(Greenland)...This place is massive. Greenland measures 2,166,086 square kilometres, of which 755,637 square kilometres forms its massive ice sheet, the middle of the world’s largest island. Its coastline also is staggering, being some 39,330 kilometres in length, which is roughly the size of the Earth's circumference at the equator. On this huge piece of land live approximately 60,000 people.
That is one person for every 36 square kilometres of land. Of course, the people—Inuit; outsiders are known as qanuallit—can live only on a much smaller piece of land, along the coasts. Ilulissat was the farthest I was north, at 69°10'N/49°45'W, some 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. It is a pretty place, but no doubt harsh at many times of the year. The sound I will remember is of the 8,000 dogs here, howling away as I went for a walk at 5 in the morning, unable to sleep because of the perpetual light.
Every one of them was chained by a five-foot length of chain, which meant that they had a circular span of 10 feet, which is good to know, for they certainly are not pets. They are related to husky dogs and are not allowed south of the Arctic Circle (other breeds, in turn, are not allowed north) in order to keep the breed strong and pure and ready as working dogs. Also given the Danish name of grønlandshund, the dogs work hard, but during the summer they just sit around, not being fed too much in order to keep them fit. I walked around Ilulissat many times, between the rows of brightly coloured wooden houses. All the wood needs to be imported from Canada or Denmark, Greenland’s mother country. When the road runs out, a small trail winds along the coast, passes several fishing boats and ends at the beginning of the great glacier here. A hill here is where in olden times the elderly, no longer wishing to be a burden on their families, would throw themselves off to their deaths. Only those who contributed could live, was the unwritten rule, seemingly.
The glacier, called Sermeq Kujalleq, is the most active in the northern hemisphere, each day discharging into the icy sea more fresh water than New York City consumes in a year. It is spectacular, and the temperatures dropped noticeably when one is close to an iceberg, which here are immense. Think very large, and then think again. The scenery constantly changes, due to the migrations of this ice. One morning I awoke (I hardly got to sleep, really), and two Minke whales slowly passed by my window amid a few icebergs and a few more patches of floating, condensed snow. Two days later, and the whole bay—which stretches to Disko Island—was cluttered with ice. It was as though some giant had moved the hotel overnight. Equally of interest to me were the huge expanses of tundra. One could either jump from grassy tussock to grassy tussock or huge stone slab to huge stone slab. Rivers occasionally meandered from one small pond or lake to another but mostly quickly disappeared into the damp sod. Ravens jumped around. I walked for quite some time and found myself at the cemetery, which views icebergs from a distance. Who knows how many here died as a result of the elements?
A Greenlandic saying goes, If you do not fear the sea, you will not last one year in Greenland, and even in July, the water was frigid. One local told me that the only way to survive a soaking is by not panicking and being young to begin with. He told me of three young men who somehow let their boat drift away as they were out hunting. One of the men jumped in to retrieve it, but the current moved the boat faster than he could move towards it. His friends ran to get help. An hour later, the man was plucked out of the water, having survived by grabbing hold of a small lump of ice. The air ambulance was called, but apparently after being cared for on the boat, he promptly walked straight past the ambulance crew and was seen later that evening down the pub having a beer.
The town—it has 4,800 people and is Greenland’s third-largest settlement—is known also for being the home of Greenland’s greatest explorer, Knud Rasmussen (as I write another Rasmussen is currently leading the Tour de France cycle race, although as I revise this, he has now been thrown off for irregularities concerning drug tests), and by his childhood home, now a museum, was going on a kayaking competition, in which competitors manouevered around a set course (small Inuit boys guided them by waving red flags) before lifting their long, heavy kayaks on their heads and shoulders and running approximately a kilometre before doing it all again and again and again.
I had no idea how many laps constituted the race; one competitor was Spanish. I know this because I replied to him in his language after hearing him swear at dropping his kayak upside down in the water. He was not about to put his hand in the water to re-right it, not without at least a pint of Spanish jerez inside him. His name was Xavier, and being the only qanuallit competitor had become quite a celebrity. He had been given an Inuit name, for the locals could not pronounce his Spanish one.

(Antigua & Barbuda)...Recently, I went to the Caribbean for the first time. Considering how fortunate I have been to get to go travelling quite often, this is either very strange or a fault on my part. I have always been engrossed by Latin America, both Central America and South America, so my time, money and enthusiasm have gone in those directions, rather than to the Latin islands of the Caribbean or anywhere else there. I have been to Caribbean coasts of Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico, but never to one of the island-nations that sweep around in that broad, attractive archipelago. My first chance was to the small islands of Antigua and Barbuda, which together constitute the nation—independent from the United Kingdom since 1981—of the same name. Its most famous son, seen in posters everywhere and in the name of its brand new stadium, built to host games for the 2007 Cricket World Cup, is Sir Vivian Richards, who I remember playing cricket in England in the 1970s and 80s. They refer to him as a living legend, a label that is ridiculous, but there can be no mistaking—and neither should there be—the importance to this small country of 70,000 people of having someone of his world stature representing them.
The day before I got here I was listening to him bemoaning on the radio the shocking state of West Indies cricket, from England, where his team was being soundly thrashed by the old colonialists. I stayed near a small village called Bolans, which seemed typical of all the places I saw there. Few seem well off, but poverty was not present.
My map suggested it was possible to walk from Hermitage Bay (home to a new, very expensive hotel of the same name) to Mosquito Bay on which was my hotel, but the Jolly Beach Harbour Resort has muscled its way, together with a wide entrance for yachts, in across what was once able to be walked upon.
So, I walked back past one of the island’s many abandoned sugar mills, across a small lagoon (water is rarely evident anywhere here) and through this straggly village of small houses, tethered horses and free-roaming pigs.
On the other side of the island is Nelson’s Dockyard, which always was called English Harbour until the name of Horatio Nelson became more marketable. He detested the place on his one brief visit as a junior officer, and his words cannot be disputed by the marketers as it was the only statement he made about the place.
Today, it is pleasant, so much so that guitarist Eric Clapton has a house nearby that blends into the reddish rock and is stared at for ten minutes by every tour group to the island. The capital St. Johns has a little to recommend it, but the tiny village of Seaton’s, on the other side of the island, has more, especially an old man called Louie who I started chatting to as he was chopping the tops off coconuts. He gave me one.
And I especially liked Deadwood Bay, which is in the village of Crab Hill. There I found a deserted beach with warm, turquoise water and a perfect view of Montserrat, with one side of it still destroyed by the July 1995 eruption of its Soufriére Hills volcano. From my idyllic spot, I could see yellow-white slopes to one side of the island, darker colours (vegetation?) to the other. Boats do go out there for a price, but the currents discourage kayakers. I took a small place to the neighbouring island of Barbuda, which is coral and flat.
On a clear day, the Barbudans can see Antigua, but Antiguans can never see Barbuda. I had a wonderful day here, visiting a colony of Magnificent frigatebirds that is accessible only by boat; exploring some caves that were the homes of the island’s original Arawak people and that now house small crabs that inhabit shells that look like broken rocks (I crawled through a small gap to see a garden of cacti, only to be told that recently a woman in a wheelchair made the same short (but not for her) journey; to the Beach House where I was dive-bombed by Roseate terns defending their nests and ate spiny lobster together with a glass of Glenmorangie single-malt whisky; searched for and found a rare, endemic Barbuda warbler; saw the remnants of the K Club resort where Princess Diana used to hide away, and saw island capital Codrington, which houses most of the island’s 1,800 people.
Passengers sit under a tree at the airport until they hear the one afternoon plane (of two the whole day) coming to land. Calvin, my guide, told me that if you were born on the island, or were resident for sufficient years, you could build a house wherever you liked and then claim ownership of that particular parcel of land. Back in 1981, some of the people on the island were not so excited at the prospect of being united in a new nation with Antigua, but economically they had no choice. It seems that the union did neither island any harm. People on both were invariably pleasant.