Nuuk; Saturday, 23 May, 2026

A really good nights sleep as I was woken up by the alarm rather than being awake before it went off. After a quick shower, breakfast I headed out of the hotel and down to the Tide Water Steps where my two tours of the day would be leaving from, albeit a bit worried about how much I’d be able to see of the journey as a heavy fog was sitting over the city.

The tour headed out of the harbour and started with a quick sail past of Old Nukk and the end of the new airport runway before heading into the Fjord system that stretches for hundreds of kilometres from Nuuk up the west coast of the country, and whilst the first hour or so was shrouded in a thick fog meaning we could only see the very bottom of the mountains lining the fjord, about an hour in things started to change.

In the space of about 5 minutes the fog started to clear before we emerged from the dense bank of murk into brilliant sunshine and clear blue skies, revealing the vast number of snowcapped mountains lining the fjord, with the stunning scenery continuing all the way down the Kapisillit fjord as we headed to our destination almost at the head of the fjord in the village of Kapisillit.

Kapisillit is a village with a population of around 60 people year round, but is also home to a large number of summer homes that attract a significantly larger population at weekends and during the height of summer, but with access only via boat – no roads reach the settlement – it’s a beautifully quiet place (if you ignore the occasional quad bike).

The tour included an hours guided walk around the village, including being able to go inside the small church located at one of the highest points in Kapisillit before about 45 minutes of free time to explore on our own before heading back to the boat to head back into Nuuk, picking up a couple of additional passengers in Kapisillit of locals who needed to get into Nuuk.

The sail back was equally impressive, though once again about 45 minutes out of Nuuk we encountered the fog bank which made the final journey back into the city centre a grey one. Back at the Tide Water Steps there was just enough time to quickly visit the recently added facilities (I’d seen a video of someone who’d visited about 18 months previously and there hadn’t been anything here then) before it was time to start the next tour – this one out to a small island out in the open sea that’s home to one of only two puffin colonies in Greenland.

Because the journey would be out to open sea, in a boat with only enough space for the captain, guide and six guests, we were warned that it would be pretty rough given the meter plus high waves and the general swell, at which point our group of five tourists became a group of two tourists as a party of three needed to back out because the older member of the group had back issues that wouldn’t be helped by what turned out to be very bumpy conditions, though it did mean the remaining two of us had a VIP tour.

As predicted the sea was very rough, both on the crossing and when we got to the island, which made taking photos challenging, so I wasn’t able to capture on camera quite how impressive a place it was with the vast number of these charismatic little birds darting around the place. We spent about 30 minutes bouncing around near the island, but it was clear that conditions were getting worse so all in agreement we made the journey back towards Nuuk, going slightly slower on the way back to counter the increasingly rough sea that made the journey interesting.

The outbound trip had taken about 50 minutes to get to the island, but it took us nearly 90 minutes to get back, more a tribute to the captains safe piloting of the small boat, deliberately slowing down into the worst of the waves to reduce the movement of the boat meaning we made it back to port both intact and without any need to revisit the content of our stomachs, but also relatively late into the evening.

From the Tide Water Steps I headed into the centre of town for a quick, and light, dinner, before heading back to the hotel and hopefully another good nights sleep that would clear the feeling of motion that I was still getting in my head from spending so much time in rough seas.