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Final Report

By Sunday evening we were all feeling pretty groggy - more jetlagged than exhausted. It takes a while to get used to the perpetual light. A couple of good nights sleep and plenty of fresh air seems to have left us a bit more wide awake and ready to face the unknown.

We were due to drop the hire car off when the city-center office (an industrial estate 5km out of town) opened at 8.00 am. It should have been easy if I had not left Sean and the skis at the wrong terminal, and got caught up in a suburban one way system on the way back to the B&B. Ferrying Ruth and Mark to the other terminal would also have been quicker if we had not done a depth first search of the surrounding roads - encountering the now infamous (in my mind) one way system. Still we all ended up in the right place and the car hire manager had a sense of humour - as long as we had enjoyed Iceland and wanted to come back he was happy.

We were flying at about 19000ft up the west coast of Iceland with clear veiws of the coastline and the fjords below. As we left the northwest corner of Iceland a cloud bank formed obscurring any view, but started to dissipate a short while later to reveal a mass of broken packice, some of the slabs more than a km across - an amazing sight. As we neared the coast of Greenland we saw ranges of mountains running inland, wide glaciers flowing down the valleys and a solid band of packice along the coast.

Heading inland the plane circled low over the settlement of Scoresbysund before landing on the dirt strip.

There is nothing here except the airport. A helicopter makes connections to a few nearby villages. The flight took two and a quarter hours and most of the other passengers were Brits, also headed for the mountains. Some are headed North to Petermanns Bjerg with Tangent Expeditions. Another team of three are headed to the same landing site as us.

It is two degrees above freezing, but the sun is shining and the cold has no bite. It's much more pleasant than a wet bank holiday in the Lake District. We didn't know that there were some bunk rooms at the airport, and bed & breakfast was offered. It seemed rude to refuse, so we have one more night with beds to sleep in. It's not exactly cheap, but I'm sure we'll get our money's worth at breakfast tomorrow morning.

We are cooking our own food this evening, to check the stoves and fuel.

All our gear is here and we spent a while openning boxes in the hangar, checking it and organising it for the flight to the mountains. In 24 hours we'll be there.

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