East Greenland

Guests fly to Akureyri, the largest town in northern Iceland, set at the head of Eyjafjörður beneath a rim of flat-topped mountains. Hanse Explorer lies alongside; once everyone is aboard and settled, she slips down the fjord toward the sea. The evening run along Eyjafjörður is a gentle start: farmland and fishing villages on either shore, and the long subarctic light lasting deep into the evening.

A full day at sea, crossing the Denmark Strait toward Greenland, roughly three hundred nautical miles of open water. The route crosses the Arctic Circle at Grímsey's latitude and then carries no land at all until Greenland. The crossing can produce significant swell; once inside Scoresby Sund the waters are typically calm. These offshore waters are summer feeding grounds for whales, so time on deck is rewarded: fulmars trail the ship, blows can appear anywhere on the horizon, and the first drifting ice arrives as the Greenland coast rises ahead.

Landfall in Greenland at Ittoqqortoormiit, the most isolated town in the country: around 350 people on a rocky headland at the mouth of Scoresby Sund, with the world's largest national park to the north and the world's largest fjord system at its door. The town was founded in 1925, when Ejnar Mikkelsen landed some eighty settlers from Tasiilaq, and marked its centenary in 2025; its name means 'the place with the big houses' in East Greenlandic. Ashore are colourful houses, sled dogs staked out on the slopes, a small museum and a post office. Polar bears occur near town, so shore parties follow the expedition team's lead.

Overnight the ship runs north along the outer coast and turns into King Oscar Fjord, crossing into the Northeast Greenland National Park. The afternoon call is Nyhavn, the old ore harbour on the fjord's southern shore: from 1956 to 1963, lead and zinc from the Blyklippen mine were trucked ten kilometres down from Mestersvig and shipped out from here, and the airstrip at Mestersvig still supports Danish operations in the park. It is a first taste of the park's scale: striped mountain walls, enormous water, and musk oxen on the tundra benches above the shore.

Deeper into the park, the ship turns into Segelsällskapet Fjord, named in 1899 by the Swedish explorer A.G. Nathorst for the Royal Swedish Yacht Club as he searched for the lost Andrée balloon expedition. The banded slopes of the Berzelius mountains rise straight from the water. At its head the fjord narrows into Alpefjord, aptly named: the spire peaks of the Stauning Alps stand over the water, with glaciers descending between them nearly to the shore. Zodiac cruising and shore walks as ice and conditions allow; Arctic hares and ptarmigan are regulars here, and musk oxen graze the valley mouths.

Ella Ø sits in the mouth of King Oscar Fjord, and its small station is the summer base and logistics point for the Sirius Patrol, the Danish dog-sled patrol that asserts sovereignty across the national park. Patrol members serve twenty-six months, and their winter journeys run two to four months at a stretch across the far north. Schedules permitting, there may be a chance to see the station; either way the island offers proper hiking under big rock walls. The afternoon continues to Kap Hedlund for a landing on the cape's shoreline.

Kejser Franz Joseph Fjord is one of Greenland's great fjord systems, running more than two hundred kilometres from the inland ice to the Greenland Sea; it was first surveyed by the Second German North Polar Expedition of 1869 to 1870. The morning is spent in Kjerulf Fjord, an inner branch walled in rock, where the green valley of Paradisdalen opens at its head. In the afternoon the ship continues to the head of the main fjord, where the Nordenskiöld Gletscher calves into the sea a few kilometres west of Kjerulf's mouth.

A three-part day in the heart of the fjord country. The morning is spent beneath Teufelsschloss, the Devil's Castle, a flat-topped mountain of banded, multicoloured rock named by the 1869–70 German expedition, with a walk into Benjamins Dal below it. The afternoon crosses to Blomsterbugten, the Bay of Flowers, named in 1929 for its botanical abundance during Lauge Koch's expedition: a walk leads inland to the lake of Noa Sø, where great northern divers nest, and Arctic hares and musk oxen are often seen; the 1929 hunting hut at the bay is still used by the Sirius Patrol. Late in the evening the ship noses into Moskusoksefjord, the musk-ox fjord, a long, narrow inlet rich enough in birdlife to be listed as an Important Bird Area.

Ymer Ø stands at the entrance of Kejser Franz Joseph Fjord, cut nearly in two by the deep slash of Dusén Fjord. The morning landing is in Noa Dal, a broad tundra valley made for walking. In the afternoon the ship rounds to Kap Wijkander, the headland on the southern side of Dusén Fjord, for a final landing in the national park. From here the course leaves the great fjords and follows the outer coast overnight toward Liverpool Land.

South along the coast of Liverpool Land, back toward the mouth of Scoresby Sund. The morning is spent around Lillefjord and Watkins Bay on the peninsula's southeastern shore, smaller-scale country after the giant fjords of the park. In the afternoon the ship crosses to Raffles Ø, a steep, uninhabited island rising to 550 metres just off the coast, sighted and named by William Scoresby Jr. in 1822 during the first charting of this coastline.

Into Scoresby Sund proper, and to the Bear Islands, a rugged and rarely visited archipelago in Hall Bredning off the mouth of Øfjord. The low rocky islets and the sounds between them hold some of the most concentrated scenery of the voyage: sculpted icebergs grounding in the shallows, Arctic foxes on the tundra, and guillemots and glaucous gulls on the cliffs. Zodiac cruising threads the channels; ashore, the tundra is a carpet of dwarf willow, Arctic cotton grass and reindeer moss.

An afternoon at Rødepynt in Rødefjord, where the geology turns red. This is the red-sandstone country around Røde Ø, one of the most visually arresting landscapes in Greenland: rust-coloured walls and screes that once formed part of a prehistoric desert, now set against blue ice drifting down the fjord. Icebergs ground in the shallows on their way south, and musk oxen graze the valleys behind the shore.

Rypefjord is a classic inner-Scoresby fjord: sheer granite walls, immense sculpted icebergs, and glassy water made for kayaking. At its head the Eielson Gletscher descends from the ice above, one of the sources of the bergs that stream out into Hall Bredning. Zodiacs work the ice edge for seals hauled out on the floes; Arctic terns dart overhead, and the inner fjords are among the places where a narwhal sighting is genuinely possible.

The morning is spent at Sydkap on the north shore of Hall Bredning, near the mouth of Nordvestfjord, whose glaciers feed many of the giant icebergs stranded across this basin. Ashore are the remains of a former trading post and older Thule-culture winter houses, with Arctic hares on the slopes and long views over the water. Then, in the late afternoon, the reason this date is circled: a total eclipse of the sun. Scoresby Sund lies on the centreline of the 12 August track, with totality of a little over two minutes and the eclipsed sun standing about twenty-five degrees above the horizon, over a fjord of icebergs with no crowds and no artificial light anywhere. The Captain and Expedition Leader will position the ship on the day's forecast for the clearest possible sky.

The expedition ends at Constable Pynt, the small airport of Nerlerit Inaat, about forty kilometres northwest of Ittoqqortoormiit and the air gateway to East Greenland. After breakfast, guests disembark and board the charter flight back across the Denmark Strait toward home, ending a rare and powerful encounter with nature at its most elemental.