It’s the hottest time of the year in Thailand, but I’ve just finished reading a book about the Arctic - Gavin Francis’s True North, in which he explores the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard and Lapland. This joins a small list of similar books read of late: Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, Joanna Kavenna’s Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule, and the Lonely Planet Guide to Greenland and the Arctic. Once completely off the tourist trail, they’re now well and truly on it. Why? A combination of things I suspect: the tourism world has opened up like never before, many people want something more than Majorca, prices have come down and facilities have developed. Also, the Arctic has benefitted – or suffered, depending on your viewpoint – from its status as a climate change, er, hotpoint. See the glaciers melt! Incidentally, unlike the Siberian Arctic (see 3 Feb), I really would like to visit Greenland.
10 interesting facts:
- 330BC: Pytheas the Greek sailed as far as Shetland and probably Iceland
- Hyperborea and Thule were mythical places in the the far north (it’s also the last half-decent album by Tangerine Dream and, oddly, Ultima Thule was their first single)
- 550AD: St Brendan and other Irish monks sailed to the Faroes and Iceland
- 986: Erik the Red discovered ‘Greenland’ and a few years later North America
- 1578: Martin Frobisher ‘discovered’ Greenland and claimed it for England
- 1664: first ‘tourist’, Francesco Negri, reached Lapland from Italy
- 1736: Anders Celsius travelled to Lapland to prove Newtonian science correct
- 1909: Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole; others flew & landed or surfaced in submarines but amazingly the first undisputed conquest by land wasn’t until 1968 by the American Ralph Plaisted and three colleagues
- The North Pole has been the home of Santa Claus since the 1870s; he also has a home in Lapland
- Greenland is the world’s largest island that isn’t a continent but has a population of only 50,000 – the least densely populated country in the world
10 interesting facts:
- 330BC: Pytheas the Greek sailed as far as Shetland and probably Iceland
- Hyperborea and Thule were mythical places in the the far north (it’s also the last half-decent album by Tangerine Dream and, oddly, Ultima Thule was their first single)
- 550AD: St Brendan and other Irish monks sailed to the Faroes and Iceland
- 986: Erik the Red discovered ‘Greenland’ and a few years later North America
- 1578: Martin Frobisher ‘discovered’ Greenland and claimed it for England
- 1664: first ‘tourist’, Francesco Negri, reached Lapland from Italy
- 1736: Anders Celsius travelled to Lapland to prove Newtonian science correct
- 1909: Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole; others flew & landed or surfaced in submarines but amazingly the first undisputed conquest by land wasn’t until 1968 by the American Ralph Plaisted and three colleagues
- The North Pole has been the home of Santa Claus since the 1870s; he also has a home in Lapland
- Greenland is the world’s largest island that isn’t a continent but has a population of only 50,000 – the least densely populated country in the world
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