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The comfortable Hotel Ammassalik is set above a hillside of ochre mustard-yellow and

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The comfortable Hotel Ammassalik is set above a hillside of ochre, mustard-yellow, and green wooden houses. Book a room overlooking the fjord – the view is superb. In the middle of the night – or was it day? – a supernatural calm settles over the water, which reflects the angular mountains with glassy precision. The hotel is the hub of everything – all meals and excursions.

I had arrived as the huskies were being put out to pasture, the winter's dog-sledding expeditions coming to an end. By early June, with warm blue skies and heady spring temperatures reaching 16C, the hotel was offering cruises to icebergs and glaciers, whale-watching, hikes and boat trips to solitary Inuit villages.And meet the consul ...The hotel's owner, Captain Kelly Nicolaisen, will take you out on his cherry-red fishing-boat, the Timmiki, if you are staying at the hotel. He was typical of Tasiilaq's resourceful Inuit and Danish community; he had more irons in the fire than Del-boy Trotter. The previous day, I'd met him hauling the Icelandic flag above the hotel in his role as honorary consul for Iceland "Not a tough job," he told me.

"We just get the occasional drunken Icelandic fisherman."How far he can take you is weather-dependent, and the situation changes rapidly. We chugged across the sound through bobbing chunks of ice shaped like toadstools and anvils. Although melting, the fjord's turquoise-tinged floe was thick enough to prevent us from exploring several titanic icebergs lodged tantalisingly ahead of us. We made do with a stroll across a raft of ice the size of a football pitch. The captain explained that is was from the North Pole.Sounds fun, but who'd want to live there?Take a stroll down to Tasiilaq's thought-provoking museum for an insight into the harshness of life once endured here. by the Inuits around Ammassalik.All Greenlanders live on the rocky coastal fringe, as a desolate icecap smothers 85 per cent of the country's interior It's a minor miracle that anybody lives here at all. As well as a wonderful sealskin kayak, and the odd whale skull, the museum has a display of crisp black-and-white photographs, taken in 1904, showing Inuits peering through fur skins from inside their wigwams.

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