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Ever
since 15th-century explorers returned from the distant north
with wild and woolly tales of a remote region of brutish hairy
pygmies, unicorns, mind-bending visions and citadels of ice,
Ultima Thule has been the fantasy of all fantasies. Poets
from Virgil and Pytheas to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have
celebrated it in verse; the Weimar Republic used it as a template
for one of their mythic Nordic-Germanic societies; and big-haired
'70s rock bands, with a penchant for heavy feedback and fuzzy
guitar solos, have used it as a clarion call to youthful rebellion.
Even
the juggernaut of global technology has not flattened the
myth. Greenland, and especially its northern regions of Ultima
Thule, remains a land of fantastical and semi-mythical proportions.
The aurora borealis, the vast tundra, the glittering columns
of ice and the monstrous glaciers that calve icebergs into
the sea are one thing; the cold, the igloos, the dogsleds
and the proverbially tight-lipped Inuit are another. But any
land that has a mirage-inducing atmosphere capable of conjuring
up an entire city out of thin air, or turning a dog turd on
the horizon into a sailing ship, has got to be worth visiting.
Full
country name: Greenland (Grønland) or Kalaallit Nunaat
(local name)
Area: 2,175,600 sq km (848,484 sq mi); estimated 341,600 sq
km ice-free, 1,834,000 sq km ice-covered
Population: 56,000
Capital city: Nuuk (Godthåb) (pop. 14,000)
People: 87% Greenlander, 13% Danish and others
Language: Eskimo dialects, Danish, Greenlandic (an Inuit dialect)
Religion: Evangelical Lutheran, shamanism
Government: Self-governing Danish territory since 1979
Head of State: Queen Margrethe II of Denmark
Prime Minister: Jonathan Motzfeldt
GDP:
US$945 million
GDP per head: US$16,100
Annual growth: 0.6%
Inflation: 1.2%
Major industries: fish processing (mainly shrimp), handicrafts,
furs, small shipyards, tourism
Major trading partners: EU (esp. Denmark), Iceland, Japan,
Norway, USA
Member of EU: no
Greenland
Flight from UK
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