Paul Richardson
This is the latest in The Daily Beast’s series on underrated destinations, It’s Still a Big World.
Waking at 3 a.m., I creep out of my tent into the weird penumbra of an Arctic summer night. Below me lies a deep fjord where icebergs float serenely in water of a steely blue. At the back of the view is a cyclorama of jagged mountains, their dark shoulders cloaked with late snow. Being “in the middle of nowhere” has never seemed more literally true. I stare dumbly, wondering for a moment whether I might be sleepwalking through some hyper-vivid dream.
There are few genuinely new frontiers in modern travel, but Greenland is surely one of them. It hardly seems a decade ago that the coolest, most talked-about new Nordic destination was Iceland. But these days remote and exotic places all too quickly become “been there, done that” ones. In 2023, telling people you’re off to Iceland is unlikely to raise more than mild interest and a quizzical eyebrow. Whereas an upcoming trip to Greenland still gets you a serious “wow.”