Clyde River, Nunavut
Destiny recently got me where I tought I would never go: in Nunavut. I do travel a lot for work and I've
been lucky enough to go to many countries in the world, but I never tought I would be landing so far north.
When the director who hired me explained that we would be going to Clyde River on Baffin Island, I had
no idea where it was. At least I had an idea where Baffin Island was. I was about to be educated.
(The map is from Firstair, an excellent air compagny. You are well treated and they feed you constantly wit good food!)
Now, if you look at the map just north of Nunavik, there is Baffin Island. We took off from Ottawa and flew 3 hours
to get to Iqaluit. That was my first shock. Iqaluit is a fairly big city: around 6500 people live there. The parliement
of Nunavut is located there. You can find an hospital, hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, a television station, an
internet service provider and so on.
There is the Iqaluit airport. Notice the taxi on the left. We were surprised to discover that many taxi
drivers there are from Montreal, Quebec and speak french. We got quite acquainted with the airport:
Since, because of the fast changing weather in Clyde River (fog comes from the sea), flying to Clyde
is incertain, we had to try three times. We flew for two hours to Clyde and once there, the plane started
it's descent and got close to the runway. But it was completely covered with fog. It was beautiful to see
the colored light thru the fog, but the pilot then pushed the gaz and got back high in the sky and had
us returning to Iqaluit in no time. Now, that's another 2 hours flight. No problem with that, security
goes first and they served us with more good food! The problem was more at the airport. Remember
we were a video shooting crew, carrying 22 heavy boxes of equipment. And guesss what? We had
to take checked it out of the airport, take it all the way to the hotel and back the next day for another
flight. And we did. That is not there that I gained a couple of pounds, that's because of Jane's deserts
at the Qarmmaq Hotel in Clyde, but that's for later. We carried the 22 boxes the following day,
checked it all in piece by piece with the airline counter and waited for the plane to depart. We waited
in vain: the flight was cancelled due to bad weather in Clyde River. So, here came the 22 boxes
out of the airport again and back to the hotel. We got to like it and were hopping that the next
day's flight would also be cancelled so we could carry the boxes around again. Just kidding. But
fortunatly, the flight went through.
