton ship (equivalent to 3,400 blue whales) unexpectedly feels diminished. ![]() The cruise director is his ususal enthusiastic self (aren’t they all hired to be vibrant, energetic about every part of the cruise itinerary?), so I am skeptical when he exclaims, over the PA system, the transit will be the voyage’s highlight. Voyaging through Prince Christian Sound is like sailing through the Rockies, graced with glaciers and, of course, ever-present icebergs. As the Vikings did a thousand years ago, ships transit through Prince Christian Sound, open no more than three months a year, to avoid the treacherous waters and currents found at the tip of Greenland. This channel called Prince Christian Sound or in Greenland’s Inuit (Eskimo) language “Ikerasassuaq” (do not even attempt to pronounce these helter-skelter vowels, unless you want an Inuit to smile at your inadequacies.) is a 66-mile long (105 kilometers) passage which cuts through the southern half of Greenland from the east to the west coasts, zigzagging like an anaconda through a river. You are sailing on a luxury cruise ship through a unique maritime channel found at the southern end of the world’s largest island Greenland. Now, imagine this ice the size of three Greyhound buses, deposited in blue-gray Arctic waters amid granite mountains whose peaks are one billion years old, from whose sides cascade waterfalls formed by melting glaciers. ![]() Prince Christian Sound: Iceberg Canyon of the North ![]()
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