Day 23 - Finish line is reached

Day 23, 26 June
Position: Upernavik

We called Air Greenland and chartered a helicopter to pick us up at 14.00 to bring us down from the glacier. Our GPS is set to show the position in degrees and divide the degrees in normal 10's. The person who took the position at Air Greenland forwarded it to the pilot as a position in degrees, minutes and seconds. This error led to a misunderstanding. When the pilot called us on our satellite phone and asked why we didn't appear at the position we started to smell trouble. After a brief discussion the misunderstanding was cleared and the correct position forwarded as degrees, minutes and seconds. In the mean time the weather had gotten worse. From our position the visible clearing between the ice cap and the clods were small, and it was getting smaller by the minute. The helicopter had to arrive pretty soon if we were to avoid having to wait for a helicopter pick-up on an other day with better visibility.

After some thrilling minutes we could hear the sound of a Bell 212, a helicopter who turned out to sound like a Vietnam movie on steroids. The sound appeared to come from somewhere close, but because of the low visibility ity took some time for us to spot it. Naturally it was easier for us to spot the helicopter than it was for the pilot to see us. When the helicopter started to circle the surrounding areas apparently without seeing us, Hugo started to shoot signal flares in order to attract attention. Six flares later the helicopter landed by our position. It then turned out that the pilot had spotted our big red Hilleberg-tent, but when we took it down it we disappeared.

When we got up in the air it soon turned out that we had chosen the right spot to stop. Only a few hundred meters ahead of us the glacier was covered with crevasses and rivers of melting water. The posted picture shows how the glacier looked like from the helicopter just after take off.

In Upernavik there are no hotels. But through some sweet talking with a nice lady working at the air port we came in contact with a person who was willing to rent us a house. The choice between continuing to live in a tent or get a real bed and a hot shower in a house was a pretty easy one. The posted second pictures shows Upernavik from the air. The picture only covers a part of Upernavik, but still shows about 90 % of all the houses in this nice settlement. "Our" house is one of the red ones to the right in the picture.

We have now showered and changed clothes for the first time in more than 3 weeks. The next few days will be spent to explore this exiting settlement. Our plane back to Norway leaves on 1 July. Bjørn Einar keeps talking about this place being perfect for learning kayaking "the proper way".