About the Author
Denmark-based author Sean Connolly (@shanboqol) has been enjoying the landscapes of Greenland since 2022, splitting his time between this Arctic wonderland, his base in Denmark nd many other destinations around the world. His passion for exploration began long before he could even read maps, a fascination that has only deepened over the years. Since 2011, Sean has worked in travel media, authoring and updating more than a dozen guidebooks with Bradt Travel Guides and Lonely Planet. His extensive experience as an adventure guide and travel writer has led to features in renowned publications such as Wanderlust and The Telegraph, with his work covering destinations as diverse as Greenland, Senegal, Nigeria, Mauritania, and Guinea-Bissau. Sean’s expertise and love for uncovering the world’s hidden gems bring a unique depth and authenticity to every itinerary he crafts, making each journey an invitation to discover the extraordinary.
Prepare to Embark into Polar Bear Territory
Get ready to embark on a remarkable adventure deep into the pristine wilderness of East Greenland. Over the course of your journey, you will venture into areas seldom seen by others, sailing through icy fjords, exploring glaciers and mountains, and scouting for polar bears in their natural habitat. Guided by expert locals who know this land intimately, you’ll experience the Arctic’s unique ecosystem up close, encountering a variety of wildlife along the way. This trip is about truly living a local way of life —through sailing, camping under the midnight sun, hiking across the tundra, and even tasting traditional East Greenlandic cuisine. As you navigate this stunning landscape, you’ll also have the opportunity to connect with the local Inuit culture, visiting small settlements like Isertoq and learning about life on the edge of the world. Each day will bring new discoveries and unforgettable experiences.
Day 1: First Camping Spot
Our adventure begins with a relaxed morning, allowing time to soak in the sweeping views of Tasiilaq, with its surrounding mountains, bay, and the lively atmosphere of the town. After some final packing and preparations, we met the Sermilik Adventures team: veteran hunter Tobias Ignatiussen and nurse-turned-guide Line Kristiansen. With decades of experience navigating East Greenland’s rugged terrain, Tobias and Line will be your guides on this journey.
Flexibility is key on this expedition, as Greenland’s weather dictates our plans. Our ultimate goal is to reach Umiivik Bay, 300km to the south, but we’ll adapt as necessary along the way. We load into the boat at Tasiilaq, making a quick stop in Kulusuk to pick up the rest of the group arriving from Iceland. After greeting everyone and settling in, we set off on our journey.
Our first destination is a small island off the southern shore of Ammassalik. Upon arrival, we set up camp, unloading tents, supplies, and gear. The island’s hut provides shelter from the wind, and we soon discover we’re not alone—a curious raven keeps a close watch, waiting for any stray snacks or remnants of our evening meal.
Day 2: Whales and Icebergs
We awake into a moody mist, snapping photos in the soft light. As we set off, humpback whales appeared close to our boat, curious and majestic. The day soon clears and we motor south in our open-topped boats, curious and majestic. The day is clear and we motor south in our open-topped boats, with icy fingers of wind ensuring we discovered immediately and exactly where a jacket wasn’t properly buttoned, or a scarf not fully tucked – plugging the drafts with anything available, like the owners of an old, leaky house.
We pass the turnoff for Isertoq, the most isolated village in southeast Greenland, and the last settlement until you round Cape Farewell at Greenland’s southernmost tip, more than 700km to the south. From here on it’s just us and the ice, which floats around us on all sides, taking on the most extraordinary, surrealist forms.
Passing through the Graah Archipelago, we stop at the ruin of an ancient winter house. These are the stone-and-turf buildings in which Greenlanders used to hunker down for the cold, dark winter period. The headland offers a view over the cluster of islands and bays surrounding, and is covered in flowers and tufty tumbleweeds of eider down – it’s not hard to see why it was chosen.
A few fjords later, on a peninsula bordering Køge Bay, an astonishingly isolated modern summer house keeps watch over the waters beneath the Pamiagtik, Køge, and Havhestens Glaciers. Here we met a handful of adventure kayakers, who were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. They were the only other people we saw all week.
Day 3: Into the Heart of Polar Bear Country
Today we continue heading south, full speed ahead through the world’s wildest art gallery. Hundreds of kilometres of psychedelic drama in blue and white, where the most impossible shapes tower into the sky and tumble into one another, bubbling, creaking, breaking, and surfacing again as a newly formed work, each as beautiful and dramatic as the last. The wide, flat icebergs provide a place to stretch your legs, to have lunch, to refill your water bottles from the pools of meltwater on the surface, and to relieve yourself after some hours in the boat.
Here, as we approach Umiivik, the search for polar bears begins in earnest. Tobias, piloting the boat with his face in the blistering wind, keeps a careful watch. In fact, we are headed for his birthplace. Tobias was born here in Umiivik Bay, where he spent his childhood migrating between hunting grounds for seal and arctic char, and the family homestead here at Betaii. He is one of the last people alive to have lived the semi-nomadic lifestyle that sustained the Greenlanders for centuries.
A shot rings out from the boat – we’ve taken a seal. The water around our boat turns a ferocious shade of red as we haul it on board. We pull up on land and the seal is skinned, gutted, and carved within 15 minutes, before being plopped into a pot to boil – in seawater, of course. A round of giggles and uncertainty passes through the group when Enos starts handing out slices of raw liver; a delicacy that in the end no-one can refuse, reminds us of the seal’s unique importance in this part of the world. Without its meat, fat, and skins, settlement here would have been impossible.
Day 4: Exploring the Remote Wilderness of Umiivik
Here inside Umiivik Bay, the great Greenlandic ice sheet pulls close to the shore. As we pull up to a vantage point deep inside the fjord, huffing and puffing to the top of a small hill, a thought crosses my mind: ‘How many people come out here every year, 100? More?’ The answer is probably closer to 20; even Tobias has only been to this particular spot a handful of times.
As we set up our camp for the night, I’m struck by thoughts of what it means to be luxurious or exclusive. Isn’t this real luxury? Here at the base of this uninhabited fjord in East Greenland, where my footprints – and perhaps those of a polar bear – were the only ones to be found? It certainly felt like it to me.
Day 5: Encountering the Arctic Giants
A morning call to Tasiilaq on our satellite phone confirms our fears: the weather is about to turn. Our days of taking in the wilderness, pondering our place in the universe, and getting an intimate lesson in traditional Greenlandic culture and cuisine had been immensely rewarding. But we had still yet to accomplish our stated goal – that is to see a polar bear.
Tobias scans the horizon without rest, but we have to start heading north to ensure we reach an appropriate place to spend the night. We’re still very much in bear country, and the rain isn’t meant to arrive until evening, but will the timing be right? A wild whoop and a message shouted down the radio from our master hunter puts these worries to rest in an instant: ‘Fire fire fire! Fire isbjørnen!’ Four – there were four polar bears on the horizon, little sweat-yellow smudges against the brilliant white backdrop. We pull closer to see a mother, two babies, and a juvenile. It’s an unusual grouping, and they’re just as nervous at our presence as we are. But there they are, bigger, and also somehow floppier and gawkier than I had imagined – all muscle, yet somehow with the lanky gait of a giraffe. The fact that we had seen them at all in this enormous wilderness defied belief.
The bears eventually crossed the next ridgeline, out of our line of sight, and it was time to motor. The rains soon caught up with us, and it was late evening by the time we pulled up to the southern shore of Dannebrog Island. Here was the smallest, starkest, most basic hut we had encountered so far – yet on this wet and windy night, it was nothing short of a palace – and our dinner of whale in oyster sauce was fit for a king.
Day 6: Sheltering in the Storm
The day dawned as raw and wet as the night that went before. There would be no exploring today, but rather hot chocolate, journaling, reading, and a decidedly damp petanque tournament using the roundest rocks to be found. We had actually managed to accomplish everything we set out to, and still had several days of exploration ahead of us, not knowing what awaits us. The team was relieved, and we spent a tranquil day collecting our thoughts and marveling at our luxurious, dry hut built years ago by the hunter’s association. Many miles from shelter of any kind, these huts are both a comfort, and in some cases a lifesaver.
Day 7: A Serene Day on the Water
Today the sila (or weather) smiled on us once again, and we continued our journey back north under clear skies, stopping to fish for arctic char along the way. And though the weather may have been with us, the fishing most certainly was not. We ended up with just a couple of fish – a welcome treat, but not enough to feed the group. But that evening we would quickly forget we were hungry at all: a pod of humpback whales was feeding in the fjord just in front of our campsite, so we all piled back on board to get a better look. And look we did: the sun was setting, the whales were breaching, and the water was as smooth as glass, with only camera clicks and splashing whales disturbing the silence.
Day 8: Walking on the Ice Cap
A bit of peer pressure saw most of the group convinced into taking a morning dip between the icebergs, which was, as you might imagine, bracing to say the least. But after a week without a shower, it was hard to argue with the water’s immediately humanizing effects. The weather, however, was after us again, and our fresh sunny morning would soon become a sodden gray afternoon – but not before we got to climb up onto the ice cap for a couple of hours crunching our way across its immense surface, wondering what it would be like to march all the way across as other explorers, far more intrepid than I, have done.
From here, the incoming weather forced us to reroute up the Sermilik Fjord and call in at our first settlement for the whole trip: Tiilerilaaq, also known as Tinit, with a population of only 96 inhabitants. The forecast was so bad that Tobias even made a special trip to Tasiilaq for the night to get his boats out of the water before the storm rolled in – so things were looking serious indeed. Tucked away in Sermilik Fjord, this was our chance to enjoy a cozy night in one of the houses in the settlement and sleep in beds after our camping adventure – once again, feeling like pure luxury!
Day 9: A Quiet Day in Tiilerilaaq
In Greenland, the weather is often more severe along the coast than deeper into the fjords, and Tobias, Line & crew were on the money bringing us here. While it was a gray and uninspiring day in Tiilerilaaq, it was blowing with wind gusts of more than 30 m/s in Tasiilaq. Many houses in outlying Greenlandic settlements don’t have running water, so instead there is a ‘service house’ where residents can come to do laundry, take a shower, and handle other basic tasks. They’re also open for tourists, so we all excitedly queued up for our first hot shower since we had set out on this expedition nine days ago, and it was everything you could have hoped for.
In the evening we arranged to have dinner with a local friend in Tiilerilaaq– who was in fact the same woman who ran the service house, where we had all just showered. Small town life! After a fabulous dinner, and a chance to pet the family’s sled dog puppies, we went out and watched the local kids playing football. A cotton-candy pink sunset completed the scene, all at about midnight.
Day 10: Ice Cave Adventure
Today the weather looked promising again, and luckily so, as it was time to return to Kulusuk for our outbound flights. Feeling positively pampered after two nights in the village, we still had one last adventurous stop to make before heading home – to the ice cave in Kulusuk.
Discovered only a few years back by Niccoló at Nunatak Adventures, it’s the only ice cave in Greenland that’s accessible to visitors, and is only a 15-minute boat trip from Kulusuk airport. Before we knew it, we were rappelling down into this cool subterranean lair, arriving into a surreal world of greens and blues, illuminated from the cold, glowing ceiling above. Cut through by a stream of meltwater, the cave walls are a canvas of ancient air bubbles, and we pressed our cameras to its surface, desperately trying to capture some of the abstract artworks trapped within.
Back above ground, we soaked up all the sun and the views we could before boarding our flight to Iceland and saying goodbye to Tobias, Line, Enos and the whole team, and to our mesmerizing, thought-provoking adventure in East Greenland. It’s a melancholic thought to board the plane with, but a hot dog and a hug from the kind kiosk manager Kristina helps push some of the pensiveness aside.
Conclusion
The cave shifts every year, and Niccoló thinks it will be gone before too long. It’s a poignant reminder that as far away from the problems of the outside world as we have felt on this trip, in truth these problems have been with us every step of the way, as accelerating climate change alters the face of the Arctic.
We may have been one of only 20 people to set foot in Umiivik Bay this year, but ours are not the only footprints to leave a mark, and actions taken a world away will ultimately determine the future of this untouched paradise.
It’s a melancholic thought to board the plane with, but a hot dog and a hug from Kristina helps push some of the pensiveness aside. To call this trip a polar bear safari is to barely scratch the surface. It was a window into another world, and a privileged view of our planet that few people ever get to see. I know that Tobias and Line breathed a sigh of relief when these legendary bears came into view, but they were just a fluffy white cherry on top of an out-of-this world, Greenland-shaped cake.
