Kulusuk
"Lia grabbed my arm on the tarmac and just pointed at the icebergs. Nobody had warned us the airport had a view like that."
A handful of turf-roofed houses on a windswept island, where icebergs drift past the runway and drums still call visitors ashore.
We landed in Kulusuk the way most people do: disoriented, a little jet-lagged, and completely unprepared for how small everything felt. The airport was built by the US military back in 1956, part of a Cold War radar station, and it still has that stripped-down, functional look — a single runway carved into the rock, with fewer than 300 people living in the settlement around it. I remember stepping off the plane and forgetting, for a second, to walk toward the terminal, because the fjord behind it was full of icebergs just sitting there, enormous and silent, like they’d been placed for effect.
Kulusuk is East Greenland’s front door, and you feel that the moment you start walking through it. Houses in bright reds, blues, and yellows are scattered along the harbor, a few older ones still wearing their traditional turf roofs, insulation and design passed down long before anyone here had heard of a radar station. Lia and I wandered up from the coast without much of a plan, just following whichever gravel path looked least steep, and kept stopping to stare at the water — sea ice breaking apart in slow motion, catching the light in a way that made it hard to keep walking.
That evening a group of local dancers performed for a small crowd that had come in on a cruise ship — drum dancing, the kind that’s been done here for generations, now shared mostly with tourists passing through on their way to Tasiilaq. I’ll admit I felt a little self-conscious watching it as an outsider, camera in hand, but the rhythm of it, low and steady, cut through that pretty quickly. Afterward an older man who’d been part of the group told us, in fragments of English, that the drumming used to call people together long before there was a harbor full of colorful houses to gather in front of.
The next morning we caught a boat across the water to Tasiilaq, weaving between ice chunks that looked close enough to touch from the bow, and I kept thinking how strange it was that this tiny island — really just an airport and a village — was the hinge that so much of East Greenland swings on. Everyone who comes this way passes through Kulusuk first, even if they only remember it as the place where the plane door opened onto all that ice.
When to go: We went in July, when the water opens up enough for the boat crossing to Tasiilaq to run reliably — aim for June through August if you want that same ice-free access, since earlier in the year the fjord can still be locked up solid.