Financial Times Europe - 09.11.2019 - 10.11.2019

9 November/10 November 2019 ★ FT Weekend 9

Travel

Greenland An experiment in ‘slow radio’ leads|

Horatio Clare o discover one of the world’s mostt

spectacular walks, the 100-mile Arctic Circle Trail

O

ne afternoon in the out-

back of Greenland we

climbed an amphitheatre

of rock to a view of miles of

mountains. They surged

into distances where you could walk for

weeks and see nothing of humankind.

Greenland’s 57,000 people inhabit a

speckle of settlements on the rim of the

vast interior. Here, in the south-western

region of the island, far from the ice cap,

lie countless of miles of frozen moss, sil-

very lichens, peaks lined with bones of

snow, tarns, clear skies and a continent

of silence. You can hear a raven’s wing

beats hundreds of metres away.

At the end of September we had flown

into Sisimiut, a small fishing port its

inhabitants call a city, which is only

accessible by boat or plane. Our mis-

sion, to record a “Sound Walk” for BBC

Radio 3, required recordist Andy Fell,

producer Jeremy Evans and me to trek

40 miles eastward into the interior, car-

rying all we needed in heavy rucksacks

and sleeping in hunters’ huts along the

Arctic Circle Trail. We aimed to make

three hour-long programmes capturing

the spirit and sound of the walk, part of

the channels “slow radio” output,

designed as “an antidote to today’s fren-

zied world”.

“We may have to cancel,” Jeremy

wrote, just before departure, “a polar

bear has been seen on our path. I am

looking for someone with a gun.”

He found our man, Kaajinnguaq

Kajussen, a Greenlander who stalwartly

trod out the distances with us, a rifle

strapped to his rucksack. Pretty well

every Greenlander I met hunts. Food is

very expensive here — everyone seems

to keep freezers stocked with reindeer

steaks. We had no common language

savenanoq, bear, andtuttut, reindeer.

Leaving Sisimiut, three runaway husky

pups decided to accompany us. Our pro-

cession comprised me muttering into a

microphone, Andy with a recording rig

like a radar poking out of his backpack,

Jeremy listening, navigating and noting,

and the dogs following Kaajinnguaq,

under the misapprehension, as it turned

out, that he’d walked the trail before and

so knew where we were going.

The path dissolved into profusions of

rock, moss and dwarf willow, reappear-

ing on mountain passes. Our guides

were the map and distant cairns. Cairns

and tiny huts a day’s march apart are all

there is of the Arctic Circle Trail, which

runs a hundred miles between Sisimiut

and Kangerlussuaq, where there is an

international airport. Annually about a

thousand people complete what is one

of the world’s most wonderful treks. A

guest book in our first hut was a hubbub

of joy, gratitude and amazement,

1950s recorded that the Greenlanders

had only recently begun to distinguish

between hours of work and play. To

them, existence was all one. They prac-

tised a form of polyamory by which a

wife might leave her husband to spend

time with another man. Three days was

the limit. If she shared her body but not

her soul, no infidelity had taken place.

Understandably, when you see the

untameable landscape here, the Inuits’

philosophy conceived existence in

terms of an immanence that Samuel

Taylor Coleridge’s thought also identi-

fied. All things, animate and inanimate,

share a force of beingthat transcends

death. Shamans were able to travel

between bodies and worlds. They used

drum dances to take their audiences on

sacred journeys between worlds and

life forms.

After Fali had played and sung it was

the turnof Nuka Alice Lund and Jose

Joelsen. A compact, vivid woman, deli-

cate lines beautifully tattooed on her

face, Nuka Alice explained her song

came to her when she was hunting seals.

“We believe the drum songs come to you

out of the earth — they find you,” she

said. A thin skin is stretched over a

wooden hoop. This rim is struck with a

stick, giving a beat. The rest is down to

the dancer. Her song was melancholy

with yearning for life and death, sorrow

and praise. I told her how moving I

found it. She smiled. “That is what it is

for — it is supposed to change you.” Then

she grinned. “Jose is pretty good... ”

Jose Joelsen is a tall slim young man,

shy, track-suited, with tattooed lines

spreading out from his mouth. “This is

about a man who is challenged to a bat-

tle by a shaman,” he said. “He doesn’t

want to do it but he has no choice.” He

bent slightly and struck his drum. Now

something astounding happened. As his

voice filled the space, Jose changed. His

body swelled and spread with the

sound. His features suffused, deepening

and broadening into an entirely differ-

ent face: there is no other way to put it.

The boyish figure became a man

wracked with anguish and desperation.

As the song went on different notes of

experience came, regret, determina-

tion, a terrible kind of acceptance. To

witness his song was to be transported

suddenly, to be shaken and moved by

something irresistibly powerful, an

ancient intertwining of the human spirit

and this mighty land.

Jose now tours the world performing.

He and Alice teased us about our walk,

not entirely lightly. “You know a man

disappeared on the trail three years ago?

You know there are wild men who live

out there, they like scaring people. You

know there are evil spirits?” Their tat-

toos, they said, were defence against

them. “But isn’t nature neutral?” I

asked. No, they said, nature could be

good or evil.

It was easy to imagine the origins of

that belief in a landscapethat would

soon be dark, frozen and pitilessly hos-

tile, but the days we walked through and

the nights we saw were still and clear,

magically benign. In the last couple of

hours of each day’s trek the weight of

our packs and the distances covered, the

rough going underfoot, Andy’s shoul-

ders, Jeremy’s legs and my feet pro-

duced strains and aches. The huts were

always further, around another ridge,

over another shoulder, but our arrivals

were all the more wonderful.Little

more than sheds, the huts offer a sleep-

ing platform or bunks, a paraffin stove

(with fuel, in one case), candle stubs,

abandoned bullets and camping gas. We

lived on boil-in-the-bag stews and pasta,

beans and potatoes, energy bars, choco-

late, water and nips of cheap Scotch. We

became close, drawn together by the

GREENLAND

NORTH

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

Maniitsoq

Nuuk

Sarfannguit

Sisimiut Kangerlussuaq

mapsnews.com/©HERE  km

W

hen I called Berlin’s

Tegel airport “awful”

last year, its defenders

came out swinging. One

colleague marched over

to berate me and several readers wrote

to say they “couldn’t disagree more”.

“I think it is the best airport in the

world, and the most inspiring piece of

customer-centred architecture I have

ever seen in a public building,” one

reader said. So vehement were the

Tegel defenders that I used a recent

trip to Berlin to consider whether I

should think again.

Tegel was built in 90 days in 1948 to

facilitate the Berlin airlift. Its concrete

hexagonal terminal opened in 1974.

The shape gives Tegel what its

supporters regard as its principal

advantage: its gates allow quick access

in and out.

There are no long walks through the

airport. Immigration desks are spaced

But you immediately run into one

of Tegel’s defects: it has no rail

connections. There are public

transport options — of which more

below — but I was chairing an early

event the next day so I broke with my

usual practice by jumping into a cab,

postponing my Tegel research for the

next day’s return journey.

Withmore time on the way home,

I took the airport’s advice and caught

an S-Bahn train to Zoologischer Garten

station, where I found the X9 bus to the

airport. Unfortunately, the bus does

not accept plastic cards and I had

nothing smaller than a €50 note for the

€2.80 fare. I don’t want to get anyone

into trouble so let’s just say that what

the X9 lacks incharging facilities it

makes up for in easy-going drivers.

The bus meandered through the

afternoon traffic, taking 45 minutes

rather than the advertised 20, but I

noticedsmarter travellers get the train

to Jakob-Kaiser-Platz and hop on the

X9 for a much shorter journey to Tegel.

With the battery on my iPhone

running low by the time I got to the

airport, I looked for a computer

terminal to print out my boarding

pass, but those are available only for

Lufthansa passengers. I can see Tegel’s

appeal to the nostalgics. All around,

the 1970s resonates: the shops, the

food, the technology.

The hexagonal shape meant we had

our own dedicated passport control

and security line. For our British

Airways flight to London City, we were

sharing the space only with the

similarly timed BA flight to Heathrow.

So, quick access once again — to a

packed departure area. I headed for the

designated “charging point” to restore

my phone: there were two wall plugs,

probably originally installed for the

cleaners’ Hoovers, and permanently

occupied by the half-term school

parties returning to London. It is

probably unfair to expect Tegel to

update itself. It has been due to close

for years, waiting only for Berlin’s

Brandenburg airport to open. That’s

the new airport that has done more

damage to postwar Germany’s

reputation for efficiency and

competence than anything else. It’s

almost a decade behind schedule and

wildly over budget.

Berlin Brandenburg is now supposed

to open in October 2020, with Tegel

then scheduled to be turned into a

high-tech science park and residential

neighbourhood. But there are voices

calling for the old airport to be saved.

Berliners voted 56 per cent in favour of

Tegel staying open in a non-binding

referendum in 2017. They and many

FT readers love the place, for reasons

that remain largely lost on me.

@[email protected]

around the terminal gates rather than

centred in one place, which means that

if you arrive, as I did, on a late (and

delayed) flight from London, you get

through in a couple of minutes.

So vehement were the

Tegel airport defenders

that I used a recent trip to

Berlin to consider whether

Michael Skapinker I should think again

Business travel

The sound of wilderness

complaints about midges, laments over

endless bogs — “so wet, wet to my arm-

pits, and then I got wetter,” cried one —

and sightings of musk ox, reindeer and

birds. In every entry was the sensation

of being humbled and exalted that

nature in her true might imparts. A Brit-

ish woman wrote of her relief at having

to think only about the walking, the

navigating, the place.

This is rich territory for the mind.

Greenland’s modern story goes far

beyond the melting ice cap. In the

ground here are an estimated quarter of

the world’s reserves of rare earth oxides,

crucial for numerous high-tech applica-

tions including wind turbines and elec-

tric cars — reenland could be the SaudiG

Arabia of the green future. Donald

Trump’s offer to buy the place was

understandable (and the third time,

since 1867, that the US has considered

it). Last year, China, already invested

in an Australian mining company that

has won concessions in Greenland,

offered to build three airports here.

There are places where an ultraviolet

torch will make a hillside of rocks glow

like cinders, so rich are the minerals

within them.

I told these stories for the microphone

but as we tramped I thought most of all

of an extraordinary experience in a

community hall in Sisimiut on the eve of

our departure, where Jeremy had

arranged to meet local musicians. Fali

Kleist, asinger-songwriter, described

the thrill of his youth, when Greenland-

ers rejected Danish rule, asserting their

culture and national destiny in a series

of summer festivals. “The Inuit held

these festivals to trade and tell stories

and maybe fall in love!” Fali said.

I n t h e e a r ly

20th century,

when the Danish-

Inuit explorer

Knud Rasmussen

lived and trav-

elled here, Green-

landic life was

based on hunting,

a s t o n i s h i n g

toughness and a

sensitivity to oth-

ers necessitated

by communal liv-

ing. Members of a

B r i t i s h a r m y

expedition in the

From top: a

hiker above

Sisimiut, the

western

terminus of the

trail; houses in

Sisimiut; sound

recordist Andy

Fell; one of the

nine huts along

the trail

Visit Greenland/Lisa Germany

Photography; Alamy

The Arctic Circle Trail is open to all

and there is no fee for walking it or

for using the nine huts along the

way. Most walkers start from

Kangerlussuaq (where there is an

international airport) and head

west to Sisimiut, from where they

fly back. The trail is marked with

cairns; there is often no path. It is

100 miles in total and most people

take between nine and 11 days.

Spring will be very wet underfoot,

summer runs the risk of midges —

autumn, when the first frosts

deplete the insects and freeze the

bogs, is ideal. Consider carrying a

tent for emergencies, and possibly

a satphone, as there is no mobile

reception. The guidebook

Trekking in Greenland: The Arctic

Circle Trail y Paddy Dillonb

(Cicerone) is essential kit. See also

destinationarcticcircle.com a body(

set up to support business and

tourism in the region); it can also

advise on weather conditions and

polar bear sightings.

Trail notes

work and the adventure, by delighted

incredulity that we were here and by a

wonder at the astounding scale and

purity of the mountains and the lakes.

We walked through rough meadows of

crowberry and lichen, over rumples

of deep icy mosses. We climbed up

banks of rocks through shining Arctic

light. In the high passes we crossed

stony desolations where lay freezing

and silent lakes. At night the Northern

Lights snaked above us, pulsing tenta-

cles, luminous green. God, what a planet

this is! I kept thinking.

I looked back, on the last day, at the

figures of Andy with his 45-pound pack

and Jeremy, similarly burdened, tiny in

a remote valley, and marvelled at Radio

3’s willingness tosend them here. The

programmes will be broadcast over

Christmas. In the Boxing Day edition

comes the moment when Kaajinnguaq

unstraps his rifle. I am holding forth on

thebeauty of a pair of snow-white ptar-

migans and noting, as the Norse settlers

recorded, that some of Greenland’s

wildlife is unafraid of humans.

“Ah. It looks as though Kaajinnguaq is

going to take a shot at them,” I com-

ment. He has decided the husky pups

need feeding. He takes aim at one of the

birds, about30 yards away, a slightly

tricky shot uphill in a cross-wind. He

fires. The ptarmigan looks nonplussed.

He fires again. The birds are barely

bothered, affording Kaajinnguaq a third

attempt which also misses. We get the

giggles. So much for the Boxing Day

shoot. A charging polar bear must be hit

under the chin if there is to be any

chance of stopping it. Fortunately, the

closest we came to our beast was a sight-

ing of its tracks.

We wanted to do the whole 100 miles

but the production team’s time was lim-

ited, so we branched off the main trail,

trekking south to the hamlet of Sar-

fannguit where we took a boat back to

Sisimiut. The huskies were caught and

returned to their owner. Fit and exhila-

rated, we went for a celebratory drink.

“You have been out in nature?” the

barman said, “Then your souls are full

of wisdom!” I laughed, but on the jour-

ney home our feelings of deep calm and

gratitude at having seen and crossed a

fraction of Greenland’s immensity did

not fade. Indeed, remembering our trek

along the Arctic Circle Trail, they only

seem to grow.

NOVEMBER 9 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 11/20197/ - 17:52 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD9, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 9, 1