Hiking Qaqortoq – Around the Big Lake

   We made it to southern Greenland to a small town called Qaqortoq. It has a population of about 3000 which means we basically doubled the size of the town. There are around 40 cruise ships that stop here in the summer time. The tourist infrastructure is a bit more developed but it has a long way to go to accommodate a ship of this size. Most tours were a narrated walk through town. We opted for the 8 mile 5 hour walk. We had a very good guide who lives is Switzerland and comes here in the summer. The lake walk is around the fresh water lake that supplies the town with their drinking water. However there is one large hill at the far end of the lake which took about 90 minutes to climb. There was a lot of up and down on the way up but overall we thought that it was not as hard as Nuuk. There were not as much scrambling as in Nuuk. It is really hard to describe the hike and what the landscape looks like. The pictures should help.

 

The Downside

Our guide did a good job of filling in details about the area, something we did not get on the last hike. He knew about the flowers and the landscape and did an excellent job of keeping the group together. One person was very slow and we left him behind with others from the ship. We did a small walk through town but opted to return to the ship as we had not eaten much since our early breakfast. We left at 8:30 and were back on aboard around 3:30. We stopped for afternoon tea to replenish ourselves. After a brief rest, we were off to the early show.

  The main entertainment seemed to come up fast! The entertainment was a vocalist who did a variety of songs from Broadway, Opera and Pop. It was among the better entertainment that we have seen. We could not remember hearing her in the past. One of our missing table mates came back so the 5 of us had a very nice meal. We checked out the specialty restaurants menus as we are going tomorrow. We decided to head to the cabin early as we have another 5 hour hike tomorrow. It is billed as strenuous but the other hikes were billed the same. We shall see.