"Not much ice today," shouted the skipper. I had to lean close to hear this surprising statement. The 20-knot wind blowing from the nearby icecap flicked the words from his mouth and sent them skittering across the green-blue sea.
He was right: there wasn't much ice cluttering the channel between the mainland and Disko Island, as the wind had blown all but the largest chunks away. Those that remained were icebergs, carrier-sized chunks of ice snapped from the snout of a glacier moving in a stately procession to the north, and there were, to my untutored eye, plenty of them.
"But very rough, no?" the skipper continued. It wasn't really rough in the way the sea gets up around the coast of Britain, and his boat, a 25ft cabin cruiser seemingly more suited to summer trips to Ryde, was coping. Though cold, the waters looked inviting; the bright skies and the windy sunlight made them seem warm, tempting me to jump in and float gently between icebergs, watching supine as the fulmars played on the wind.
The boat took us from Ilulissat, the main port in this part of west Greenland, two hours north to Ice Camp Eqi. "We" were myself and an old friend, Charlie Millar. Both great fans of the tales of Polar heroism, we had, after several pints in a London pub, concocted a plan to visit the Arctic. We chose Greenland because it seemed the most mysterious part of the region easily accessible by plane.
Greenland is the world's largest island, the size of western Europe, yet it has a population of only 55,000. North of the Arctic circle, they live in a climate dominated by winter: in October, snow covers the ground, the white blanket not melting until May. Between January and March the water is frozen hard enough to speed dogsleds across the sea. The length of the day is extreme both in winter and summer: in Ilulissat, the sun sets on November 31 and doesn't poke its head back above the horizon until January 11. In summer, the situation is reversed, and daylight is constant during June and July.
Greenland also has one feature no other northern arctic landmass can boast - the ice cap, 3km thick, covers 90% of the country, leaving in the summer only a thin green inhabitable fringe around the coast. We reckoned two or three days' exploring and camping on the ice would be about right, and had hired a guide to help us find our way around. He was Danish, and his name was Dennis. He was keen to show us the ice but less keen to stay there overnight, and had devised a trip based at Camp Eqi, a three- to four-hour walk from the edge of the ice cap.
The side of the bay on which the camp sat rose from the sea in a series of steps, each a slab of smooth rock. Between these rounded outcrops clung dwarf willow, blueberry and moss, none more than ankle height. On the lower land, at the head of the valley, the plants grew in profusion. The low sunlight covered the soft ground on which we walked in the colours of a Highland summer - browns and greens flecked with early autumn magenta.
Across the bay was the face of the glacier, in front of which was a great raw moraine, a 50ft-high grey gravel boundary between heath and ice. It took four hours or so to walk to the moraine and back, and by the time we returned a party was in progress. It was partying Greenland style.
The hosts, our guide's employers, flew most of the guests in by helicopter. Also choppered in were the supplies: crates of Tuborg beer, cases of wine, and food for the barbie. I've been to a few barbies in my time but this was the first where the slabs of marinated meat thrown on to the grill had once been part of a fin whale.
Greenlanders have a small quota of whales that they are allowed to kill annually, and some of the flesh had ended up on our barbie. Charlie and I, both graduates of an environmental degree course, found whale steak rather hard to swallow, if only because the slabs of meat were so big. "Not fishy at all, is it?" said one of the guests, recognising that we were not aficionados. And they were right - it tasted more like beef.
We spent the night in a hut that had been part of a base camp set up for a series of French scientific expeditions in the late 1940s. Despite the ravages of time, it was still warm and windproof. The following morning we picked our way through the party fallout and on to the path that led to the ice. Paths are rare in Greenland outside settlements, but the French expedition's equipment had been bulky so the engineers had built a road to transport it to the ice cap. We followed this up over the hill, heading inland. Here the landscape was more barren, a flat rocky highland dotted with small lakes filled with clear, clean water. Along the veins of rock that formed the skyline sat large boulders, lowered into position as the rivers of ice in which they were embedded melted away.
Near the edge of the ice cap, the land changed dramatically. The path led us down into a small valley, from where we climbed up and into a completely different landscape. Gone were the browns, greys and greens of the lower land; here, there was nothing but grey. The last moraine we clambered over was loose and gravel-like; then, in a few strides, we were no longer ankle deep in stones but standing on hard ice. Before us, the ice rose gently to the distant horizon, then carried on climbing to reach a height of over 3,000m before descending gently to the east coast 800km away. The ground we stood on was not flat but formed like still waves, each about 3ft high.
The ice was hard as glass. In some places, pale blue water ran in small channels; in another, a river ended in a vertical, bottomless, blue ice hole. Dennis nimbly jumped across, then told us to do the same. He warned us not to slip: once in the water, it would be a bobsleigh run from which there would be no return.
It was deliciously terrifying to peer into any of the numerous crevasses. They were deep, and the colour changed from white to blue, then to indigo in the depths. In the winter, these would be covered in snow; now they were open but difficult to spot. The folds in the ice could hide a small depression or a gash in the fabric of the ice cap 100m deep.
The following day, we were back in a warm wooden hut at Camp Eqi. The wind had subsided and the sun shone brightly on the glacier opposite. Without the noise of the wind, we could hear the artillery cracks of the ice falling in house-sized blocks from its face. Once in the water, they broke up, writhing and spinning as they did so.
It was a lazy afternoon. Charlie, a keen birdwatcher, spotted a family of ptarmigan nestled between some rocks behind our hut. Unfortunately for the birds, so was Peter, the charming but reckless Dane who ran the camp. Four shots rang out, and soon the family ptarmigan were being plucked for supper. We ate them in the camp kitchen, washed down with plenty of red wine left over from the party.
The boat that came to collect us was not the listing dayboat of the outward journey but a tough and competent-looking fishing boat. While we collected our kit together, the skipper was told he could kill time looking for seals in the bay. When we jumped aboard an hour later, it was clear that he had done more than kill time - there was a dead seal in the back of his boat and a happy grin on his face.
With no wind to clear the bay, the first hour of the journey back to Ilulissat was spent carefully picking our way through the ice-choked waters. Once in the open sea, the skipper turned on the radio and opened up the throttle and we sped between the rocky coastline and the processing icebergs to a soundtrack of tinny dance music.
The shops and cars in Ilulissat were unwelcome after the clean beauty of the ice but it was here that an Air Greenland flight was waiting to take us to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland's international airport. There, the walk across the Tarmac gave us a final chance to breathe in the wild beauty of this untouched country, but not our last chance to see it. Flying back to Copenhagen, it was nearly an hour before we were no longer looking down at the ice upon which we had so recently trod.
